Despite having the day off yesterday I didn't have a lot of time to play Eve. I know, sadness ensues. Fear not, as usual I do try to maximize my Eve time and find something worthwhile to do with it. Sometimes this simply amounts to taking insane risks and losing ships I probably should have kept. Case in point.
My supply of fitted small ships is almost zilch at this point, for some reason my small ships keep getting exploded. So the only fitted Frigate I could find, being too lazy to fit a new one, was a Worm. So be it. I undocked and flew around a bit in it and, as usual, everyone fled. I can't blame them. I was about to give up when I caught the blip of the Gnosis on scan in Hasama. Been awhile since I'd seen one of these on scan and usually they simply mean a mission-runner that I can't find because I don't have magical dual-boxing prober skillz.
I waited and sure enough the darn thing shows up near a Plex. So I warp in to take a look. And sure enough there is a Gnosis sitting about 140k off the gate. Let me pause a moment in this story, just as I did in-game, and give you a brief overview of my thinking. The Gnosis wasn't moving. The Gnosis could be AFK. Not likely, but possible. The Gnosis is probably sniper fit, given the "sitting 160k off" stance. Gnosis are Cruisers and I'm in a Frigate with awesome Drone powers. My Worm today is AB fit and not MWD fit, so low sig. And boy, killing a Gnosis with a Worm would be cool. I will most likely die. Or, more likely, he'll just warp off.
So I burned at him. I manually burned and kept my angulars all angular in case he was sniper fitted. There was a celestial sorta kinda behind him so I had a nice warp off if I needed it, but meh (you know me) once committed. I'll keep this part of the story short and sweet. Things went very well for a moment. As expected his guns couldn't really hit me all that badly and I chewed thru his shields pretty quick, so maybe armor tanked? It was about this time that my speed dropped to almost zero and his drones and guns found me. I went boom.
Ok fine. Hasama is only two jumps from Ish so I went back to grab another ship. People rarely stay around for round-two, but you never know. As usual in these cases I really try to pick a ship that will result in a good-fight, usually (if possible) the exact same ship as my opponent. That only seems fair. And sure enough, much to my surprise, I actually had a fitted Gnosis in my hangar!! Who knew? I don't even remember flying it before. Although I think I may have way back in Hevrice. No time for questions about fit, I undock and head off.
By this time a couple of Frostians are on the case and watching local for me. The Gnosis is next door in Nikki, probably headed to station for reps. So I warp over to the station and sure enough he undocks just as I land. I align out and warp off slowly to the Sun, being all obvious. Hoping he will follow. Yes, I still had a Limited Engagement, but Sun is better than station. After a brief pause he lands about 100k from me and we begin the dance.
My own Gnosis is a shield-fitted Artie Sniper packing 750s and a really decent buffer on top of a MWD and a surprise package of Garde IIs in the drone bay. I already knew his Drones were Hob2s, so I waited a bit longer before releasing the Sentries. My hope was to stay out of his point range and hammer him from a distance. But one problem with quickly undocking a ship you don't often fly is those pesky pre-set orbit/keep at distance numbers. Yes, I forgot to check them. It didn't matter as much as I feared because the fight just boiled down to a hammer-fest anyway. He wasn't armor tanked, he was hull tanked with three T2 rigs.
Mash and Temar joined in at the end, but the fight was decided already. Between the Arties and the Sentries my deeps was just gonna be more than he could take. And eventually the Gnosis exploded.
Good Fight.
I even got an eve mail from the Gnosis pilot (which I hope he doesn't mind me re-printing): "Good to meet some fighter over here...before you engaged for the firt time I was sitting on Ishomilken for 15mins on 16ppl local and no one went to take me down :)"
Happy to oblige. And it was worth losing the Worm (THREE WEBS!! No wonder my speed dropped to zero!) to end up with a great Cruiser Brawl.