Fraternity. Gives Dirt Nap Squad a Dirt Nap

Tags

Curse, Dirt Nap Squad, Fraternity., HLW-HP, PVP

Some days…

Ouch.  That is the only way to say what happened today in HLW.

It started off easy enough.. in fact, you might say I was the one who started it.  DNS had a fleet roaming the deeper parts of Curse, around H-ADOC, when I decided I wanted to join the main fleet.  I switched into my Sac and headed over.  I didn’t get very far as there were some Fraternity. on the VOL gate in HLW.  It was just a couple inties, so I really wasn’t worried about.. especially since thus far, I really hadn’t seen them operate all that effectively.

So I jump through into VOL-MI, and both the Stiletto and Malediction jump through with me.  The Stiletto points me, but I’m not all that worried.  A Sabre lands on Gate and just sits there for a while, presumably waiting for the go ahead to bubble.  I already had him locked up and so I switched over and started laying into his shields.  I goofed in that I didn’t try to warp away, forcing him to have aggression.  I send the call up, and a there are a few DNS pilots in HLW nearby, plus the main fleet, having been blueballed thus far, decides there might be some fun.. so they head back.

There becomes a little skirmish where we lose a couple interceptors: This one and This one, but we get an Ishtar for the trade.  However, I already have a sinking feeling about our own fleet.  Normally we have pretty decent fleet comms, but today it seemed that people just couldn’t shut up, and some of the scouts were a bit over anxious as well.  Still, Fraternity. had not done a good job in the past against us and even their arrival on the scene didn’t seem to be organized at all.

I jumped back into HLW from VOL and the main Fratnerity. fleet started to show up.  They gave me a bit of damage, so I warped off of field to repair.  Our comms were a mess, worse than normal today though and it was hard to know what was going on.  Their fleet took down four of our ships before we were able to get off of the field.  A Rupture, a Vexor, a Deimos, and a Brutix.  In response, they lost a single Lachesis.  Comms on our end were so bad, all we thought we lost was a couple tech 1 cruisers.  Had we known we had lost a Deimos and Brutix, we’d like would have called it a night.

We reformed at station and our scout said he had a ship within 100km that we could tackle.  Comms were still a mess, and by the time we undocked he was too far away.. but still we warped.  We landed in their fleet, but again they were out of effective range.. their inties were on top of us again and their Ishtars were too far out for us to bring any serious DPS on them.  We lost a Maulus and a Thorax this time around.

After that beating, we redocked and comm issues were then somewhat cleared up, though I still think the previous losses had gone unnoticed.  We warped out to KLMT in an effort to see if they would follow us in, but the Fraternity. pilots were playing their best hand today, and didn’t follow us in.  More over, their inty pilots were doing good as well, jumping into KLMT to see what we were doing and escaping before we could take them out.  However, their Sabre pilot was not so lucky.

We had eyes on the enemy in HLW as they sat off of the KLMT gate.  Our scout bombed them, destroying some drones, but he got caught and lost his ship.  We had another scout too, but both of our scouts seem to be too excited.. giving a ton of useless information and comms again started to get bad with people boasting about how good our fleet was.

Boasting when you are losing is always a bad sign.

Our very excited scout had determined that they enemy fleet could be caught if we jumped into HLW, warped to the seventh planet, and warped back at the enemy fleet at 70km off of the gate.  During that time, another DNS pilot came from LJ with his smartbombing Typhoon in a wild (possibly drug induced) bid to kill the inties that were right on the gate.  He lost his Typhoon without a single kill.

However, while the Typhoon was preoccupying the Fraternity.’s inties, our FC decided we could make our move.  So we jump in, warp to the seventh planet, and align back to the gate.  Our scout, now very very excited, told us we could just land right on top of them if we warp 70km  from the gate.

The FC gave the command and we warped.  Our first target were the Scimis.

Did I mention that our scout was very, very excited.  In fact, he was so excited he didn’t realize that while we did land 70km from the gate, their fleet wasn’t in perfect alignment.  So we drop out of warp 50km from the enemy fleet.  At that moment, I knew that if we could kill the Scimis, we were done.

The Scimis were on the ball, and were 90km off of us long before we had a chance to tackle them.  The rest was a slaughter:  Omen Navy Issue down, Ishtar down, Rifter down, Hawk down, Auguror Navy Issue down, Vengence down, Zealot down, Celestis down, Manticore down, and finally my Sacrilege.  Total losses well over 2.5 billion.  And embarrassing battle, but sometimes you take those risks.

Three things happened that doomed us:  1. Too much pride lead to too many people talking over comms when they should have been quiet.  This caused us to have bad intel about our initial losses, which likely would have caused us to dock up and re-evaluate the situation better.  2.  We need to train our new scouts better to understand what information we need, what we don’t need, and how to present that efficiently.  3.  Going up against an comprehensive Ishtar fleet without another Ishtar fleet.  Sadly, Ishtars are very powerful at the moment and until they get reviewed, we’re likely to see more of these again.

Good thing I am trained up for one.