8 replies to this topic

[roigon]

I'm posting this here since I do not have a blog to post it on, and this is as good a place as any. For the people reading this who do not know what Ganked is, it's essentially a public roam organised by some people from RvB. I guest FC"d for them of which this is the After Action Report. For more information about ganked you can check this link: http://rvbeve.com/fo.../16-rvb-ganked/

Now on to the event.

For this ganked we went out in a medium range tier3 kiting gang, perhaps a little bit more difficult then your normal ganked but it's a setup that has been reasonably popular in nullsec and is considered to be hard to counter.

Of course in the actual setup you use skirmish links and recons like the Huginns and Lachesises for range control. Going that route would have just ended up with some expensive loss mails so I chose to forgo those rather vital pieces of this setup and instead fill them up with more deeps. Which ended up working just fine for the standards of ganked.

We set off from Berta in a 100 man fleet with probably roughly 60 tier3's and 40 various other things including but not limited to inties, dictors, cruisers, dessies, frigates and a Broadsword.

We went to pick up some people in Sendaya first, one of our scouts reported a small gang of pirates dicking around. We made best speed but as we got closer most of them had left except for an Arazu who was coming our way. The Arazu went into Mifrata and found us. He did not have a lucky day.

We then waited around a bit, took a few pot shots at a Ishtar sitting on the Sendaya gate in Doril, but he didn't feel like dying. We then left and set course for Providence.

I was going to tempt fate. The gateway to providence via derelik is "guarded" by an alliance called "Of Sound Mind" and they love their bombers. Living in curse myself and venturing into Providence from time to time I had a pretty good idea what they where going to do.

As we came into G-5EN2 however our scouts started reporting a cruiser gang moving from 9UY4-H into 4B-NQN and then into 9-F0B. I quickly got ourselves setup on the G-5EN2 gate in 9-F0B2. Bubble on the gate and the tier3's burning off to optimal ranges. Unfortunately the cruiser gang wasn't coming to us for a fight, but instead came to dock-up in station.

Time to move on. I told people to align to 4B-NQN, and then warped the fleet to a tactical off the gate to avoid the bombers that where certain to be set-up on the 4B gate. Argh, Unfortunately I did not warp the fleet I mistakenly warped myself. As I noticed this someone on comms told people to warp themselves. I tried to overrule this ill-advised idea, but it was too late and quite a few people had warped themselves already.

Of Sound Mind did a nice bombing run killing some of the ships that warped. We didn't lose that many ships, but because I was feeling nice and because I forgot to make some tea for myself I ordered a quick retreat and a 5 minute break to get those people reshipped and get myself some tea.

Having done that we set out again, provi again. We went into 9-F, aligned for the out gate. And a Sabre decloaked, bubbled up and Of Sound Mind did another bombing run. I have to say, it caught me a little bit off guard. We lost about 20 ships there, but this time I had my Tea so I wasn't planning to go back again.

We moved on, our scouts reported that about 30 CVA where sitting on a J-bridge, I was hoping this was for us and we would be getting a real fight soon, but alas they where apparently set up to go fight someone else, or we simply did not take the path where they had put their bait. Either way, nothing much happened until we hit Catch.

We where heading trough Catch from Providence to Curse and as we where tracking trough systems the scouts reported a Talwar gang in U-QVWD, we at the time where in ZXIC-7, we quickly moved to QBQ-RF and created a bait-squad made up by our Broadsword and two Mallers. They where to go into 36N and then U-Q to bait the Talwars into engaging. As we arrived in QSM however the Talwar gang had gone into 36N and were looking to head towards 9KOE. Change of plans, bait squad to go into 9KOE and bait them there.

So it was said and so it was done. The Talwars spotted the bait squad moving trough 36N and unfortunately decided to land at 50km off the 9KOE gate. Bait squad went trough and the wait began. Those Talwars took their sweet time. They burned back to gate and started shooting the rats. *sigh*

Eventually they had all gone into 9KOE and the main fleet could spike local and burn to 9KOE to help our bait. As we came into local we immediately burned to optimals and started blapping Talwars.We killed about 20 talwars and quite a few of their pods.

As we sat there looting I noticed a few ships on d-scan and I wondered if they had been there the entire time. As I asked this to the fleet hoping someone had been paying more attention to d-scan trash then I had the init fleet landed. 40 man strong with Zealots, Fleet phoons, Fleet tempests, Navy domi's, Tech 3's, Guardians and an Archon.

One of the first ships that landed was a Loki, being a quite dangerous ship versus a tier3 kiting gang we immediately melted it, then switching to Guardians. But by this time they had cyno'd in their Archon and the Guardians where on the ball, we managed to kill another Jaguar but when trying to kill a second one their reps where keeping it up. It was time to disengage and so we did. Later we noticed that the pod of the Guardian pilot was actually a 1.7B partial snake set. :OP Success:

http://kb.the-initia...d&kll_id=129282

As we buggered off leaving the initiative behind we headed for Keberz to take a bit of a break.

As we did so the scouts reported a CVA tier 3 gang in SV5. With the initiative in pursuit we tried to get a good position on them, eventually having all 3 gangs on the same grid in some sort of mexican stand-off, but as we got a good warp-in on the CVA gang to get the range advantage they buggered off. With the initiative being a bit too heavy for us to take on I chose the better part of valour and set course for Keberz again.

The Initiate pursued, but only managed to grab one extra ship from our fleet before we made our way to the questionable safety of the Keberz gate. After some mucking about with finding a good angle to go trough the bubbles there we made our way into the hi-sec and headed for Agil to have a break.

Time had not stood still and it was nearing midnight, which for me meant 1am. I had wanted to go to E02 in great wildlands as a roam final, but with the initiate in the way and us pretty much having to pass trough their homesystem this didn't seem like a brilliant plan any more, so instead we decided to go to Querious or more accurately Delve.

At this point we had a fleet of about 30 strong left, so heading for a system with 300+ pilots in it seemed like a good idea.

The way to K-6K16 was as empty as could be and we made pretty good time towards said system. As we got there the TEST people had not yet fled and after some poking in local they formed up a fleet to deal with us.

We first flew around a bit 100km off the station trying to see if they had any brave rifter pilots left that would burn for a tier3 gang. But unfortunately no fleet of brave hero Rifters appeared. So instead I asked the fleet to align to the sun and the HIC pilot to warp to the sun. I then warped the fleet to 50 off the sun and told the HIC pilot to bubble up. Arg. Warped myself. Eventually we got it sorted however and the fleet was sitting 50km's off the bubble waiting for TEST to do something. Preferably something stupid that would land them right at our optimals.

Unfortunately it looked like TEST wasn't planning to make any such silly mistakes and we saw combat probes out, this would allow them to come in from an odd angle and land right on top of us. As the probes came within close range I burned the fleet off a bit hoping to at least make some distance while they warped.

Luckily you can always depend on TEST and as they came pouring on grid they landed in the bubble in perfect optimals of our gang. I didn't exactly count them but I'd say we where up against a gang of roughly a 100 TEST pilots in T1 ECM ships. Griffins, Black Birds, and assorted other ships. We started burning and melting, but after a few minutes reinforcements landed in the form of Caracals and logi's. The call to disengage was given and we scattered across system. We simply didn't have the fleet left to handle all that ecm and a logi supported caracal fleet.

http://eve-kill.net/...kll_id=16314283

It was around 2am at that time so I called it a night and we started heading back to hi-sec.

Later on the killboard I noticed that the Caracal fleet was actually goonswarm, so in hindsight it might have been interesting to stay on grid for a 3-way fight. But at the time I was having trouble enough positioning the fleet and staying on top of what was happening and occasionally calling targets when I wasn't jammed.

In the end it was a lot of fun to do this fleet. It probably isn't the best match for ganked and it's quite taxing to run, but we had some good engagements even if disengaging to fight another day isn't the way of ganked most of the time.

Will try to think of some new fun setup for the next time mang is off on a break to look at some babe's in bangkok.

I'll also try to sort out prizes as soon as I have time.

[dizzy]

Sounds awesome! Shame I missed that one; bloody friends and their birthdays!

[Greygal]

Great AAR, Roigon! Damn sad I missed it... ended up working a double-shift that ended an hour before Ganked started; I tried to stay awake but actually fell asleep at my desk! Glad ya'll had fun though!

[Targan Yaken]

It was good fun, thx for fc-ing. I took the liberty of linking this AAR on the RvB forums, hope you don't mind.

[Othran]

Good AAR. You wrote it nicely - I get the sense of "why aren't you doing...oh never mind" perfectly. Made me grin

[Kaeda Maxwell]

Fun was had

[glepp]

Defo a fun roam. Good FCing, mate. Was a pleasure to skirmish. Must say I was a bit surprised in SV5 when i warped to my TAC off HED and found myself 70km off the CVA sniper nado fleet... Then i was even more surprised when i got neuted by their curse. Damn heavy neuts.

[roigon]

FC'ing it is quite difficult though, was an absolute horror keeping track of our position, calling targets and also not forgetting to call out when I was putting my prop mod on to keep range. You make it seem too easy ^.^

[Itkovian Beddict]

FC'ing it is quite difficult though, was an absolute horror keeping track of our position, calling targets and also not forgetting to call out when I was putting my prop mod on to keep range. You make it seem too easy ^.^

Gotta say you did a really great job. HSMR is something I want to work up to and yes Glepp makes it all look easy but I'd be happy to be even half as good as you were from what I saw.