The past week has actually been pretty much a vacation week for me from Eve, I've been on every day but not really playing much at all. It is good to take breaks sometimes and also a lot of our pilots are on vacation this time of year. Plus, we've been on a two week excursion that has just wrapped up.
I say that because I didn't have a lot of time yesterday and I was looking for a good fight. I'd come close a few times but everyone kept running away. Seriously, don't these people realize just how terrible I am at Eve? To be fair, I have my days, but lately I seem to be in a bit of a funk when it comes to fighting the good fight. (From my perspective) These cycles come and go in Eve, I'm an old enough player to know that, but I hate being on the bottom of one.
So I decided to undock in my Ishkur and go see if I could get a fight. I didn't have long to hunt. As soon as I jumped into Jov I scanned the Tusker in local sporting his own Ishkur. He wasn't around the gate so I warped to a safe and asked for a 1v1 in local. Sure enough, he agreed.
A word about the Ishkur. I don't fly them very often, but I've always liked the ship. It's moderately tough and sports a decent drone bay for a ship its size. There are several ways you can go about fitting them, the options on exact mod fits are numerous, but they really come in two flavors - blaster or kite. I was sporting the blaster version, small neut, cap boster (Which I had almost replaced with a tracking disr, but went cap), armor rep. I had no idea, of course, what he was flying.
I arrived at the belt first and started taking some rat damage, so I started burning away from the rats. The other Ishkur landed about 20k from me, so immediately I supposed he was going to be kite fit. Which means long point, railguns, and virtually no tank other than distance and speed. So it would be a fight for range. If he could keep range or if I could close it.
I unleashed my Warriors, I would have to rely on them more than usual. He settled his orbit into the 12k range and we started dancing. I overheated my AB and instead of orbiting him, I made for the nearest asteroid. Once he started eating into my armor I started up the repper and hoped my roid gamble would work. It did, he bounced off one of the rocks and lost speed. I immediately burned directly at him and started to close distance. My damage to him was starting to take a toll, so I clicked on my repper to start overheating it. And this is where I lost an extremely close fight. Instead of overheating, my click stopped my repper. I lost at least two cycles before it started back up again.
I did get into scram range and started popping caps, but I couldn't get close enough to use the neut. One cycle of that neut and I would've won. It was that close, we were both down to slivers of structure when one of us exploded. I wasn't even sure when it happened which one of us it was, that is how close the fight was.
Good fight. If it hadn't been for the lost repper cycle I would've won. As it was, it was close, but no cigar. Despite the loss I had a blast, it was fun fighting in a belt again (it's been awhile) and a fight against the two sides of the Ishkur fit was also fun. So thanks for the fight.
As in all fights you try to learn from your mistakes. I should have just overheated the whole rack instead of trying for the mod overheat, in a fight that is usually the safest way. And I realized afterwards that I hadn't overheated my point, which I almost always do at the beginning. That wouldn't have made a huge difference, but in a fight that close, it might have.