EVE New Citizens Q&A

I want to tell you about an extended engagement on a solo frigate faction warfare roam. Hopefully some newbros will enjoy it. I'm new to pvp and I've only won a few 1v1 fights, but I can fly a lot of stuff because I made my character a long time ago (originally for incursion "logistics").

I started in a cheap ship in Onnamon, which is a high sec border into FW space. I went through Kinakka (a bit of a deathtrap), Raihbaka, Iralaja, Martoh and into Eha. At a few sites I only found farmers that warped away, or empty systems, or all friendlies. I was looking for any engagement I could get where I wasn't attacking a blue. I could probably get more action elsewhere at this time of day but these are my familiar grounds, where I have bookmarks, etc., and where I can quickly respond to allies if they request help.

So in Eha there was someone doing a faction mission in a Federation Navy Comet, and I warped in and approached in my Executioner from 40km, using AB, going maybe 1km/s. He left, because there were a lot of blues in local, and I looted the site for about 1.5m ISK. As I fly through the zone, I'm happy to loot wrecks and drones as I see them, especially in this ship. In the past I've been lucky to find abandoned gate camps/fights that have left behind over 50m of loot, so I'm definitely checking any wrecks I see.

Caldari currently owns Eha, so I drop loot and continue. I did poke my head back in the site but the guy just warped away again. It was kind of frustrating but it doesn't really matter. I continue into Innia, Pavanakka, and then Aivonen. This is my standard roam, with the idea being to go through Akidagi back into highsec and my base in Onnamon. Obviously you react to situations as they develop, and you try to avoid getting predictably caught on gates, but just using a frigate it's actually not too dangerous travelling, nor pricey when you die, so you don't need to be very worried about lowsec if you're just passing through, especially if you have cheap implants, can use the d-scanner, and have an overview tab ready, full of things to warp to to help you save your pod.

Aivonen is currently Gallente space, and I find a catalyst idling, defensive plexing in a medium plex. I decide to go for it. I preheat my scram and guns, I have my orbit set to 1000, I warp in at 10 so I don't get caught on the gate, hit the gate as soon as I get on grid, hit the orbit button, spam the lock button and get my scram, web, and guns spooled up as the target locks. Target locks, I get insta-gibbed, and I warp out my pod, first to a celestial, then to a safe, then to Akidagi and back home through high sec, using some tacticals along the lowsec gates on the way, if there's anyone in system that I'm concerned might try to smartbomb my pod.

Here's a link to the kill: https://zkillboard.com/kill/63089508/

Now, you've probably heard of tight fits, but this is a very loose fit. There's plenty of extra grid and CPU to fit additional stuff here, and there's only one gun on it. A lot of players will say to get 10 ships and go lose them all to learn pvp, but I've heard a decent player say "Any idiot can lose a ship." I'm here to prove that.

That said, the key feature of this ship is that it has all the elements that I wanted to practice: a gun, a scram, an afterburner, a web, and a tiny bit of ammo. The purpose of the fit was to cheaply develop the muscle memory needed to quickly react to a fight and practice the initiation sequence at the start of a fight, and to provide a shell to roam around in while I was using d-scan and looking for targets, etc. A frigate fight is very short, and a small difference in reactions can mean a big difference in the outcome of the fight. So that's why it's a good idea to practice this. I think of this ship as essentially a golf ball at a driving range, and I'm just working on my swing. I would suggest that you use a bunch of different hulls for this job, just so that people using zkill to look at your stats are going to have more chaff to deal with. It also makes you look snuggly, which can encourage people to engage you. Now, it's much more time-efficient time to do this with a buddy, but it's a chore, too. The other thing is that you can use this ship to get a cheap look at an enemy fit when they have a few potential fits, and then you can fit to fight him afterwards.

Anyhow, at this point it would have been really good to do some research. I knew that he was a catalyst blaster fit and I could have looked up some of his fits and put them into pyfa (a fitting program) and just checked out his range, dps, and EHP. Instead I grabbed a merlin that I'd fit specifically to fight hybrid turret enemies and just derped back into him: https://zkillboard.com/kill/63089710/

Situational awareness is important in Eve, and this was a different person, but it was the same hull and a similar ship name, so I pretty much thought of it as one person. Turned out not to be the case. I took the fight anyways and it turned out that they probably fit pretty similarly. One had ion blasters and one had neutrons. So what did I learn? Well when I think about ships attritionally, I think of them as having a score that's roughly their EHP * DPS. This isn't perfect or anything, but when two ships with the same range and buffer tanks step toe to toe without mitigating eachother's dps with ewar, it seems reasonable, and I found out that my resists didn't give me enough EHP to give me a high enough score to kill this guy. I was disappointed and I felt bad, because I knew that this was really simple information that I didn't have to spend a ship to learn. But I went through zkill, found some of their fits, put them into pyfa and discovered that the range on a blaster cat with neutrons is 1.7km optimal and 4.7km falloff. Boosters and implants exist but I don't know much about them. Cost of ship, 11m, and I decided to try a new strategy.

...

So firstly, I knew that this guy would attack my drones. If he can't hit me, and can't tackle me, and is taking damage, what else can he do? So my primary concern is to keep the drones alive and to keep applying their DPS. Against a buffer tank, if I can keep doing that, I should eventually win if the fight isn't interrupted. Speaking of mistakes, I forgot to continue to check d-scan during the fight. Anyways, first he tried to tackle me, and then he tried to get away, and then he probably tried to tackle me again. All of this took maybe 30 seconds. Then he started nuking my drones, and I mean really nuking them. Before the fight, I had planned that I would withdraw drones that were being hit as they were being hit, individually. That didn't work out so well. He managed to kill 2 of my 8 drones (5 total could be deployed at any time) during the first wave. I pulled all my drones and then put them back out again, and sent them back to him. You use hotkeys to do this; set them up. During this time he quickly loses shield, then slowly loses armor, then starts to very slowly go into structure. He's also trying to get away as well as close the distance, and I'm watching where he's going on my tactical overlay, doing keep at range and approach and orbit and just trying to stay within point range but also stay outside of scram range, and I'm preparing to overheat my point in case he drifts out of range, as well as trying to watch my drone health. This is probably why I forgot to keep checking my d-scanner. So I discover in the middle of the fight that the time it takes to target drones is really critical to their performance, meaning that if I send out my drones, get them to do 1-2 volleys, and recover them, he shouldn't be able to kill them. So I'm doing that, trying to get them back before they get popped, and he's slipping further into structure.

At this point, I don't know what the hell happened, but I'd gotten too close a few times (close enough that he potentially could have hit me with an overheated scram, but I got ridiculously close, like 2500m, and he scrammed me. Not good. He also managed to kill 2 more of my drones, leaving me at 3 drones remaining. He had afterburner, I didn't, he had tons of damage at close range and I was stuck there. I mashed my keep at range button and watched the distance slowly shrink between us, going from 9000m to 7500m to 7000m. My shields got stripped away, and then armor, really quickly. I switched to my escape tab and started spamming warp on a celestial, and then he disappeared, and I was pretty stunned and trying to figure out if I'd died, and then I cancelled warp. I tried to catch the pod but couldn't. I literally sat there just thinking about the fight for almost a minute before looting the field and warping off, another rookie mistake.

Reviewing the fight, if I had managed my drones better at the start of the fight he probably would have died. I didn't ever have to get scrammed by him. Him taking the fight at all was a gamble but I hadn't exactly shown myself to be the strongest player, so whatever. Maybe timing slingshotting and shooting drones at the same time would have given him more success in one of those areas. Finally, at the very end of the fight, assuming that he wasn't out of cap, since he was faster than me and could hold point and since I had no guns, he should have just kept on me but killed off my drones. He could have won the fight at that point, but he thought that he was dying and that his only chance was to kill me first, but he was wrong.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/63090567/

I said good fight in local, and he didn't reply. Ah well. I made my way home.

After writing this post, it would be a good idea to review some of my other fitting options to fill out the rest of this fit, test the fight without the rigs, work on getting away after entering a plex in an mwd/disruptor kite ship (e.g. overheated mwd garmur with slaves, damn that's hard to deal with), and see if I can find a fit with tracking disruption and test it out. Ideally I want to stay on budget for these fits too, if possible.

The 4 fights together were probably something like 4 minutes of action. Scrambling for fittings in a sparse regional market and tooling around lowsec probably took an hour, and just literally thinking about my options and how to procede probably took like a half hour. All of this for a fight that really didn't matter, but it was still a very rich experience, and the thinking and learning is the essence of this game, at least at first.