Today I want to take you inside a fight I had yesterday. A fight I lost. So let's take a deep dive into this fight linked here.
I choose to highlight this fight because it is a great example of how a data point, like this killmail, only tells the positive or negative outcome of a specific engagement. But fails to illuminate anything else about the fight. And in this instance especially, there is much more to it. I was with two other pilots in this case. My fellow Stay Frosty pilots Phoenix and Angor. Phoenix was in a Slicer and Angor was in another Comet, but his was blaster fitted. We were flying back and forth between plexes in Heyd watching as one after another ship would warp away from us. I called it "pinball", because we did this about 20 times before we spotted the Coercer on scan.
Normally I avoid 1v1 situations with Coercers, especially faction versions, simply because you never know what you are going to get. A well flown Coercer can be deadly. And once we slid into this plex I knew we'd have our work cut out for us. The ship was 60k away from me when I landed and Phoenix went out to get tackle in his Slicer. I also knew that Angor wouldn't be much help in this situation. But I only needed to close about 20k before I could start applying dps. Which is what I started doing.
Phoenix hit 80% structure and flew off. But he had allowed me to get into dps range. So I overheated my prop mod and went into master mode. Tunnel vision, whatever you want to call it. Suddenly everything is all about managing angles, mitigating incoming damage, using the web, overheating mods, keeping transversal as much as possible, and maximizing my own dps (which is tricky with rails). I can only assume the other pilot was doing the same.
I probably should have warped off, but the target was already damaged and I believed I had a small chance of victory. And that decision was only available for a short moment anyway, after that it was all in. And it was working, but so was his efforts. All the way down to the final moments this fight could have gone either way. After the fight he told me he had toasted his guns, so it all came down to that final volley. One more shot and the fight would have gone the other way.
The fight ended pretty much the way I thought it would. But it was close.
If anything I'd like to continue to encourage players to take fights. Learn the martial arts by example. You will not improve in this game unless you try, you take chances, and you learn. It really does work.