Seems like I fell of the blog train again. After my last post, I played TSW for some more time, doing the Nightmare grind without feeling too ground out. It was fun, and I plan to get back to it eventually.

But  I got distracted around the time the EVE Alliance tournament started. (Which I wanted to cover in a blog post, but alas…) So for the time being, I’m back into EVE. My pet project at the moment is doing all the epic faction arcs for standing, and because I’ve never done them. But for the second time, I’ve now been on a roam with the Tuskers.

I ended up with the idea because I watched the tournament and felt the EVE itch come back. When I logged back into the game, I was lucky enough that I still had a semi-private chat channel open that a bunch of people formed when they left the uni (EVE university). Among those people were several who flew in the tournament. That was really nice, because a few of them discussed their fights in there. Great way to get back into a game that otherwise probably would’ve bored me to death again. Anyway, one of those people was Malfyrion, now a member of the Tuskers, who had already graduated from the uni by the time I joined, and mostly played cat and mouse with unistas from a small pirate corp. He probably remembered me a lot less than I remembered him. Talking to him made me look up the Tuskers’ public channel, and I realized they did public roams every now and then. I was intrigued, though due to the tournament, public roams had been suspended for the time being.

Two weeks ago, the first public roam was scheduled after the summer break. Since I couldn’t fly HICs, I brought a Raptor, for a long time a much-derided ship that back in the day, I bought a stack of to try intercepting with (something another ex-Unista I am proud to have flown with, Guillome Renard, encouraged me to try out). With the last patch’s changes, the Raptor isn’t actually such a bad ship any more. What I had totally forgotten was that inties are not only supposed to tackle, but also to scout ahead. Oops. So I got an assignment to go to a system, and promptly went the wrong way because my autopilot settings were not set to “prefer less secure space”. Oops again. Thankfully, I could hide that embarrassing fact from our FC, or maybe he was just nice enough to overlook my blunder. When I finally arrived at the designated system, I indeed found an appropriate group of frigates on d-scan. Now to figure out where in space they were… That again took ages, or at least it felt like it to me. Then I was happy to announce “four Kestrels, a Keres, …” until it was quickly pointed out that this wasn’t very helpful and I should paste the results into Dingo. Oops the third… At least I had figured out their composition and that they were in a small FW plex. The group looked nice, and the rest of the fleet came in. (Yay, I had been useful!) The following fight didn’t go as planned though, and there were many sad faces around.

The ISK loss tells the story…

The roam was called shortly thereafter after some unlucky encounter of another gang. Well, you win some, you lose some. Or in my case, you lose some, and you haven’t won any yet. Plus, I felt a bit self-conscious about my scouting.

But one thing that I learned in EVE is that you should never stop when you are discouraged, because that will poison your outlook on the game. So I started doing the epic arcs (see above) as PvE while waiting for the next public roam.

This happened this last weekend,and this time, I decided to got about it in a different way. I couldn’t fly the advertised DPS ship (Sacrilege), and while I was able to fly the potential replacements (Ishtar, Deimos), I realized that the Celestis was on the list. Since my sensor damp skills are actually quite nice, I thought that this would be a good choice. No flying on your own doing scouting. Stay with the group, stay at range, stay safe, let your decisions be made by someone else. This worked very well, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. It probably helped the the results were much better than last time, too. SCUM. gave us a good fight (it looks very lopsided in the battle report because they didn’t manage to kill any of our ships, so their ships that escaped do not show up at all.)

Success!

I managed to damp their logistics, use one of my damps to whore some more killmails, smartbomb some drones that were put on me, and stay alive thanks to our great logistics. My fear that support ships would be the prime target and early to die didn’t turn out to be true. Well, at least not the die part… I brought the ship back in one piece at the end of the roam. We tried to find some more targets, but most of what we saw was unengageable for us (I heard Tuskers like to take fights against superior numbers, but there’s a line between brave and foolhardy.) We managed to evade a blackops gang, and found an EVE uni group which evaded us. Except for three stragglers, who managed to warp right into us at a gate, one by one. That’s how they learn!

Space is a harsh mistress.

I will probably have an eye on those public roams from now on. They’re great fun, and only happen every now and then, so I can easily accommodate for them between other important things… like getting my security status up again. Low-sec PVP is bad for that…