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So yesterday I'm coming up the pipe from Ostinjelly back home and scanning as I go, when I notice the Golem on scan in Lowes. (And not in Home Depot where they usually are! Low Sec humor.) Anyhoo, I start yelling about it in fleet chat and in typical Stay Frosty fashion it takes awhile for my words to sink into their thick Pirate skulls. "Did he say Golem?" I tease, but we are notoriously terrible at organizing anything. We could be warping in on a transport full of plex and three ships would leave fleet because they found a Tristin in a small plex. Seriously. I love that.
The Golem had Grandchildren by the time we finally got probes out in local. I figured he was either terribly stupid or he had friends. I never counted on the fact that he was both. Wasn't long before we finally had probes out and located him. Hard to hide a Golem. Our Helios pilot was drunk and de-cloaked to point him before our Broadsword landed. So the Golem pilot did the right thing and used his MJD to pull range... but instead of warping away he turned to kill the Helios. Like I said yesterday, always count on stupid. Our Broadsword landed with his infini-point and the game was afoot.
Anytime something like this starts happening in Low Sec its like dropping a bleeding fish in the ocean. It doesn't take long for the sharks to start circling. By the time my Phoon and our other BSs landed we already had company. And things started escalating from there. I'm going to freely admit right here that I'm probably not 100% aware of everything that went down around me. From the moment I landed my focus was on killing the Golem and then saving my Phoon. My secondary focus was on providing deeps to my mates, trying to apply neut pressure to things that had us pointed, and generally help save as many of our ships as possible.
Luckily for me the Phoon is a long-range death dealer, so when things started landing on us after the Golem exploded, I was already about 50k from the wreck. So I pointed my nose at the Sun and started pulling range. Overheated the Phoon does right around 2k, but I had to manage that carefully. I had a nice constant cloud of small annoying ships keeping me pointed, so it was really a patience game. Put my neut on the ship with point, load up the precision cruise missiles, and shoot the ones that were getting too close. I love these kinds of moments in Eve, time starts to act weird and it feels like these moments get stretched out reaaaallly slow. Nothing that was near me posed an immediate threat, but my Phoon isn't active tanked either, so the damage adds up eventually. I decided to switch to the iHub as my align point, as it was more in line with the out gate. I knew I'd have aggro timers so going straight to the gate could prove to be a costly mistake. And finally they lost point and away I warped...
Right into a bunch of small ships waiting for me. Of course. It wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the ECM ship. By this time a bunch of Stay Frosty pilots had arrived in system or re-shipped, so I asked for some help to get the ECM ship off me. That worked like a charm and eventually I was able to warp to a pounce above the out gate. Immediately to a safe spot, align to station, wait on the timer to expire (12 or so seconds left) and then dock in station.
Good fights in local.
I was feeling so good about how we did that I ended up paying our pilots for some of their losses out of my own wallet. Like a Boss.
That was fun.