Party Time

I decided to step up and do some FCing last night. I even posted an alliance mail announcing an op, much to the surprise of some of my alliance mates, who have gotten somewhat used to the quiet nature of things these days.

“Wow, an op? With ship types? It almost sounds if we’re a real pvp alliance, Susan!”

To be honest, I kind of expected few to show up. It was relatively early for Late Night, so was thinking that maybe we’d have three or four people, including myself. Three or four people is a nice amount of people for casual small gang pvp, but you are still limited in what you can engage for sure.

To my surprise, my fleet grew to a decent crew of people. At one point, I even had to expand by adding another squad. And, we found a ton of stuff to kill, and had some pretty solid engagements. We fought a mixed gang in the Roush area, and killed a Razor battlecruiser fleet later in the evening. The Amarr came by, and we killed them as well.



I ended up dying four times throughout the evening, losing a firetail, thrasher, Brutix, and Hurricane. Besides the firetail, you can see a pattern in that list. =p I’m a girl who likes her DPS, and unfortunately high DPS ships tend to get primaried. That certainly won’t stop me from flying them, however.



I’ve been thinking a lot about how Rubicon is going to affect the warzone. So many people are discouraged that it doesn’t seem like there will be any FW-specific iterations at all in the near future. Not major features mind you, just come cleanup work on plexes and etc.

However, while some of the announced features aren’t FW specific I think they are still going to have a huge impact. Take the warp changes, for instance. By the time you get someone on short D-Scan on the gate of your plex, they will probably already be in warp inside to catch you! Small ships—frigates, interceptors, etc., are going to have a lot easier time taking plex occupants by surprise. Not only will they become a threat much sooner after entering local, but they won’t be lingering on D-Scan quite as long to give plexers an early D-Scan warning.

Also, the warp changes will mean a lot quicker response to a variety of things across the warzone. Hostiles will be able to go several jumps to reship much more quickly than they could before, and the ability to respond to things happening a dozen jumps across the warzone will be a lot easier for frig pilots.

Of course, ship rebalancing of interceptors and electronic attack frigates will also impact the warzone. Any time you change small ships –particularly ships that fit inside the primary militia plexes –you always see some changes to plexing fleet compositions. I have a feeling that interceptors are going to be very popular plexing ships in the future.

The introduction of the new structures will also significantly impact the warzone. The ability to have little bases, several jumps from where you can dock will be helpful for hostile invasions. And, area of effect cyno jammers will allow FW pilots to protect themselves against hot drops. I expect the cyno jammer will often be used during risky bunker bashing, in particular.

So, while I think I’ll continue pestering people to bring back regularly spawning battlecruiser size plexes, I think that even with the current announced features, FW is in for some interesting changes.