Maller v Hurricane

The fight

I've been impatient to get into cruiser, so I've used the Purity of the Throne event as an excuse to hop in a Maller and go and clear some sites. All good fun.

As I'm heading out of low sec after one of these runs, I get caught by a Hurricane sitting on the gate; he's clearly a fast-locking, custom fit. Still, I'm in a Maller, so I cruise back to the gate and get ready to jump out.

Except I don't.

Despite only having T1 guns, I do have a T2 tank with about 38k EHP, and I really want to see how long I last. I only have a second to make the decision because I'm taking damage, and have been the whole time I burned back to the gate. In that second I decide to throw logic, reason, and rationality out the window and engage.

That. Was. Fun.

The Hurricane had an active armor tank, and my guns, drones, and the gate guns were not enough to break that tank, so he was never in any real danger. But that was never the purpose of the exercise.

I left the mwd off, and tried to get under his guns. He had already opened the fight with a neut, but I've got capacitor rigs and the Maller has excellent cap, so it did not make nearly as much difference as it might have.

He had drones too, of course, and I briefly tried webbing them and shooting them down, but that didn't work. In hindsight, it might have been more worthwhile to send my Acolytes after his Hobgoblins; I pick fast, high optimal drones to deal with frigates, and they should do decently against the slower drones.

In the end, though, I went boom.


Afterthoughts

I do not think that there was anything I could have done to change the outcome of this fight once I decided to engage. That said, I do think there was room for improvement.

Overall, I think I flew too much like a frigate pilot. Getting under his guns? They're the same size as what I'm packing, with better tracking, and on a custom fit for killing smaller ships. It was never going to happen.

On the other hand, I instinctively left the mwd off, because a frigate using that around a battlecruiser is going to die. But thinking about it, I doubt it would have significantly increased the damage I was taking, as I was probably already taking close to maximum damage. What it would have done is allow me to hold outside of web and neut range, which works to my advantage in this fight. I don't have Scorch, so my low damage would have gotten lower, but I might have lasted long enough that he ran out of cap for tanking the gate guns.

Again, the webbing and shooting of drones is a frigate pilot's trick, hardly something that a cruiser can pull off. I do need to test the Acolytes against Hobgoblins, though. The Maller is in for the long fight, and that kind of dps reduction could make all the difference in some cases.

I absolutely can't complain about the tank, though. It was brilliant, and the fight lasted well over a minute, as I got six repair cycles off before I lost count. He had only a single neut, which meant I could reliably pulse my repair module between neut cycles. Between the neut and his active tank, he must have been eating cap boosters like candy. Heh. Next time I see him I'll have to troll him by sitting on the gate without engaging, letting him waste resources against my tank before jumping out.