Pod Pilot After Action Report: ElenitiFighting Jedi Bears
Or the story of how we fought 2 Archons , 3 Moros’s, 2 Rapiers, 2 Loki’s for nearly 2 hours...
Prelude
Most of EvE players that reside in wormholes abide by the rule of “Real Life First”. Sometimes it easy to live up to this and sometimes it is not. This is because wormholes differ from K-space. There is no instant fun to be had. One cannot choose to do a L4 mission (if that is your cup of tea) or hop into a solo Talos to go hunting. Everything needs preparation – to go hunting you have to meticulously scan and scout your system, the adjacent system and the system after that. This is what we call “The Chain”. In addition, the lack of immediate local chat means that you have to rely solely on scouting with Dscan and probes to find anything to shoot at. If you choose to use probes, you’ll probably just scare the prey unless you know how to “one-shot” scan them to 100%. To the accustomed wormhole resident, unknown probes lingering on Directional scan (Dscan) is as subtle as Santa Claus buffalo hunting on the prairie with jingle bells strapped around his neck. Good luck finding stuff to kill with that approach.
The fail
On the 15th of July early EU time zone, we had just started scanning the chain and we noticed that the C6 adjacent to us (=C6s) had two inactive players at a POS belonging to Jedi Knights Orden , formerly of the BLOOD UNION alliance - a formidable WH alliance. We observed these players at the POS for 15-20 minutes and concluded that they were AFK. We then proceeded to scan the system down, knowing full well that by doing that we would be revealing our presence, although with the new Discovery scanner, they probably had seen the new signature pop-up anyway. The chain was quickly scanned, and it contained one Low-sec entrance, one High-sec entrance and the rest were EOL wormholes that lead to dead-end null security systems with little activity in them or around them. The scouts started to head back towards home and when one of the scouts jumped back to the Jedi’s C6 system we saw a flurry of activity at their POS. Several subcaps had logged in whilst we were down the chain and the heavy recon scout placed eyes on them. The POS had Rapiers, Lokis, Damnation and assorted smaller stuff piloted.
After observing the Jedi’s POS for a short while an Archon, Naglfar , Moros and two Orcas were seen logging in to the POS. Boredom turned to excitement in mere seconds. So many questions arose: “Did they miss us coming in?”, “Are they going to run sites?”, “What are they doing?” .These question would be answered momentarily, as quickly as they had landed to the POS, the Orca, Carrier and Moros had started to align and then warped away. Precious seconds ticked by while we were trying to assemble a fleet in our home system and the heavy recon scout tried to pinpoint where they had warped. After a moment of hesitation and confusion it became apparent that they had just collapsed the way to our home system.
What a failure. They had not missed us coming in; they were definitely not going to run sites but instead they were collapsing us out and succeeded in doing so unobstructed. The disheartened scouts exited the system through the HS we had found earlier and started to head back to a trade hub to await an entry back home.
Spider sense
Whilst the new chain was being scanned out someone asked on teamspeak a simple question: “What are the Jedi’s doing now?”. The heavy recon scout, now 6 jumps out, answered that he doesn’t know. No one thought much about it. What happened next was due to a mixture of spider sense and good luck. Without further comments the scout decided to turn back and return to that wormhole to take a peek inside.
What he found when he jumped back into the Jedi’s home system took everyone by surprise. There were tens of new ships on Dscan and most of the ships seen in the POS not 20 minutes ago were at a new signature. This new signature had to be a new wormhole and the residents were duking it out there with an unknown entity according to the Dscan data. Using the confusion of the fighting to his advantage the scout drops combat probes outside of Dscan range and tried to one-shot scan the capitals estimating the range and direction with the new scanner interface. Result : 98,8 % hit – so close but so far. The scout has to perform an extra cycle of scanning with the probes. That means 5 seconds of more time for them to notice that we are scanning them. We had to know who they were fighting and where. The second cycle lands us a 100% result, probes withdrawn, and the heavy recon initiates warp to see what is going on.
Meanwhile in our home system, the sudden burst of activity has raised interests and more scouts are seeded into the system in addition to the heavy recon already in place. A fleet is organized in hopes of maybe getting to participate in a three-way fight or just maybe gank something.
Once the heavy recon lands at a distance it can clear see that the fight is already over. The defending force of the Jedi’s has forced an unknown entity back into their wormhole. Now sometimes, the tiniest things can have huge implications and end up affecting the whole end result in a huge way. In this case the tiny things that I am referring to , were four Hammerhead drones that had been left behind on top of the wormhole. Why this is important you may ask: In wormholes everyone knows everyone and one day you can be shooting some guys, the next day you can be fleeted with the same guys to kill other guys. Confusing right?
These four drones revealed to us who the Jedi’s were fighting against. It was ASH alliance. Communication was established with them quickly and a plan was hatched. ASH alliance would try to lure the Jedi’s into re-engaging at the wormhole by amassing a fleet of theirs at the wormhole. We would simultaneously go through another route and when the already mass reduced wormhole crashes with the weight of ASH alliance ships, we pounce on the capitals from the other direction.
Very quickly events started to unfold in a cascade that was hard to control anymore. A scout at the Jedi POS informed that an Archon was gaining speed and quickly after she reported that it had initiated warp.
It's a tarp
And so the bait was in. The heavy recon at the [ASH] wormhole reported: “Archon on close range Dscan” and then in rapid succession that : “Archon landed at 0km from the hole” . This information was in turn relayed to [ASH] alliance. The scout at the Jedi POS notified that a hostile Scorpion was aligning and gaining speed also. Rapidly after it had initiated warp it was seen on close range Dscan from the [ASH] wormhole. Immediately after the landing of the scorpion, the ominous hum of wormhole activation was heard. Heart rate spiked as simultaneously the wormhole went “mass critical” from just the scorpion jumping. The agitated voice of the heavy recon was heard on comms “Scorpion jumped, its crit, ITS CRIT, ASH needs to jump now”.
With luck three Guardians and a solitary Phobos manage to jump through before the wormhole collapses. The bubble of the Phobos goes up with an Archon and a Scorpion inside it, and the game begins. At the same time our reinforcement fleet jumped from the backdoor entry into the system and initiated warp to the now tackled Archon and Scorpion - completing a classic “hammer – anvil” maneuver.
The fight
Wormhole fights are sometimes over in mere minutes and more often than that they are quick skirmishes leading to few losses before the perceived losing side disengages to their hole. Then there are the drawn out fights that we found ourselves in on the 15th of July, the kind of fights that result from tireless scouting, solid tactics and a healthy dose of blind luck. The C6 wormhole we were fighting in was a Wolf-Rayet star giving +50% to all armor resistances to all ships. These system bonuses coupled with an off-grid booster in the Jedi POS, we were facing capital ships with highly boosted tanks.
Now, truth be told, I do not know if the Jedi’s knew what they were heading into but neither did we. What I do know, is that they chose to stand their ground and we chose to see this fight through. Within minutes of the trap being sprung, the Jedi’s had on field in addition to the Archon, two Rapiers, two lokis and two Moroses with the third Moros landing at its optimal 20km out of the fighting soon after. We had about 30 ships on grid, a standard T3 armor comp, complemented with Neut-Legions.
We tried to overpower the dreadnoughts, to no avail. We tried neuting the hostile capital ships and then breaking them only to be frustrated when they coasted out of siege/triage in time to get remote repairs and capacitor. To make the situation worse , even with a -50% signature boost given by the environment of the C6 Wolf-Rayet system, we were losing ships at a steady pace to the combined webbing and target painting of the Rapiers and Lokis. We brought ECMgus to counter them but even one missed jam cycle on those ships, meant hard work for the Guardian pilots and a possible 1 bil loss. The hostile Dreadnought pilots coordinated excellently with the Rapiers and Lokis and by combining a poor choice of orbit direction, a judgment from Bob, massive webbing and angry Moros pilots, we sustained roughly a T3/Guardian loss for every 10 minutes of fighting. One single unfortunate (probably multiboxing) guardian pilot managed even to get one-shot by a Moros without any webs or target painters. I picture the Moros pilots going on comms: “BOOM! Headshot”, (in Russian of course).
The fight had been going on for 30 minutes and we were the ones losing expensive T3 cruisers. By now it was clear that we could not break the tank of these capital ships because of massive boosts the system provided, the fact that three of the capitals were in refit range, and last but not least , we were facing skilled capital pilots.
Reinforcements
As the fighting raged on, reinforcements were heading in. Our job was to keep these pilots occupied until we reached critical mass. Scouts and heavy recons were seeded into the entrance chains to provide warpins for the reinforcements that included additional Neut-Legions, DPS and Guardians. Bringing Bhaalgorns in would have been a total suicide, as we were barely keeping T3’s alive in the withering storm of XL sized antimatter charges. Although we had not killed any of their ships yet, the prolonged fighting (now close to 1 hour) clearly started to take a toll on the Jedi’s also. At this point one of the Moroses is primaried again immediately after it enters Siege mode. We slowly chew away at its armor and Void M, Hail M and coalesced beams of light chip away at its armor penetrating for the first time into its structure. Teamspeak was silent apart from the FC who relayed his orders calmly: “Overheat what you can, do not burn out, I repeat DO NOT burn out”. The hemi-circle indicating the structure integrity of the target went down painfully slow 75% - 50% - 20%. “He is OUT of siege – he’s getting reps again” the speakers echoed. The disappointment was palpable but at this point we were fully committed – either we win or we all die. We try again, and again. The same Moros is 20 minutes later saved from 2% armor and 20% structure gliding out of Siege mode just in time. To keep the Archon pilots stressed we try to Alpha through the subcaps on field on several occasions but even without Triage mode active the carriers are able to keep the sub-capital ships permalocked and as such provide immediate repairs. No luck there either.
In turn we cycle all of our guns and all of our neuting power to the Archons that now have to spend cap repairing the Moros and themselves. However, when there are two Archons on the field this is a difficult feat to accomplish, because the primaried carrier can save cap by not remote repairing the Moros and only itself while the not-primary Archon repairs the Moros. Our losses accumulate slowly but steadily, but so does our fleet size. The combined efforts of the now reinforced fleet, numbering around 50 pilots, and the heavy stress of continuous fighting gives us a chance to clinch this. The Moros that has previously has been barely saved on two occasions enters siege, with only 70% armor and little capacitor. Simultaneously both the Archons are in triage and one of them is capped out by our neuting and its efforts to repair the Moros. We hurl everything that we have at that Moros - 50 % armor , 20% armor. Yet again , teamspeak resonated the orders from the FC “Overheat your guns, do not burn out, I repeat DO NOT burn out”. That time we got him, the first Jedi ship to die after a grueling 1.5 hours of fighting.
The Archons were struggling at this point with exhaustion, cap management and triage cycling and after the first Moros went down, we proceeded to grind down the two remaining Moroses with ruthless efficiency. It took some time but we had blood lust in our minds and a hunger for kill mails. We then mopped up the Archons and the remaining subcaps on field which included at least one Loki and one Rapier.
Acknowledgements
I hope the length of the BR hasn’t deterred you dear reader, it only aims to depict some of the events that lead to this glorious confrontation that scouting included, lasted for 4-5 hours. Many people and entities partook in this operation and I’ll try to mention them . Firstly we have to thank Ixtab. and Ash Alliance, without them this fight would have not been possible with the result we together achieved. The FC performed admirably, relaying clear orders and coordinating reinforcements. Scouts also did a good job, although failing in the beginning to see that they were collapsing us out the ensuing scouting was good and special points for the “spider sense”. Special mention goes also to the fleet members who despite of 1.5 hours of constant fighting managed to keep combat comms. I don’t think we heard the oh-so frustrating “IM DYING, PLEASE HELP” scream even once . People stepped up, gave short comments when asked, answered questions briefly and followed orders. Excellent work.
However the biggest acknowledgement and appreciation has to go to Jedi Knight Orden, they brought a fight, and they fought valiantly, with skill and determination. It was an honor fighting them. With experience comes skill, and with good skills you are not afraid of fighting. Sometimes when you fight you lose. I am sure they will be back on their feet in no time providing content and fights.
“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose”
~Master Yoda, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
The title of the BR refers to them fighting like Bears (not carebear but a true bad-ass bear). Fighting to the last man taking as many of us , the attackers with them and not using self-destruct.
Butchers tally:
Unfortunately Eve-kill is totally freaking out at the moment so accurate killmails are hard to get:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=18762197
Our losses are pretty accurate but the Jedi’s capital losses are not:
Here are the pods that prove we killed them: http://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&crp_ ... m=7&y=2013
and a Moros and a Loki mail from Battleclinic:http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/c ... den#losses
15 Ships lost, total approx. 10 bil ISK, that Talwar must be a glitch in Eve-kill again
3 Moroses destroyed, estimated total 12 bil ISK
2 Archons destroyed, estimated total 8 bil ISK
Subcaps destroyed, 3 confirmed, estimated 2 bil ISK
Eleniti
Disclaimer: As per usual I depict the event as I remember them. It was long afternoon and I might have missed something or remember it totally wrong. Please correct me if so. If anyone has fraps or screen caps please share them.
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