I came home and was immediately invited into a fleet. It was being FC’d by a veteran of -MVN- who recently rejoined the corp and I was excited to fly with my old friend once again.
I caught up with them by taking a shorter route to their next destination. Before I arrived at HED, our meeting zone, they scored a drake and helios kill in transit.
In HED, the locals were timid, but we managed to score a few kills. I left one of our heavy interdictors on the Keberz gate and – sure enough – a few players warped straight into it from station. We destroyed the odd pairing of a rifter and prophecy without anything running afoul. Honestly, I expected the prophecy to be bait but that was not the case apparently.
Moving on, we looped through Keberz down into Querious to bust a small gatecamp in A2-. I jumped into the camp with my rapier and tackled a Sleipner and Raven who were sitting at the edge of their anchored bubble. The command ship was killed first and the raven soon followed. The original FC for this roam was depressed because he missed both kills due to an inability to cross the high-sec systems between A2- and Keberz.
We then moved up into Providence looking for more fights. Unfortunately, we lost a key part of our gang in A2- due to his personal time constraints. With only one logistic, we were significantly weakened. Keeping this in mind, I burnt ahead.
The next target was a caracal sitting in a bubble behind a gate in D-G, the system owned by Dara Cothrom currently. I burnt straight at the cruiser in my rapier, expecting him to want to leave the field. He stood still and I actually ended up in scram range before I switched from approaching to orbiting. It was sloppy piloting and I immediately realized this was not an ideal situation.
With a web and scram on me, my dual-webs (with no scram) was not enough to get away. The caracal was not a threat to me, his dps was slow, but things took a bad turn when a bomber decloaked. Worse yet, my gang was still in warp to the gate.
I immediately focused my dps on the bomber, killing him quickly, but not before he did a large amount of damage to me. The Caracal entered structure as my first gang-mates showed up, and I was still at 5% armor. I thought that, with a damage control, I might have the advantage.The problem was that I had barrage loaded, not high-damage EM or thermal ammo, and my dps was much lower than it should have been.
My first ally put his tackle on the caracal as I exploded. This was frustrating but I knew it was going to happen unless our scimitar made it on-field immediately after the bomber died, which he did not. The caracal literally had 169 structure remaining when my gang-mate finished the job.
I was frustrated for a minute but regained my composure quickly. You don’t really expect to die to a t1 cruiser and bomber with a scimitar in gang, but my own piloting mistake (not getting into an orbit around the carcal) caused this loss, so I have no one else to blame. The rapier was replaced a few jumps away in low-sec for cheap, and most of my loot (including t2 salvage) was returned, further mitigating the loss.
Moving without me until I was re-shipped, our gang fought a larger Legio Astartes Arcanum gang who had a nearly identical composition. We traded 1 harbinger loss for a dominix kill. Under the circumstances, this was a good result. Our gang actually had a chance to warp off without any losses but the BC pilot decided to keep the point while the gang finished the dominix at range.
Here’s a summary of the kills on our roam:
This was a good roam and I had fun the whole way. I’m now looking forward to taking out some larger gangs this weekend so that we can engage more home-defense fleets on their own terms.
We also have an alliance-scale campaign starting soon (as is public knowledge) and everyone is excited for that too.
Easley Thames 