Oh Eve, why you so fickle? I haven't had much time to play lately, my life right now is insanely chaotic. Between packing up and getting our home ready to move and on the market to sell, plus securing our new home, staying one step ahead of legal issues, trying to secure paying work to keep the lights on, and dealing with continuing and on-going issues with children - Eve has taken a firm backseat of late. Its going to be like this at least until the end of April. But I do manage to log on for short bits here and there, and yesterday I managed almost an entire hour of warping about in space.
The Jackdaw is a ship I haven't flown much. So I recently fitted one up and determined to undock it and fly it around. Mostly I knew this would end badly for me. Not only would people run away but eventually they'd blob me into exploding. Which is entirely normal for me. So I didn't care. Which is also normal for me. And sure enough people started running away. Eventually however I happened to catch the signature of a Vexor Navy on scan sitting in a Large plex. There are two other players in local, both from the same corp and both relatively new. Several attempts to catch them both resulted in them running away. Despite my railings against WCS I fully accept that my primary job as Pirate King is to catch the enemy and force them into fights. This is the part of the job that I enjoy the most, hunting. As the hunter my task is to catch my prey. To be smarter than them and to use my wits, the tools of my trade, and my craft to encourage deadly encounters that they may or may not want to engage in.
So I did. The plan worked perfectly and eventually I managed to put myself in position to be next to the VNI when he landed from warp. I had caught an elephant with a Jeep, so now what? Two things worked against me. His high slots were all neut based and I hadn't flown a dual shield boost ship in a long time. I was hammering him pretty good and got him into structure, but I messed up my cycles and went into re-load on both boosters at the same time. Luckily my good friend Cerv landed and managed to finish off the Vexor. Not the world's best trade, but at least it wasn't for nothing.
Next I jumped into a Jaguar to join Narxes in his Wolf. We eventually found a Magus and Narxes called for help, just as my client froze and I had to re-start the client. When I returned I was in deep structure and the Jaguar exploded under me, I had just enough time to warp my pod away to safety. Sigh.
Two ships gone and not much to show for it, so time for a Comet. Our small gang of opportunists ran across an Algos that was acting strangely and we started trying to get ahold of him. Back and forth eventually saw Cerv catch and dispatch him with his Stork. The fight itself wasn't that interesting, it was what happened afterwards. Apparently Mr. Algos wanted revenge and made it clear several times in local that he wanted a re-match. I'm no fan of re-matches. Second fights rarely go well. The reasons are simple enough, the enemy knows what you are flying so you've lost that advantage. They have time to counter-fit you, deploy links potentially, or call for back-up most likely. This appeared to be the case as he showed up in a Caracal with a Caracal buddy in tow. Meanwhile we have a Stork, a Comet and two Tristans to our name. Still, we were game and we started hunting, but they kept running away.
On one of these hunt and run jumps we noticed a Succubus on scan. The system at the time was rather busy, but I patiently waited to see what might develop. Patience is a virtue and it soon became apparent that the Succubus was being piloted by none other than Elise Randolph from PL and he had a Tristan with him being flown by fellow Tweetfleet member and Twitch streamer ScaredPanda.
What followed was one of those engagements that takes extreme patience and positioning in order to work properly. We had been joined by Narxes in a Slicer, but otherwise our ship choices were pretty slow. But it seemed like both of them were into the fight and wouldn't be warping away, so we simply started spreading the field and positioning ourselves properly. A lot of dinking from a distance, only to have them pull range on us. Until finally I got a small break. The Succubus was once more slingshotting around, trying to stay clear of Cerv's Stork and Narxes' Slicer, when he came pretty close to me. Enough so that I could get a few good rounds into him and deploy drones. I noticed that the Tristan was arching over on her orbit and so I did a very quick turn and burn, overheated my prop mod and got my scram on the Tristan. It didn't last long. All of which finally brought Elise's Succubus into range as well, and it finally exploded.
We did lose the Slicer in the process, but that was a good trade for a good fight. The Slicer was the key to pushing them both and keeping them engaged.
It was an interesting hour to say the least.