All The Small Things

A few people have been asking about a certain fight that happened this week. This isn't it! This is just a quick little something-something until that's written up (soon™). 

Sometimes it's not the big fights or the big kills that make you smile the most.

Every now and again when we got a Wolf-Rayet static with a quiet chain, we'd take advantage of the system bonus and take out a fleet of Coercers and Catalysts backed up with Augorors to run a few sites. It something that a few of the newer guys to the corp had never tried, and given how refreshing we had found it compared to cap escalations, it was something we were eager to get them in on.

The static had some activity earlier in the evening, but it seemed all OEG Industrial's pilots seemed to be offline - something that was not unusual for a russian corp with low activity on the killboard at that time of night. Sherpa watched the connection while I set up an Eos in a safespot, while being acutely aware that the Eos cost more than our entire ratting fleet combined.

It's no secret that the Wolf-Rayet bonus in C5's gives certain frigates and destroyers in the region of 1000dps and a low enough signature radius combined with resists decent enough to handle the incoming damage from a sleeper site with just a couple of Augorors. A single site will pay for the whole fleet with some change, but it's easy to lose the ships if you aren't careful with transversal and sig bloom from MWD. And as PvE in Eve goes, it's actually pretty fun.

After a couple of sites, we'd brought in a Noctis to clean up after us. That was when I noticed a Loki appear briefly on Dscan. Odi said the tag was something he'd seen on the ships before the Russians logged off. If they were logging back in, I doubted they'd take kindly to us running their sites. Despite how the Destroyers performed versus the sleepers, the small amount of armour hitpoints didn't make them viable for a sustained battle against a balanced fleet. The raw dps a group of them ought to be enough to deter solo gankers, however the concern was for the Noctis.

We sent the Noctis home as soon as the combat probes appeared on Dscan. With no new signatures and nothing having jumped past Sherpa, it had to be the locals. And it has to be said, they were crap at scanning. Eventually, we caught the probes on close range Dscan to our fleet. A few minutes passed, while they must have been getting eyes on field and perhaps a warp in, but suddenly the probes moved and started to home in on the Eos.

If I'm flying the Eos, it usually means I'm dual-boxing, so I tend not to put a point on it. The midslots I interchange for various types of EWAR. On this occasion, it was still fitted with sensor dampeners. Just as I was lamenting this choice, a Proteus landed on grid and started to lock up the Eos, perhaps expected a helpless offgrid boosting ship. Oops! I couldn't have been happier that he'd gone for the Eos over anything else. I returned the lock, setting drones on the aggressor. What was worse for the Proteus pilot was that I fit my Eos with neuts in the spare high slots, so it would only be a matter of time until he was dead in the water. The only problem was that he could still warp out.

This is an eventuality we had planned for, however. Sherpa decloaked his own Proteus to point his opposite number. To add insult to injury, we warped the ratters, along with a Sabre in to get on the killmail and the pod.