Warfare & Tactics

So recently, I realised something that's fairly hard for an EVE player to admit to himself, let alone other EVE players: I really suck at PvP. My corporation has had some definite successes in its past, but those were in spite of my PvP skill, not because of it. I don't really understand the metagame, I know the applications of individual ships in the broadest terms, I don't really grasp fitting strategies and the most I know of combat tactics is "orbit, shoot, smack in local if I die." The funny thing is that I'm not doing at all badly in terms of pure skill points - I broke a hundred million skill points very recently, and I can fly just about every ship in the game with maximum efficiency. My PvP ineptitude cannot be blamed on a lack of ability on the part of my character - what's lacking is player skill.

This will not do.

So what I've decided to do is take advice from everyone who'll offer it, try it out in the field and see what happens. I'll record my endeavours in FRAPS and make videos of it, and also keep a log of it on the forums. My intent is that this will serve not only as a learning experience for myself, but will help other people who want to learn PvP as well.

Entry #1 - Thursday 08/11/2012

So we start out small, with a small roam in Placid in a small ship. Once I had set out to do this, I started asking some of my more skilled acquaintances for advice, and the overwhelming majority of it was "do roams in dangerous places in small, easily-replaceable, inexpensive ships." A friend of mine, Milo Caman, donated the setup - an active-tanked neutron blaster Incursus - that I used that night. It cost ten million ISK to fit because Stacmon's prices are a little inflated, but I was OK with that. I named it "Milo Caman's Idea" in honour of him and set out from Stacmon into the mildly dangerous low-sec space of Placid.

Placid is factional warfare territory, which makes it a little different to other low-sec space. You meet a lot of neutrals who have terrible security status, yet probably (and emphasis on probably) won't shoot you if you don't antagonise them - it's dangerous to assume that they never will, of course, but it means you can jump into a system full of flashy-reds and not know immediately if they're a danger to you. Roaming up to Renarelle, however, I discovered a very large collection of pirate battlecruisers that were killing members of both militias. I realise that PvP requires bravery, but it doesn't require suicidal stupidity, so I fled to Vlillirier screaming like a little girl.

Having roamed Placid for about half an hour and found no fight that wouldn't be completely one-sided, I decided to try my luck in Intaki, which is a notorious hive of scum and villainy. Flashy reds in local, and a plex being run! I was in luck! Alright, warp to the plex - what did we have here? Was that a... oh, that's a cruiser. A Rupture, in fact. And it warp-scrammed me.

Oh dear.

Having been well aware that I was likely going to lose the ship anyway, I decided to commit and engage the Rupture and point blank range - which, given that it was fielding medium autocannons, turned out to be the correct course of action. Orbiting at the effective range of my blasters, the transversal of my ship was too high for his guns to do any serious damage to me, and although he was neuting me, the ship was never designed to be cap stable anyway - the Cap Booster 200s refilled nearly two thirds of my cap every time I slammed one. With the meagre DPS of my blasters and my drones, I probably wasn't going to kill him any time soon, and I was probably going to die horribly when my cap boosters ran out, but for now, everything was looking fine.

So of course, that's when the Alpha Volley Union Jaguar showed up, and tore my ship apart in about twenty seconds.

"Gf" in local, warp very quickly to the nearest celestial object still on my overview and from there to a station. Obviously I would prefer to have killed something on my first outing, but it was still a whole lot of fun. All the parties involved were good sports and when I explained my plans to them, they seemed encouraging.

You can find the first video of my exploits here. I realise there's a lot of problems with it - my voice is too quiet in comparison to the rest of the audio, and I'm stammering like the lily-white neckbeard I am. I'm gonna work on those problems as I work on my PvP skills.

Was a nice watch :)

The reason your cap held up is because he was using a nos on you, not a neut. As such it did more harm to his cap than to yours

There is no reason to fit t1 fit if you can fit t2 fit, if you get some pvp why to ruin your possibities with gimped fit.

At least you want to use t2 gun and load some null ammo too so you can use those if needed on some situations.

Also lot of small things to do, you were not really having chance to kill anything there, because you forgot to use scrambler, if that rupture would have been alone and being in trouble like that you think he could just warp away.

You did not use your directional scanner on gate when you jumped in.

Also when you start warping it is good to at least put your damage control on to prepare possible smartbomb BS on next gate, personally i always put heat on warp disruptor and guns when i uncloak on new system.

There is lot of different little things you can learn to do automatically to save some time and effort if something bigger is happening around you, so you can focus more about what is going on than just focusing how to control your ship.

The Rupture most certainly aggroed on me first, and we were at an acceleration gate, where there were no gate guns. There's about twenty-ish minutes of footage I didn't put in the video of me just roaming around looking for someone to shoot and not finding anyone - I turned FRAPS back on only after I realised I wasn't going to be able to escape the Rupture, and thus would have to fight him instead.



Will keep that in mind.

For the love of Jeebus, put on the T2 mods. It adds up. Why start with a 30% disadvantage?

Frigate fights often end up being decided while you're in low hull hp. Those extra HP repped or extra damage applied can mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Also, you used no heat at all, not a good idea against a cruiser since it'll be a long fight but against a smaller opponent, you might want to keep in mind that you can overheat the armor reps or the guns for extra oomph. This wasn't a kiting setup so overheating the warp scrambler would've been moot.

re: the acceleration gate.

In future, warp at 10 and spam activate as you're landing. In a frig you will pretty much always get in before a rupture can tackle you.

At that point you give yourself an extra few seconds to weigh up your chances. You can either align and be out before he manages to follow you in, OR you can be right at 0, under his guns the moment he lands :)

Buy in bulk at a market hub and then have Red Frog Freight ship it to the nearest high sec station you use. You'll save a lot of money.

in reality that would have done nothing for him... it was a minor fw complex.... as such that rupture or wolf wouldnt have been able to follow him had he taken the gate.

Staggering your reps can help manage cap and tank. train over heating skills ( i think just thermodynamics) and remember over heat early and often. your best bet probably would have been to try to kill the jag first, from watching the video you can see the ruppy was active armor tanked and you probably would have had to have him cap himself out for you to break that tank, so learning when to swtich targets can help, it woulda been tough to kil the jag regardless but you didnt have time to kill the ruppy against the incoming damage. so switching to ligher targets to take dps off the field can help. in that fight it deifnatly woould be hard to split them in that fight, but learning how to split up groups will help you in the future. if you couda gotten distance 15km or so + away from the ruppy he would have been in falloff range to help you mitigate damage and maybe you could kill the jag/comet before diving back into the ruppy.

Join RVB. You don't have to waste time looking for 1v1 frigate fight. We honor 1v1 fights, in all ship sizes. And we have arranged cruise, battlecruiser, even rarely battleship fleet fights. We don't "teach" pvp, but we provide/facilitate pvp engagements in high sec for you to try out diffrent tactics and ship fittings. Really, the most important thing I learned in RVB is to stay calm in pvp situations, which you only get by exposure to lots of pvp.

In your same shoes mate, can't even make up my mind on what ship to bring to the fight. Keep up the good work mate, will be following with interest.