It's Friday night, and I'm bouncing around in my Astero. It's a new fit, and I'm looking for a new above-class fight to test out my tank/gank balance.
I've already managed to snuff an Imicus - he cloaked up as I landed in the belt, presumably because he wanted to scan the system without bothering with a safe.
I immediately dropped my own cloak, and burned towards where I last saw him. I get the vector right, and I manage to decloak him, which earns me the kill. I'm feeling on my game.
So when I see an Oracle on D-scan, I know I want a piece of that. The attack battlecruisers are the perfect above class kill. Their massive guns can't hit a frigate in orbit, and they have no drones to drive you away. Lightly tanked, they look good on the killboard without being too tough to take down.
I narrow it down to 1 AU, and check the belts, but he's not at any of them. I start looking at anoms, and there's only one within range. Off I go.
Landing under cloak (naturally), I see that he's 97 km off the warp-in, kiting out the rats. He's slow-boating, so I can catch him, but it will be a long, slow haul. There is a real chance that he'll finish up and leave before then. Or someone else will drop in for a visit.
The geometry favours me, though. He's roughly in line with another anom, so by warping there, and then warping back at 100km, I can close much of the distance fairly quickly. I decide to go for it, and land 17 km away from him.
Perfect.
Sliding into my desired orbit, I drop cloak and lock him up. I switch to conflag, and unleash my drones.
The fight, however, does not go as I expected it to. I had expected, for example, that he would be shield tanked; this leaves you the low slots for dps mods. Instead, he has an active armor tank. After my experience with the Gnosis, I'm not too pleased to see that.
Even more unexpected, though, was the medium neut. The Oracle does not have a utility high slot, so this guy has given up 12.5% of his dps to include a pvp mod. It kinda makes sense, though. If you can live with the dps loss, the ability to free yourself from irritating tacklers like me is a nice plus.
Well, not quite like me. As part of my refit, which I'll go into in another post, I'm now rocking a Small Fleet Republic Cap Battery. I have the capacitor pool of a destroyer, and 27% capacitor warfare resistance. A few cycles would be enough for most frigates, but it becomes clear very quickly that I'm going to be a much tougher nut for him to crack.
Despite refitting for dps, I'm disappointed to see that I am barely breaking his active tank. Settling in for the long fight, I turn off my prop mod - one of the fitting compromises I had to make was going with a Y-S8 afterburner instead of the more cap efficient Monopropellent models. He's got no web, though, so I don't need the afterburner to stay under his guns.
Because he can't hit me, I don't need my armor repairer. So I'm running my laser (with cap hungry Conflag), my web, and my scram. He's slowly beating me down with his neut, and I'm beating down his armor repairer.
As he's struggling to overcome my peak recharge, it suddenly becomes much easier to break his rep cycles. From this I infer that he's having to manage his cap between his repairer and his neut, and he's decided (wisely, in my view) to gamble on the neut.
I'm watching D-scan, but we are off the main track of the solar system, and nobody is disturbing us. I'm gratified to note that the fight is moving much more quickly than my fight with the Gnosis, despite the apparent similarities in fits.
In the end, it's a race between his neut, and my dps. It's a race I win.
Afterthoughts
Yeah, I feel pretty good about this one.
Looking at his fit, I can see he's set up for operating in low sec, with the defensive neut and also a cloak. His distance off the warp-in was no accident either, as he's set up to engage at very long range. Against a non-cloaky, he's have plenty of time to see them, get away, and then cloak up.
And against
The ancillary armor repairer surprised me, though. That explains why it suddenly got easier to make my damage stick. What I assumed were cap issues was actually just him running out of repair paste. I'm glad to see that, though, because I was feeling pretty disheartened about my new fit's ability to break what I thought was a regular armor repairer!
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