Warfare & Tactics

Apologies for the long post.

I have a character with whom I like doing solo roaming in a frigate in lowsec, enjoying a bit of the pirate/antiparate lifestyle. On occasion I've got some really fantastic fights and some good kills way out of my weightclass but recently I've been running into more and more instalocking T3 gate camps.

Even high agility frigs have trouble not being caught and blapped before they warp off, and the only way I've found to combat it is to completely gimp a fit by stuffing in as many nanos/polycarbs as possible, which still only works occasionally. On the occasions I've overheated the MWD and tried to burn off the increased sig means I'm dead even quicker.
I roam all over, right around lowsec, and nearly always end my roam due to fiery death by T3 camp.

Now I've nothing against lowsec gatecamps, I've done a few in my time, but there were always counters - either the fast tackle ships couldn't take gate fire for long or were low dps, and there were usually a couple of sebo'd tackle ships with dps/logi support, so I could often escape them in a frigate with some skill/luck and enjoy the process.

The T3 gatecamp fleets seem to remove that completely. If you jump in you die. They are instalocking, very tanky, have long range webs/scrams AND have significant mid range dps.

Now my question is how to combat these camps? Am I missing something? Do I just accept that solo frigate roaming in lowsec is largely dead? Am I limited to cloaky ships for solo roams nowadays? I've tried avoiding known busy systems and 'pipes' and try to avoid any gates with a scout on my side.

To the T3 camp pilots - do small ships ever escape your death machines of pwnage? If so, any chance you could tell me how?

Many thanks guys.

Learn to analyse the map. Get access to local secure channels.

You lie. T3s can get an awesome scan res, and all gate camps like that have RSB alts there.

Not even interceptors are safe, a rseboed Proteus can scram you from 20km, so if he's at 0 on the gate, you're toast no matter what.

What you can do is open your tactical overlay (ctrl+D) and see where the mass of the camping fleet is. Pick the direction directly opposite to them and burn away with a heated mwd. Don't forget to also turn your tank on somehow (heat the invul/repper/booster). As you gain distance, try and get some transversal on them by aligning to a proper celestial and warp off as soon as their points drop.

I've escaped a Tengu gatecamp in a Thorax by doing this, the T3s simply couldn't keep up with a 2.2km/s (lolplated with 800mm, but check out armor honeycombing) cruiser. As soon as their points dropped I warped off, still in a comfortable 90% armour.

Ymmv, if the guys are spread out you're toast, if they have a Proteus at 0 on the gate your toast, if they have a Loki you're toast. If you see Legions/Tengus, you might get away comfortably.

I wouldn't mind T3s really, shows the guys have some guts fielding those ships and you shouldn't be ashamed dying to them. Otoh, you should see what a Rupture instalocking gatecamp gang can do.

That's actually really useful, cheers. I honestly didn't realise you can get scan res THAT high on a T3!
It looks like I'll have to stick to kitey nano stuff for roams from now on, I'll try to use 3 seconds allign as my target.
Does my client latency affect this too?

Arty-rifter aka Babywolf is fun to fly :D

In this situation your latency should not affect the outcome. At least i think so. You just press the warp button and the rest is handelt server side, no need for perfect client side timing. But then again, i don't know the sourcecode and maybe they are doing some weird client<->server synchronisation that will screw you over.

Latency does affect you if you fly something with cloak and an alligntime of over 3 - 4 seconds: https://zkillboard.com/detail/28905515/
Cloaker kills, best kill. Most of the time you even get the pod because they don't expect to die. If you jump into an instalock gatecamp, be ready to spam the warp button so you don't loose your pod. (or have money ready to pay ransom)

Double post

Just make sure to get the intel to the nearest nul coalition to the camp. Then your sacrifice will produce a lot of delicious loss mails and tears to fuel your warp drives.

That or fit a cyno yourself and watch the risk averse campers scatter like a Florida cockroach

Good Sir;

Fly with 2wcs.

your humble servent
SeaSaw

Love the username haha