Anatomy of a Kill: Naga

Anatomy of a Kill is a regular feature in which I take a closer look at a specific fight that I find interesting, informative, or entertaining. Today's post features a good fight from yesterday when my famous Sac engaged a Naga.

We had just been fighting in Jov, about six or so Stay Frosty pilots and myself. We were trying to pin down a couple of T3's, their Falcon and support ships. I hadn't brought the Sac for that fight, there had been a Navy Vexor and Drake missioning earlier. But the Sac had just performed beautifully, it had survived attack from a Loki, Proteus and Falcon. Not only survived, the Falcon was unable to jam me ( ECCM! ) but the T3's were a tad faster than me. So they ran away.

I had jumped back into Hevrice intending to dock the Sac and pick up some drones. Just as I was warping off the Naga landed. We had some pilots sitting off the gate so I was still getting intel as I landed on our station and aligned back out to the gate. It sounded like the Naga was going to burn up to engage our smaller ships, so I warped back to a pounce off the gate. As soon as I landed I saw him sitting on the gate at near zero, but then he started burning off. I knew if I was going to engage, now was the time, so I warped to the gate at ten.

I landed 35k from him and started burning. I wasn't sure how the Naga was fit, rails or blasters? But either way I knew he'd have range on me from the very beginning. My only hope was that my Sac would be faster than his Naga, that my manual oblique approach would keep my transversal high enough to get close, and that my Javelins would chew him alive. During warp I had made the choice to go with Inferno instead of the obvious EM focused missiles. This would turn out the be the perfect ammo choice on my part.

As my Warriors burned out to him my missiles started to land. He was hurting me, the Naga can hit from an impressive distance. But he was forced to use long-range ammo and the dps, while decent, wasn't immediately life threatening. I knew I wasn't going to get close enough to use the Web or the Nuet, so this fight would come down to pure brute strength. I overheated my long-point and landed the disrupter, so he wasn't going anywhere. Knowing that I wouldn't get close anyway allowed me to pulse my MWD, which in this case acts like an Armor Rep by mitigating incoming damage by lowering your sig radius. (When it is off the incoming damage drops significantly.) A tactic that harkens all the way back to my Hero Tackle days back in Null.

Even so it was close. I was down to about 40% armor when the incoming damage slowed during one of the down times of the MWD. At that exact same moment I managed to get three volleys of top damage in a row and his tank was broken. One more volley and the Naga went BOOM.

Excellent fight and well played. There are times of clear vision, when man and machine work together in harmony, when you have a clear understanding of the field of battle and a defined clarity of your mission. This was one of those times.

Good fight.