PvP Crash Course: Syn'Ruhkl

Back in October I was contacted by Syn about my pvp crash course. He described himself below:

Ive had an eve account since 2010, and jsut recently got back into the game after a year + break. During the times ive been playing, ive been running missions or doing WH's with my corp, Every time i start a mission or wh, i want to smash my head on my keyboard, they're sooooo boring and i know this game has more to offer.

I want to learn to pvp, i love pvp and mainly pvp in every MMO ive ever player. Im a military shift worker with another kid on the way and my play time is limited. I want to learn the ins and outs of pvp and how to fly ships properly.

Clearly, Syn has some EvE experience - probably a lot more than me when it comes to wormholes, in fact. But he wants to break out of his current routine and learn some pvp. That seemed like a worthy goal, and I liked the fact that he'd jumped right in to W space, which has always seemed like the elite end of the carebear swimming pool.

We initially set up the course for early December, but a personal matter meant Syn needed to reschedule to January. With his training focusing on Amarr, I decided that the Punisher was probably the best ship for the course, so I sent him some fits and a lists of supplies, which he duly moved to Ranellies.

We went through what has become the standard course structure, starting with brawling and kiting ships, moving up to cruisers, and then finally a battle cruiser before ending the lesson with a 1v1. We did touch on D-scan, but differences in time zone meant that I was very conscious that we had a limited  window for the course.

As in previous lessons, Syn knew my 1v1 fit ahead of time, and we discussed the pro's and con's of my brawling Condor v his Punisher. I pointed out that I would probably have better control of the range, having a web, unless he decided to use his neut to shut down my mids. Unfortunately, neuting me out would only shut down my mids, and with cap-less weapons and no active tank this came at a price for Syn, as it would limit his own ability to run his repair system.

On the other hand, my ship is cap stable with the neut running, so active tanking was likely to be limited in any event. Syn was going to need to decide how to play this fight.

For my part, I considered the Punisher's excellent ability to project damage right into my worst resists. I could probably hold Syn at range if I wanted to, but I was not sure that I could wear down his active tank faster than he would tear down my buffer.

Instead, I decided to try and take advantage of his poor tracking by getting in really, really close. I'd also use my neut to shut down his tank. Of course, if Syn's tracking were better than I expected, I'd simply get a face full of Navy Multifrequency, and I'd be too close to disengage.

The fight:

0:41 - I warp to the agreed fight location (local was quite busy, so we used a safe), and see Syn at about 60km. I simply hit 500m orbit, as this is the fastest way to get under his guns - spiraling in will just give him more time to hit me.

0:44 - I preheat my guns - this is going to have to be fast and furious.

1:12 - After a period of just motoring towards each other, I start to target Syn at a range of about 20km.

1:18 - Syn's inexperience with pvp shows itself here; I've already opened fire on him (we are about 7.5km apart), and he's only just started to target me. The approach was his best opportunity to get some solid hits, and he's let the opportunity pass.

1:24 - Syn rallies, and has the presence of mind to start his guns before he activates his point. He lands two very solid hits and then a penetrating hit as I close the distance to 300m. If that kind of punishment keeps up, I'm going home in a pod. However, my web is active, and Syn's speed has droped to 266km/s; I've got complete range control.

1:30 - I'm still getting hit, but it's a grazing hit. I'm also getting into Syn's armor now, so I'm actually doing damage. In what was probably a mistake, I've not activated my neut yet. I quickly move to correct that oversight.

1:38 - My tactics start to pay off as Syn's damage drops through the floor. However, my accumulated heat is nearly at maximum, and I honestly can't believe how little heat damage my launchers have taken. My lucky day, I guess.

1:53 - The fight has swung heavily in my favour, and I'm half way through Syn's tank. He's trying to counter neut me, which is smart (without that, I can just perma run the neut), but it means he can't use his repair system.

2:11 - My high slots are redlined, and I'm swimming in heat damage. I've been on overload for about a minute and a half. Only perfect Thermodynamics skills are keeping me in this fight. On the other hand, my damage has just spiked, so I've probably neuted out Syn's damage control. Whenever I fight Punishers I'm reminded just how damn tough they are.

2:16 - The Punisher finally explodes, and Syn get's his pod out. Well fought!


Afterthoughts:

This was an excellent fight, but one that really underscores how understanding your way through the fight is so much more important twitch reflexes in this game. As far as I can tell, both Syn and I simply hit "orbit" and focused on our modules through most of the fight - fancy piloting was never going to play a role in this matchup.

As it happens, my combination of fit and tactics beat Syn's combination of fit and tactics. If I'd stayed at range, Syn would have pulverised me. If he'd fit tracking rigs & Gatlings, he would have mauled me in close. If he'd had a nos instead of a neut, he would have lasted longer (although probably still exploded). The decisions we both made before the battle played the biggest role in deciding who got to fly their ship home.

Of course, it's not too helpful to simply say "my fit beat your fit", and I'll try and suggest what I might have tried if the roles were reversed.

First, I would have made the Condor chase me, maximising the solid hit's I'd get on the approach. I'd definitely have preheated my guns and targeted early, just to make sure I was getting every last ounce of damage out of that phase of the fight. I might have been tempted to overload my prop mod for as long as possible too, as that would have kept the initial damage from the Condor lower.

Once I saw that the Condor was under my guns, I'd have aligned to a celestial to try and get the tracking down as low as possible, while probably turning off the overload on my guns. I'd try to rep us as much damage as I could while I still had cap, and then use my neut to try and counter neut - getting the Condor to drop the web would create another chase, bringing the tracking right down.

Would that have been enough? I don't know. That Condor would know it had been kissed, though.


Course feedback (instructor):

What stood out about Syn was his interest in ship fittings. Unlike my other student's, Syn brought four Punishers that were all rigged slightly differently, as he wanted to get a feel for the difference that these changes made. That meant we were able to compare Trimark Punishers to dps Punishers on a couple of exercises, which I hope Syn found useful.

Given the importance ship fittings it solo pvp, I'd encourage Syn to continue focusing on that part of his pvp. His natural curiosity may well lead him to be that rarest of pvpers - one that actually creates new and decent fits! Once he pins down his preferred flying style, I suspect his ships will be models of efficiency.

Like anyone new to pvp, Syn also needs to turn what he knows intellectually into habits, so that in the heat of combat things are happening automatically. From little things like targeting early to understanding the best ways to pilot to maximise your dps (or minimise the other guy's), all these factors add up. The best way of doing that, of course, is to get out there and find some fights.


Course feedback (student):

Thanks for the lessons, i learned quite a bit from them, especially with regards to my own skills, and the limitations of amarr ships and capacitor. Definitly see were i need to improve on my navigation skills and how i approach different encounters.
The lessons were well laid out and flowed into one another, so it was a build on to previous lessons. Some lessons could have been a bit longer, but shortness in most cases were due to my ship going pop. The kit list for the fittings is good, but as we discussed, atleast one NOS needs to be added to the list and maybe nanite paste to reduce time to and from station to repair burnt out gear.
Hopefully in the future we can try this again and hopefully i can come out of it with atleast one win.
Thanks and fly safe

Final comments:

Syn's absolutely right about the nos; I should have included at least one nos fitting on the list of ships, and that was an oversight on my part. It would also have allowed Syn to run his active tank longer on some exercises (like the drone swatting), which would have probably addressed the issue of having more time. When coming up with the base fits, I'm usually trying to get the ships to illustrate certain teaching points, and in this case I didn't consider the simple logistics of how long the tank would run without the nos.

If Syn came out of this with a better understanding of the weaknesses of Amarr ships, then I'm glad. Of course, learning about the strengths of Amarr ships won't happen until he tries something else and watches it disintegrate in 20 seconds, rather than stand up to perfect skilled, overloaded missile launchers for a minute and a half! That's always the way, though; we always focus on the shortcomings of whatever we're flying, because those are the things the kill us.

I wish Syn the best of luck with his future pvp, and encourage him to get out there and fight the good fight!

Committing to a skill plan(ish)

While I've always had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to train, I've never been one to use skill plans or remaps to boost my efficiency. After setting my attributes to a fairly even distribution (bar charisma, of course), I've enjoyed the ability to plug in skills without worrying what their primary and secondary attributes might be.

In hindsight, I wouldn't change a thing. New players have a really difficult time knowing which skills they need, as well as when they are going to need them. A general attributes distribution allows for last minute rearrangements of skills without punishing the player.

However, the last two weeks have gotten me thinking. When my home internet connection went down, I called a friend and had them throw Advanced Weapons Upgrades V onto my skill queue, because I had no idea how long it would be before I could log back in. I'd been saving AWU V for the Christmas break, but I didn't want to lose any training time either. Then, after I got my connection fixed (sort of), I was swamped by work, so I just let it go on training.

In order to scratch the EvE itch while I couldn't play, I started reviewing the skills that I wanted to be training over the next few months. These included:

1. Caldari Cruisers and Battleships
2. Amarr Battleships
3. Destroyers V
4. Recons V
5. HAC V
6. Command Ships (if the changes to boosting look good)
7. All the missile skills (I'm maxed out for frigates, but not larger ships)

If you noticed that all of these skills run off Perception and Willpower, pat yourself on the back.

As I had about six months of Perception/Willpower training (at least) ahead of me, I decided to bite the bullet and remap Perception/Willpower. I've got a bonus remap from last Christmas that I can use to return to a general stat distribution whenever I like, and I figure I'll probably get another bonus remap this Christmas. Might as well use them.

So, in the new year I hope to be playing with a few new ships, assuming that I can afford them (the T2 stuff would really stretch my budget right now, but if I fly cheap and win consistently, I should be able to afford them in January/February).

Otherwise, apologies for the lack of updates; we ought to be back to something a little more regular this weekend. 

PvP Crash Course: Manu

This is another PvP Crash Course video and fight analysis. I've been messing about with EvE and FRAPS settings, and I've managed something a little higher quality than in the past. I've also figured out why my voice has not been recorded previously, and fixed it. However, it seems that I've done so by excluding all other sound. So I'm still working on that one.

Manu was a much younger character than I anticipated taking on, but I was impressed by his enthusiasm and the quality of his application. Here is a small excerpt his EvEmail.

I am extremely new to Eve, i have been flying a little over 2 weeks now, and am in love with the game. I was waiting for my new computer for around 2 months and during that time read about, researched, and followed Eve as much as I could. This is the game I have been searching for and I am happy I have finally found it. While I love how Eve has so many different paths to make, I am in it for PvP. I joined RvB right from the start, day 2, so that I could get into pvp immediately. I have been playing daily and flying in fleets/roaming as much as possible, trying to take in as much as I can. Luckily I took advantage of the Buddy Invite program and got a nice amount of starting isk to support my early PvP.

This kind of introduction told me much of what I needed to know. He had the resources to actually afford the ships he would lose on the course (always a question mark for such a young character) and had already shown a serious commitment to pvp. Excellent!

There was some difficulty with fits, as Manu is obviously a very low skill point character. I also told him that he absolutely had to have Thermodynamics I trained by the day of the course, which I imagine ate up about a week or so.

I ran this course a little differently, as Manu is a Gallente pilot, focusing on the Incursus. With no utility high slot to power the active tank, above class kills are especially tricky for Incursus pilots. On the other hand, Manu could theoretically break the tank on my Vengeance, and would be very strong in on-class fights.

I therefore started with the larger hulls and worked down. This enabled us to discuss mechanics on hulls that could tank his damage easily, while allowing him to try and apply those lessons to later hulls where he actually had a chance of victory.

I've discussed the specifics of the course before, and this set of lessons was very similar, but with a very heavy focus on the mechanics of Overloading, as well as an in depth discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Gallente ships.

The final lesson, then, resulted in the above video. After the painful experience of flying the Punisher again, I decided that I'd simply fly missile based ship but only use meta weapons and T1 ammo. In hindsight, this was a far better choice, as my familiarity with the systems meant that I was able to spend more time focusing on what Manu was doing rather than flying my own ship. Ultimately, I think that was more helpful.

Prior to the fight, we talked about our respective fits, and my slightly superior speed (thanks to being shield tanked). This meant that Manu would need to close range as much as possible, so that, even as I tried to back off, he would be able to maximise the time I spent within his optimal. I explained that the best way to achieve this was on the initial approach, when our respective momentums would carry us right past each other (I did not intend doing anything too tricky, like spiraling in). Overheating his guns early would be key, too, but he had to watch that they did not burn out.

On a side note, this was the day of the Tusker FFA, and the first time I let Manu hunt me, someone else got there first! Because they were also flying an Incursus, I thought Manu had found me and I engaged. As I'm talking him through the fight, he tells me "Um, that's not me." I nearly die laughing and use my better speed and range control to leave the fight and meet Manu at a safe. I reload my launchers, and we let the fight start.


The fight:

0:01 - Manu is a little slow to target me, perhaps because of low character skills, or perhaps because he waited until I was within scram range to start the targeting. Either way, I've got him scrammed and webbed before he even has me locked.

0:04 - As I've mentioned elsewhere, my guns are one of the last things I turn on, and I've already spent a few seconds considering my range and speed before I activate them. I'm not overheating, as I already have a significant skill point advantage over Manu.

0:10 - Manu has me scrammed but not webbed! I don't notice yet, because I'm watching our range and his speed. I can see that he's missed the opportunity to keep me close, but I want to see how he reacts. I'm hoping that he'll overheat his afterburner and hit approach. As it is, I'm too far out of range for him to hit me.

0:14 - Manu has opened fire, presumably to try and make sure his weapons are cycling when he manages to hit range. At this stage I'm pretty sure I've just selected a 5km orbit, and am not doing much else.

0:22 - Now, Manu remembers his drone, which is excellent, because I've forgotten all about it. He does not have T2 drone skills, but the fact that he's launched it is a very good sign.

0:28 - After having let Manu try and find his own way, I start commenting on the fight, suggesting that he overload his repair system. I've got a neut on this ship (and I'm cap stable with the neut running), but I prefer to keep the range advantage that I have rather than risk closing my orbit in order to use the neut. I also want the fight to last a bit, so Manu has a chance to try and think his way through this, and shutting down his tank would end the fight pretty quickly.

0:39 - With the repair system overloaded, I can't break his tank (until the repair system burns out, that is), which is a good thing. As noted above, I want Manu to have a little more time to try and catch me, and get as much as he can out of this fight. I also want to see how well he can keep an eye on his heat damage.

0:49 - At this point, I start to directly address the issue that Manu is having with this fight, which is range dictation. This is always going to be a key point for blaster fit boats, and I don't want to wait until after the fight before I raise it.

1:16 - After suggesting that he overheat his AB (which should have given him range dictation over me as I'm not overheating anything), I notice that he's still not closing the range. I take a look at my own speed, and see that I'm still doing over 1000 km/s. That forces me to double check everything, and I see that Manu never activated his web. I immediately draw that to his attention.

1:25 - Manu does activate his web, and my speed immediately starts to drop. Unfortunately, it's too little too late, and Manu explodes.

1:31 - Here, both Manu and I screw up. Manu does not get his pod out in time (a recurring problem for him), but I fail to stop my momentum in time, and so immediately after pointing him, I'm carried out of scram range.


Afterthoughts:

Like most new pvpers, one of Manu's main difficulties is simply remembering the myriad of things he needs to do while in combat. Here, as is often the case, a single oversight turned a fairly even fight into pigeon shoot. It's unfortunate, but ultimately the lesson ought to be very useful.

I suffered from this many times when I started out, and it won't go away until you teach yourself to constantly review your modules - you don't just hit the button once and ignore it! Once you start doing that, you will still make mistakes (or lag will drop your command to the server), but you will also catch those mistakes before they are fatal.

What would I have done if I were in Manu's shoes? I would have simply hit approach, because tracking makes no difference against my rockets. I would have overheated my point and web on the initial approach, and taken them off overheat as soon as range allowed. I would then have overheated my guns as soon as I was in range, and left them there for as long as I could. Me being me, I'd totally forget to drop my drone.

While keeping an eye on my heat damage, I would have been focusing on range and speed, when it became clear than my opponent was trying to increase the range, I would have overheated my afterburner, to try and keep them within my optimal for as long as possible.

Finally, if it looked like they were going to outrange me, I would have dropped my web and started burning in the opposite direction, trying to get them to overshoot, so I could warp out.


Course feedback (instructor):

I'm not sure I would offer this course to such a young character again, and not because of anything Manu did wrong. There were simply some exercises that didn't work well because of Manu's lack of skill points. One example is where we were practicing the approach against turret cruisers. Manu was making perfect approaches, but his lack of Navigation skills meant that he was going from full hits to light hits, rather than to no hits. That does not really reinforce the learning point, as, from Manu's point of view, the result was not really worth the added effort of manual piloting.

Manu did seem to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of things that have to be done, and Gallente frigates are notorious for front-loading the pilot's work. Those first few seconds are really make-or-break for the Gallente, which significantly increases the learning curve.

However, Manu was also very enthusiastic, and I'm certain that with practice he'll overcome these initial challenges. He has the enthusiasm and aggression necessary to fly Gallente ships well, and I can see him becoming a very dangerous pilot once his support skills are up to par.

 For constant practice, I can't think of any place better for him than RvB. However, he will need to actively review his fights and work to correct any bad habits that he may develop. All solo pvpers need to be very critical of their own performance, as, ultimately, they are the only person that will push them to do better. We are our own coaches, and we have nobody else to blame if we fail to perform satisfactorily.


Course feedback (student):

A recent hurricane has meant Manu has been unable to send me any detailed feedback. However, in his verbal feedback, he told me that the course had really opened his eyes to how much was actually happening during a fight. We had delved deeply into the various mechanics of the fight, as well as basic manual piloting, and there was so much more to pvp than "orbit + F1".


Final recommendations:

I'm glad that Manu found the course useful, and I hope that he finds my post-fight analysis helpful too, when he can read it. I would also encourage him to continue with pvp, as he clearly enjoys it. While I have focused on the challenges Manu faces, he should not feel that he is in any way behind the curve. All he has to do is look at some early posts on this blog to see that I had far, far more to learn than Manu does when I was three weeks old.

PvP Crash Course: Bjarni

The final part of my PvP Crash Course is a 1v1 against me, and a fight analysis on this blog. Bjarni was the first student to take part in my course (although, from the mail that I am receiving, not the last). Here's what he has to say about himself. 

As you might have noticed, this character is fairly old, I made it with a few of my friends many winters ago. The idea of EVE, the intrigue, the backstabbing, the single shard universe where you can be "somebody", always fascinated me. But only that, 'the idea of EVE'. My experience was fairly different. My friends soon left and I was alone in the big black sky and quit soon after. Came back!.. then left again. Rinse & Repeat. It wasn't until several months ago when I figured out where it all went wrong. I relied on everyone else to get me somewhere, mostly ISK... making ISK felt like some dark art that only the most brilliant people could do, or the ones willing to spend hours upon hours in PvE. I was neither until I did the hard work of learning how play the market. Suddenly I had billions coming out of my ears but most importantly, I had options. The options to play EVE the way I wanted to. Which for me is PvP, all the way, but I quickly noticed that a side effect of being rich is that I got really cheap! And that I'm scared as hell of scratching my ships. But I'm working on that. Baby steps.

I've got some good friends in game who are recovering Carebears, and they're damn fine pilots. If I can help Bjarni find his feet in pvp, I'm happy to do it.

The course is divided into six lessons, and it ran to about three and half hours. In the first lesson we covered safe spots and D-scanning. In the second lesson we looked at how to fight against a brawling fit, and really took a close look at how missiles and turrets actually deal damage in a fight. The third lesson focused on kiting and maneuver. The fourth lesson included cruisers, drones and ewar. The fifth lesson focused on fighting against battlecruisers and the inevitable war of attrition that this involves.

The sixth and final lesson, then, resulted in the video above. I'm flying the Punisher, while Bjarni flies the Rifter. I chose the Punisher for the simple reason that my turret skills are frozen at the level of a six month old character. Flying the Punisher, therefore, helps simulate a fellow "noob".

Bjarni knew my fit, and before the fight we spent some time discussing it in detail. We focused on the comparative active tanks and ehp, as well as the respective optimal ranges. We looked at the implications of the neut in my utility high slot, and I told him that he was going to have to choose between evading my neut and pitting his tank and damage projection against mine, or trying to get under my guns while accepting that his active tank would be unlikely to work.

I then jumped into the next system, and Bjarni was to track me down on D-scan, and jump in on me. I reminded him that he had to keep me pointed, or I would try to escape if the fight went against me.


The fight:

0:08 - I turn from my initial vector to meet Bjarni.

0:29 - Just as Bjarni had to make a choice, so did I, and this is where I make it. It's a subtle thing, hitting "orbit", which is set at 2km. If I had wanted to fight at range, I should have changed course and required him to run me down while I used Scorch to hit him on the nose. However, if I wanted to use my neut, I needed to approach him at high speed so that our collective momentum would bring him into neut range before he could correct. In making my decision to fight in close I overlooked one point that I've not had to deal with in a while, but I'll get to that later.

0:35 - I open fire much earlier than I needed to, but I wanted my guns cycling as soon as I was within range.

0:39 > 0:45 - I start landing hits at 14km out. The next few hits are solid, wiping out 3/4 of his shields, while being barely scratched in return. The tracking then goes to hell as we race past each other. He's in neut range, though, so I start hitting him with that too.

0:53 > 1:01 - We're both still hitting each other, and he's starting into armour while I'm at 1/3 shields. I overheat my guns, but then pull them off overheat because I miss three shots in a row.

1:10 - At this point I make what I feel is my first big mistake of the fight; I turn off my neut. I was starting into armour and not getting any real hits. Feeling my strategy was not working, I decided to try something else. What I did not notice at the time, though, is that Bjarni's web was off - he'd managed to keep everything else active (and lack of good hits meant he did not have to run the repair system), but I gave up just as I would have been about to see the payout.

After the fight Bjarni agreed that there were several points in the fight where a single neut rep more would have shut him down. I got too focused on my own cap, though, and didn't see what was happening to him.

1:24 - By this time, I've stabilised and I'm getting good hits again, so I'm convinced that I've made the right choice. But the lack of pressure has allowed Bjarni to recover some cap, and his web is up.

1:38 - Bjarni is now forced to run the repair system, and his web comes off again. However, he's started to get under my guns, while still landing his own hits.

1:48 - Bjarni has now restabilised, and his web is back up. With that nos, I can't afford to take the pressure off, and I know it. The overheat has gone back on the guns, and I'm switching up my crystals periodically as the range changes to try and keep the hits coming.

1:54 - This is actually a pretty important moment in the fight, because I give up on the orbit and just approach Bjarni, giving me a period of decent tracking. The results are immediate, and I start getting hits. He needs to repair, so the web comes off again.

2:14 - At this point the tracking benefits have worn off because his nav computer has adjusted for my change in flight. I'm missing again, and sure enough, the web comes back on.

2:23 - Here's where I actually get my head together and remember a few things about tracking. I align to the sun, and just start cruising. I've realised that he wants to be in close (and it's working for him), so I want to keep his orbit as regular as possible by flying in a straight line.

2:48 - My change of course gave me just what I needed, and I've got him down to half armor. However, I'd started the maneuver at half armour, and was now down to 1/3rd with an overheating repair system. Bjarni has adjusted his flying again, and I'm getting a few misses.

3:03 - I know I'm going to lose. I worked out the right flight pattern too late into the flight, and my only hope now is to neut out his point and try to warp out. His nos has paid for itself many times over, and is keeping him in the game.

3:07 - I do notice the dropped web this time, and it keeps me hoping for a stroke of luck. The grindiness of this part of the fight makes me kick myself; Bjarni's clearly hurting, and I'm landing hits, even with my poor turret skills. Had I flown like this earlier, I would not be trying to warp out now.

3:20 - I'm having to choose between my neut and the repair system, and only the neut offers any chance of salvation.

3:42 - Boom. Gf, Bjarni. Gf.


Afterthoughts:

First, I need to compliment Bjarni on flying very well. While it would be easy for me to devolve into a rant about how much I hate turrets, the reality is that if either Bjarni or I had made some slightly different decisions, the fight could easily have gone my way. Instead, he managed his modules under my neuts brilliantly, and kept working his orbit to minimize my damage.

My first mistake was forgetting that lasers have an uphill battle against armour tanked ships. I've not used EM damage in ages, so I'd forgotten this until I actually started into Bjarni's armor. Thus, I think my whole premise of getting in, neuting him down, and smashing him fast was flawed. The length of this fight makes it clear that the key was incremental advantage, and I should have simply tried to keep at range as long as possible, and fly so that my tracking was as stable as possible.

My second mistake was not seeing how close Bjarni's capacitor was to failing. As Bjarni confirmed, and as should be clear from the video, he was having serious cap difficulties, but I just didn't see it as my focus was on the combat log as I tried to manage my tracking (not flying turret ships, I don't have angular velocity on my overview).

My final mistake was waiting so long before aligning to the Sun. The entire balance of the battle shifted at that point, and if I'd not been so far behind, it would have made huge difference.

Definitely a good fight.


Course feedback (instructor):

Even before I had a chance to review this video, Bjarni impressed me with this ship handling, and ability to learn and implement new tactics quickly. He really pushed himself on the anti kiting drills, working the maneuvers until he managed them, against both "aggressive" and "defensive" style kiters. If he had a little trouble triggering point, web, and weapons all at the moment of closest approach, it's because that's an awful lot to fit into one second window. I have no doubt that Bjarni will, with practice, become a very difficult, and dangerous, pilot to try kiting.

He also demonstrated quick thinking during the drone drills. Here, he was orbiting my Arbitrator while I sent out waves of different kinds of drones for him to practice webbing and destroying. Key to this process was keeping within nos range of my Arbitrator so that the active tank could be kept running. When he drifted out of nos range he immediately switched his nos to one of the drones, a tactic that he had first been told about only a few minutes earlier.

If Bjarni has a weakness, it's a caution bred of years of pve. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to find me via D-scan, and not because he didn't understand the process. Instead, he was simply very cautious about warping from place to place, and often chose locations based more on their perceived safety rather than their utility as a scanning point. If you know I'm in cluster X, for example, you should warp to planet X, because that planet will be at the center of the cluster, allowing you to separate each element of the cluster on D-scan. Warping to a moon, conversely, will often mean that you still cannot distinguish between different parts of the cluster, despite the fact that you are almost literally next door to me.

That said, I don't feel that this natural caution ever prevented Bjarni from taking calculated risks, and his "up close and personal" approach to the Punisher v Rifter dual did not suggest an unwillingness to take risks - it would have been very easy for him to convince himself to kite, but he didn't and won the fight as a result.


Course feedback (student): 

After making my views public, it's only fair that I give Bjarni the chance to do the same. Here's what he had to say:

Hello there Taurean,

I ran into Azual Skoll in Hevrice, I had two expendable Rifters still there and he was kind enough to blow me up and give me some pointers, nice people the Tuskers.

Overall I think the entire thing was spectacular, brought me out of my shell and taught me some new things which was exactly what I was after.
I wrote a little bit down after the course, let me know if I forgot something and I'll send you another essay.

The Duration: The length of the course was fine, EVE PvP isn't something you can explain in 60 minutes anyways and the techniques get absorbed at different rates to different people. Although it would have been shorter if I had asked a couple hundred fewer questions.

The Material: All of your techniques were well explained and in-depth, I don't think I ever needed a further explanation of what you just taught me. I felt like I was starting at the bottom of the pyramid and working my way up and learning more advanced tactics, which suited me perfectly.

The Execution: Besides the literal execution of my shiny Rifters? :( In all seriousness it felt really nice to lose my ships, it really cemented what you were trying to teach and what happens when it fails.

Suggestions: I believe we have similiar teaching styles and this is something I often use when teaching techniques to beginners in martial arts or Parkour.

A some kind of Before/After, I definitely noticed some improvement in my decision making and what to do in the Punisher duel. Some people might be less observant or harder on themselves if they lose and refuse to notice any changes from what you taught them. A straight up "You did "this much" better at the end than in the beginning." might be helpful to some people.

This is what I wrote up soon after your course, ask away if I missed something.


Regards,
Bjarni Veigar.

I totally hold my hand up on the end of course feedback. It had always been my intention to do something comprehensive after I'd had the time to review the videos and digest the results, but I should have been clearer about that, rather than leave you hanging.

Thanks for the feedback!


Final recommendations:

I'm glad that Bjarni felt he came out of his shell, but what I want to make sure of is that he doesn't retreat back into that shell and disconnect with EvE again, as he has in the past.

To this end, I'd recommend that he join a decent pvp corp and find a target rich environment. While I might ordinarily recommend Red v Blue, my gut tells me that Bjarni's the kind of pilot that has an appreciation for the big picture, and the context of the fight in relation to some larger goal. Thus, he might find even more enjoyment in faction warfare or null sec. Perhaps commenters can suggest reputable corps for Bjarni, as I have no direct experience with life outside lowsec, and my FW stint lasted less than 24 hours.

I would also encourage him to keep focusing on small ships for the time being. I really feel that one of his strengths is going to be his piloting, and smaller, more nimble ships will reward him more fully for that skill than larger, slower hulls.