EPTI would head from lonetrek out through pure blind before arriving in fade in hopes of finding some action near the Fatal Ascension capitol.
The first thing I run into is a falcon. With blasters. Who decides to jam and shoot my wolf as I land on gate with him before I take any action at all. Okay. I jump away from the slimeball and continue on my way, flagging him in my contacts for later destruction when I am flying a craft with higher calibre electronics.
The rest of the way is quiet; I see not a single ship before arriving in L-C307. I enter the starsystem and greet my fellow pilots in local as I warp to a pounce over their station; I receive no response except for artillery and tachyon fire. How rude. They undocked a ragtag crew of artillery tornadoes, maelstroms, tachyon oracles, arbitrators, rifters, sabres, rapiers, pilgrims, and other assorted ilk. I assess their piloting abilities and check their previous losses and decide that, despite the fact that I am a lone assault ship, I actually have quite a few options here. However, they are fearful, despite their decided advantage and refuse to leave their undock; I cannot isolate any of them for a single moment. After around ten minutes of burning around on grid and bouncing to nearby celestials without any of their pilots giving pursuit, I decided to head out in search of other action. I set a course for 00TY, home of Black Mark. However, about forty five seconds after I jumped into X36, local +3s behind me. Finally. Presuming they would not be giving chase, I had already warped to my outgate. I quickly burn 100k off of the gate I have landed on and rapidly cycle my scanners; A sabre, an arbitrator, and a hound have followed me. This I can work with.
What proceeded was a long and arduous dance. I desperately tried to split the sabre and the arbitrator up, but my efforts were fruitless; they refused to separate themselves despite the various tactics I was employing. However, throughout all of this, I did ascertain that the arbitrator was particularly ill equipped for this situation; he appeared to be carrying naught but gallente combat drones, which my wolf would be all but immune to. However, in the time I had spent trying to split them up, they had backup arrive in the form of a rook. I absolutely could not engage on the same grid as the rook, but I was beginning to believe that I could handle the sabre, the arbitrator, and the hound together. I managed to get the hound alone and decloaked for a brief moment. and, although he was deagressed on a gate at zero, I put him into hull before he managed to jump out, ensuring that he would think twice before joining the encounter that I was setting up. At this point, I pretended to be turning tail to head home; I harassed them in local about their use of ecm ships and pretended to be rather salty about the whole thing and acted as if I had no intention of engaging. The ruse worked; their rook entered a long warp in the direction that they thought I would be fleeing in. I had no such intention. I jumped headlong into the sabre and arbitrator. The hound had gone to repair his ship. I had spawned 12km off of the sabre with the arbitrator an additional 30km off of his wingmate. Excellent. This would give me enough repair cycles before being capped out by the arbitrator to ensure that their damage would not overwhelm me before I dropped their sabre. I spooled up the autocannons. Game on.
Initially, things went incredibly well. As expected, the arbitrator hit me with a hybrid flight of hammerheads and hobgoblins, which did almost no discernible damage to me. The sabre surprised me pleasantly by having a tracking enhancer in one of his lowslots and using electromagnetic rounds: the wolf has 90% base em resist on its armor. Needless to say, things were not going well for my opponents. The sabre dropped without issue, although it took slightly longer than I had hoped, due to his double medium shield extenders and damage control. Due to this, and also due to the strange fact that I was not yet capped out, even though I had an arbitrator around 7k off of me, I decided it wise to burn away, waiting for their backup to arrive so that I could reassess the situation.
However, the arbitrator had also done something rather unexpected; although my cap was still intact, I found myself warp scrambled. My options were quite limited to say the least. I overheated my weapons and prayed that his backup would be slow to arrive. Much to my dismay, he actually had a reasonable tank fit, and although the wolfs damage is not to be scoffed at, it was taking sometime to chew threw his tank. When I was around 1/2 way through his armor buffer, the gate that we were still very much at zero and fighting on (as I said before, I had had no opportunity to drag anything off the gate, they had simply refused to come out to engage me and I had made the decision to engage rather brashly on the gate at zero when I had a chance) flashed and of all things a Basilisk decloaked. I immediately made the decision to deagress and jump out through the other side; this usually isn't an option in a frigate, but thanks to the arbitrators choice of drones and the extremely high armor thermal resistance of the wolf, it would have been quite feasible despite the fact that I would no longer be able to run my nosferatu and would be capped out completely. I deactivated all offensive modules and began to spam the jump button.
However, it quickly became apparent that something was quite wrong. My health was dropping rapidly; not only did the basilisk launch a flight of warrior 2s, but it appeared to be microwarpdriving directly at me. I didn't want to believe it, but I knew what was coming. Battle Basilisk. In addition to its deadly minmatar drones, it also had a set of rocket launchers and a 2nd webifier. I continued to spam the jump button but it was hopeless; I was not able to run my repper and what little buffer I had melted before the numerous drones and missiles. I died with maybe 20 seconds left before I would have been deagressed. Due in part to my previous tactics, and in part to slow response times by the enemy, nothing else had arrived in local, with the exception of the bomber pilot from before who chose not to break his cloak this time around. If it weren't for the surprise battle basilisk, the arbitrator and the sabre would easily have fallen. Ah well.
Good fight.
http://teamliquid.killmail.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13250966
http://teamliquid.killmail.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13250968
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