From around mid-December until January 5, I managed to go without losing a single ship and racking up about 42 kills. Not bad. Since January 5 however, I managed to lose 6 ships while scoring 21 victories over the same period. Also not horrible. These streaks come and go, Eve is nothing if not a huge circle, cycles and waves. For something a little different, today I thought it'd be interesting to look back at those 6 recent losses and recount the events of each one. Maybe we can learn something, or maybe we just discover the random nature of reality? Who knows.
Destroyers are always a tricky target for me when flying my Astero. You never know for sure what you are going to get when you start the fight. I know I wasn't expecting this Coercer to be as tough as it turned out to be. Normally Coercers don't give me much trouble as long as I can get within neut range. They start out troublesome, but eventually they run out of cap and go boom. This one did not do that. I actually ended up calling in back-up and Trajon was good enough to show up in his Astero to help. The cool part was that the Coercer and I exploded at the exact same time. Good fight.
Granted, attacking a Nergal with a Dramiel is a bit of a stretch and normally I probably wouldn't choose to do so. But this Nergal landed directly on top of me outside a Novice plex and so I had to fight it. (Did I though?) Obviously with his ADC his tank is going to be an issue, add in the ramping dps and you are in for a slog of a fight. Frankly though, I was doing much better than expected until the Kikimora showed up and put an end to it. I probably would have lost anyway, but things were much closer than you might think. Now we'll never know.
This is Stay Frosty ABA fooling around in Tama on Saturday. We had killed this pilot in a Gnosis earlier so there was no reason to think we couldn't do it again. Except the second time we had lost a few pilots before the fight and this time he targeted me right off the bat. Not much more to add to this one honestly, it happens. You take risks and sometimes it doesn't work out.
What can you do? You see a Procurer on scan and you warp in with your buddies to tackle it, everything is going fine, and then the Curse shows up. And you are the one scrammed by the Procurer. I'm going to lose another Astero before this is over.
This one is entirely my fault. This fight was bad from the start, bad positioning, bad management, and distracted engagement. And then the worst part? I must have fat-fingered the hot key for my second repper because it wasn't running and I didn't notice it wasn't running until I had already hit structure. Sigh. Sometimes I really am my own worst enemy.
I had just re-shipped into this Rifter because Trajon was in one and I thought it'd be cool to dual-rifter for a bit. If I had stayed in the Comet this fight would have been much different. But still, this is the first time I have fought a single Skybreaker. And despite both of us cramming auto-cannon ammo into him, his tank was just too much for us to handle and we both exploded. No regrets, I'd take that fight again. Hopefully in something other than a Rifter.
So there you have it. Mistakes. Missed keys. Curses. Bad Luck. And Good Fights. They don't always go your way, but the losses are fun too. Not as fun as winning. But still fun. Who cares, it's a video game.
Just undock. Adventure awaits.