I was so bored the other night I decided to go do faction war missions. After going through all my market orders and doing some trading on my alt, I figured if I was going to play on my main I might as well make some ISK doing it! (Okay, so I've missioned like twice in the last 3 years, and I pvp-ish fit my PVE ships, just in case ;)
I jumped into a shield stabber fleet that doesn't belong to me (it's amazing how motivated you can be to leroy around in a ship that's not yours) and headed toward Dal, the nearest place to pick up missions for TLF.
Nothing in Kourm. Nothing in Auga. Where the HECK are all the wartargets? Was there like some sort of mass migration in every direction AWAY from us?
Anyway, I jumped into dal and immediately saw a warp scrambling notification, along with several hostiles buzzing around the gate in frigates. I switched to my friendly overview to see what was up and noticed a ferox and a drake taking pop shots and grinned a little in amusement. Yeah, like that will work.
I continued on my way to the station and moved up in TS to talk to the guys that were fooling around in local.
"You guys shooting stuffs?"
Vordac confirmed that they were getting read to go on a roam, but that his drake was pointed by the hostile frigs. The drake wasn't in any danger, just was annoying is all.
So I did a 180 in my shield SFI before docking and made a beeline back to gate to drive them off.
I started with the dramiel first. Well, I didn't really think I'd catch the bugger, but I might make him nervous a bit and lose his point on Vordac, so I hit my approach, flipped on my mwd and let loose my drones.
The thing with double nanoed MWD SFIs is that they actually go pretty fast. A big part of the 'point' of using them for missioning is to speed tank against the big stuff while using your drones to peel off the little stuff.
To my surprise, I caught up with the dramiel pretty quickly, and was soon in range to use my warp disrupter on him. (I figured he'd just burn out of it if he wanted to though.)
"I don't really have a scram on this thing, so this probably won't work very well." I warned the AUTOZ guys on TS.
My guns and drones started to tear into the dramiels armor, and to my surprised I got closer and closer until I was bumping hulls.
Well, that's weird. After all, it's a dramiel, right?
He popped, and Vordac said on coms which other frig was pointing him so I started the 60k trek across the grid toward one of the other faction frigs. I could get lucky, right?
Got the guy almost in hull before they ran away, still in site but burning off in different directions.
I switched to my wreck overview (yes, I have one of those) and saw that the dramiel wreck was over 100k from my current position. Was it even worth it? Also, even though the drake was no longer pointed, there were still hostile frigates in various locations around the grid and I could probably get caught. Not having flown with these 'AUTOZ' guys very often, I wasn't really sure how quickly they'd have my back if I got swarmed by the little Amarrian critters. Different pilots have different ways to reacting to things and I've learned the hard way before not to trust that everyone will react like my own corpmates would.
Meh. I hit approach on the wreck and pulsed my MWD, hoping I had enough juice left in my capacitor to make it the whole way. Meanwhile on coms, they were telling everyone to get out and to get ready to go on some roam.
I pulled up and snatched the loot, seeing a few weirdly named things that I didn't recognize and a faction mod that was worth well over 100mil that I did recognize.
I looked at the other junk, only to realize it wasn't junk. It looked like weird, named stuff to me when in actuality one was a Thukker faction module and the other was a 60mil storyline module. A snatch worth a total of over 200mil.
"What the..."
I linked the killmail in a few of my channels much to some friends' amusement. Gald added it all up and figured the Dramiel was worth well over 500mil. (Crazy!) There were several faction items worth quite a bit that didn't end up dropping. Plus, he was AB fit, so no wonder I was able to catch him and hold him so easy. The poor guy probably never knew what was coming.
So, that just wet my appetite and there would be no missioning for me! AUTOZ invited me to fleet and I jumped out of my shield SFI to run back to Huola to get a better pvp ship. The plan was to grab my armor SFI but was told everyone was in shield stuff so grabbed a really fail drake instead. Okay, so it wasn't that bad. But think of jumping into your Dad's old-style Buick (those big ones you used to fit your entire family in for a trip to Grandma's) after running around town in a shiny blue, older-model Corvette. That's pretty much what it felt like.
And we were off. A few wartargets were poking around in BCs, but they kind of scattered and we headed out to Metropolis low-sec to "hunt wabbits" as Gald likes to call it.
As we were sitting on a gate, waiting for a scout to get contact with a hostile I noticed another elite wreck sitting there and I sprang an idea. Running through local market, and ran to the nearby station and fit on a Salvager. (Yeah, I left fleet during a critical moment to fit a salvager in station. I warned them that I was eaily distracted. ;)
After some not so ninja salvaging, and yielding crap tech 2 salvage I started paying attention again. No targets. Boo. So I headed to Taff, and found a hostile drake heading back the way I came.
"Drake headed your way." I warned fleet. "Capital One." They got ready but the dude pulled a mwd-cloak trick. (Yes, on a drake.) CCP really needs to nerf that. We all chuckled on coms though and started heading back home.
I jumped back the way we came to find Eran Mintor in local, along with his alt.
"Look a cyno. I gonna go kill it." Vordac announced. Meh. That means being GCCed for the next 15 minutes iinstead of going home, but I decided to go as well.
Low and behold, Eran Mintor was sitting there in his probe, all vulnerable and locked on station in the cyno field. A little trembling wabbit to us big scary wolves.
He loled in local and then I bet you can't guess what he did next. No, really. Guess!
He self-destructed of course!
Now, when I was in Locus we had this guy in corp named Zverofaust who had a nack for running away from bad situations. Not just normal running away though. Picture a little boy running with all his might, head tossed back, screaming at the top of his lungs, whilst leaving drones and everything behind. We came to call it a 'Faust Manuever.'
Well, this whole self-destruct thing that Erin has down, I dub thee the "Mintor Manuever." Has a nice ring to it, right?
We killed him and continued heading home, chuckling once again on coms. Amarrians these days.
We found a neutral Cynabal on the way, but he didn't want to play. Our rapier went GCC on him to no avail.
Later, once I had docked in huola and swapped out ships a couple times, (I can never decide!) I heard about some ruckus on the Kourm/huola gate so I went to check it out. A Myrmidon and a Hurricane were playing the "jump through the gate, get pointed, reapporach, rinse and repeat" game.
They'd get away. They'd come back. It was kind of annoying and I was about to go dock up in Kourm and go to bed when the hurricane got caught off gate.
"Uhh, I have him pointed but I need to leave." our rapier pilot said quietly.
Uhhh, dude. Aren't you GCCed? Well, good grief.
I went to offer a secondary point but another LateNight guy managed it while I started taking dps from both the cane and the myrm. I was really the wrong primary for them. I was in my double plated brick of a cane that I normally used for baiting.
Needless to say the myrmidon pulled a Faust and the hurricane xploded. Our rapier ran away in hull, and that was that.
GCC rapier bait ftw.
After that I ran to dal to get my faction loots to contract over to my trade alt as a chore for later and went to bed.
A day in the life of a Minmatar pilot. You just never know whatcha gonna get.
No comments:
Post a Comment