A Reboot, is a Very Delicate Time...

~or "Deja Vu'ja De"

This has NEVER been seen afore...

Yesterday I got 3 solo kills. Seems I'm not just back, I'm... luckier?

Three back to back solo ship kills w/ Anoikis Specials, the gratuitous yet required 3 attendant POD kills. You must understand, this is HUGE for me. I'm no one's idea of a PVP Legend... even in my own mind, they know me in there and they laugh openly.

I feel the need to segue here and say that I actually do play for the pew... I do, I PVE to afford PVP and I like good ships and good, (GOOD not Blinghy) fits, most of which usually include T2 but also some Faction and Officer mods but because they can give better Power & CPU to HP & DPS fits. My implants are almost all fit enhancement 'plant's. I do not fly the most expensive ships, but I have lost a Marauder that was worth more than a friend's carrier... I like the pew Wormhole life affords, but you gotta do the pew to afford the PEW which is where you start... at the beginning.

As them as follow me know I have been knockin' the rust off the ol' skills, of course just to discover that my, not Tur's, old skills have been changed or supplanted, which is it's own kinda fun. I have been burnin through ISK like... well, like you do when you buy and fit up a whole new fleet of multi-hundred million ISK Spaceships that's how. I also sold off the last of my PLEX, and burned through all of that too but now I have a nice fleet in th hole. A nice mix of corp acceptable DPS (PVE & PVP) and Logi and the attendant support ships.

PVEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

It has been very interesting, the beginning of this new foray into EVE. It feels like it should feel weird to undock and go "do" something... I say this because of the way it felt over the last year or so at the end of my last 'active period', around Sept. of 2017. It was depressing, it was unfulfilling, it was... boring. From around late summer 2016 to then my interest in EVE died a slow boring saddening death.

During that time my son's left the game, for one reason or another, and the guys in HELPeR were playing other games more, EVE was stagnating for us all. Rolling for content and finding none... actually giving up on hunting in Anoikis and trying lowsec roams that went everyhere and found... nothing. And PVE? PVE for it's own sake, for me is a purposeless pursuit. Without PVP losses to replace, just what is all that ISK for? Plus this was also the turning point in my last relationship (2nd wife) and the beginning of this new page, life as a single-man-to-be, and getting back involved in sailing. Something had to give, and EVE got the short straw.

As I said, it feels like it should feel weird to undock and go "do" something... but it doesn't. It feels great and also very comfortable at the same time. I now understand how this reflects my new life in the real. It'sa very cool feelin.

So I have been doin some PVE while I get settled in to where I'm ready to fleet up and actually add something to the confusion that is a Fleet Op, or, "herding cats in EVE". I've been running gas sites mostly as in our home C2 as I can run them like Hisuc rattin, well, Hisuc rattin with probable Hot Drops and Bubbles. It's fun, scary and decent solo ISK, worth the time and effort and yes... actually fun again. I still love the 'reality' in our great VR game when you live and fly in Anoikis.

Nervous in th' Service...

If we humans ever really do go out into space in any worthwhile scale, I very seriously doubt we will have "local" or instant 100% reliable comms, etc., etc. ... We will be ALONE in space so vast it staggers the imagination. Minding your own business, velocities matched with a rock, extracting ore or whatever, and having someone land on you out of nowhere is so much more probable than the way things work in any empire in EVE and I love it.

So, I'm logged on and decide to try comms on the ol hoopty laptop's internal audio... it sucks but it also does work. So, there was a slack ping about a birthday roam op and I joined up. I get buried in the details. Ship and fit... OK; cargo - ammo, MDepot, Probes & Launcher, OK; BMs? where?, yup, OK; NOTE TO SELF: keep mouth shut, these are not our comms; Fleet up is where? OK, got it, OK, warping... warping... warping... landing...

OMG

Possibly the coolest fleet I have ever flown in...

At one point we had 55 in fleet. Something in the 40's in the pic above (this was towards the end of the Op). This was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOL! Yup, that's a 'Hog you see (Nidhoggur) and 4 or 5 Leshaks and a number of Drekavacs etc. I had not flown with any Triglavian ships yet so for me that was a real hoot. Turns out my Prophesy had the same warp time & speed as the Leshaks so I spent a good part of the time watching this... so good!

Ooooooo   AHhhhhhh

So, we fleet up and I'm listening, trying to match who on comms is who in space. We are on a joint op with at least one other corp and others I know not who they be. IE we are not on "our" comms. I settle down and focus on Being a Sponge and soaking up the who, where & how. Thankfully one of the (3) fleet bosses (thanx Trenz!) was very good at fleet warping so that freed me to focus on interpreting their comms.

I tuned out the general chatter trying to key on specific orders, I did not want to miss anything important... such as 'warp to garble garble and hold'. If you've done any fleet ops you know they are almost all huge hurry-up-and-wait exercises. 2, 3 maybe 5 hours of "warp here and sit and chat" held together with the "Hope of Pew" whilst the Scouts and FCs (and their entourage) keep comms lively with, for the most part... jokes & meme's and shit talk interspersed with rare orders.

So I cannot relay to you dear reader exactly what we were doing or where or why... I just wanted to not lose the fleet and to effectively shoot who I was told before dying. I was working out who was anchor, who was logi, what my DPS ranges were et., etc.

I hear "Jump, jump." and I see a Nag' (Naglfar Dreadnought) land right next to us as... well, I'm not sure exactly what happened next. As I remember it I then heard "....stop, jump, stop jumping..." very confused on comms and I think I jumped... and some jumped through, some didn't... then the hole closed.

The Nag' and some ships were on one side, approx 1/2 the fleet jumped and 1/2 didn't but at that point it all went south. At some point there was a Sabre dropping bubbles on us, scouts jumping in and out, but no DPS landed on us so meh. Because I was still learning who to listen to and because we had 3 FCs... which is usually fine as long as they don't start giving opposing orders... which they did, so I was totally lost as to what to actually do. Finally there seemed to be a consensus to GTFO so I followed them as had scanned down a Hisec exit.

I'm outta here...

Personally I felt we should have stayed and died gloriously backing up the Nag... but I was on my very first op (in more than 2 YEARS) my very first combined op under totally unknown FCs when I haven't even learned who my OWN FCs are yet. Well, I buggered the fuck outta there.

I don't mind losing a ship, especially one fitted specifically for PVP Ops. I always kiss those goodbye on undocking them, I can podwarp away from the smoldering wreckage without a tear, as long as I get to at least engage something FFS. And the Nag was lost as we ran away. Sigh. It was a long slog back through Hisec to Amarr and so ended my first Combined Fleet Op... An interesting night to say the least.

The hole closes on the fleet...

End segue... back to the Three Kills.

The very next day, I log on and remembering from the night before how much I like 'dictors, I fit up a Sabre and head home. I had just jumped into home when...

Corpmate > magnate on D in envy, probes out, getting on comms
Tur > Magnate on Hisec hole
Corpmate > hisec bubbled (<- my bubble)
Corpmate > nice catch

The toon was newish, only 86 days old. Now this does not mean what it seems to mean... it could be a truly new player... it could be an older player rolling a new toon for whatever reason... it could be an alt... who knows? I'm pretty sure he was a noob though, the Magnate was horribly fit, 2x Scan Rangefinding Array I's (penalty for more than one), no cloak,  empty slots all over and... he had 4x Type-D Restrained Inertial Stabilizers filling the lowlots... wanna bet he thought they were "Stabilizers" as in Warp Core Stabs? He was just sitting 77km off the hole... at "0". Of course I didn't know any of that till I looked at the killmail.

So, I knew he would cloak up, I knew I was wasting my time... but, as a corpmate landed on the hole and popped drones I broke cloak, turned and burned towards the Magnate and as soon as I could I popped a bubble, fired up the MWD and waited for him to cloak and burn randomly and tangentially out of my path. He didn't. He just started to burn away... really? I got in targeting range and locked him up... I got in gun range and dropped another bubble, started the music of the 125mm Gatling AutoCannon IIs... and Boom! I locked his POD and... huh, that was unexpected. I looked over the killmails and tried to convo the guy. He only replied to my attempts with "Sorry i dont speak english" and "OK! thanks" and "UPS!" so.... boom.

He came back, just under 20 minutes later. Same guy, same ship, same fit, same tactics, jumps in and breaks cloak... so I break cloak, chase him down, pop a bubble and pop him again, Boom! followed by boom. Seriously? EVE is weird and EVE players are weirder still.

Both times I scoop corpses and lewtz and assplode the wrecks, they're just T1 hulls so not worth salvaging to me. I warp back to Visteen, drop off lewtz ,decide to stay in the Sabre, undock and warp back out to the hole. I feel like a kid who just happened by a fishin hole and got lucky, twice. So what the heck, I'll go dip my line in again...

And... Boom! Yup... I warp back out to the Hisec hole and cloak up orbiting at 5k. This guy pops in and decloaks and pops probes. I do the thing, pop a bubble on the hole to slow him down if he tries to exit and burn hard towards him, surprisingly I catch him, lock him, bubble him and pop him.

Now this toon is not newbie new at a bit over a year old and his Astero is properly fit. T2 mods, fully and properly warp core stabbed in the lows, proper rigs etc. He should not have died to me in a Sabre. I had to run him down same as the other guy and he had more than enough time to cloak up and burn out of range or even fight back. He did have a full complement of Hornet I's FFS. I was in a SABRE... itsa tin can, I've been killed by drones inna Sabre before it ain't hard. But he didn't cloak up and he didn't pop drones and he didn't fight... so, boom.

Sorry I don't have any pix of the PVP... if you play, you know why. Just too much goin on was all.

For those curious about the subtitle, "Deja Vu'ja De"...
Deja Vu, that feeling that This Shit Has All Happened Before.
Vuja De, that feeling that NONE of This Shit Has Ever Happened Before.

Fireworks while we wait on a hole. It was a Birthday Roam after all...

Fly smart and keep your finger on DScan and the Cloak my friends.

=/|)=