Starwalker entered Eugales and found Jameson2011 hanging around in system and so Starwalker joined fleet and they both headed out looking for trouble. It was not long before two Hookbills - Sun and Moon were spotted. There was a short debate as to whether it was a trap as there were quite a few in local but before that conversation was finished Jameson2011 said warp to me! Clearly he had already decided whether to engage or not.
Starwalker arrived at the scene with Jameson2011's Comet chasing the two Hookbills - they were all around 90km away and moving far faster than a Drake. Fortunately the speed meant that it was not long before they were at 150km away and Starwalker warped again to Jameson2011. He landed a few kilometres from the nearest Hookbill but before he was properly out of warp they were moving away and by the time he had locked and tried to establish point they were out of web and scramble range.
From there the fight shifted as the Hookbills had now killed the Comet and were orbiting Starwalker's Drake at around 24 km. Starwalker was on the defensive and he had to shake off the Hookbills. He shifted to Javelin missiles with a theoretical range of around 28km (at level 5) but they seemed to be largely ineffectual. Originally Starwalker had thought that the Javelin reached out to around 22km but after checking it was clear that they were within range of the Hookbills but that the damage level was so low that it was simply not effective.
In theory the Javelins were doing around 300 DPS so Starwalker was a little surprised that the Hookbill could shrug off the damage as easily as it was. Small signature radius would be an important factor but perhaps its speed was also reducing the effective damage significantly. Checking the logs later showed that only around 10 DPS was actually being applied, an important point about damage projection - what was real versus the theoretical.
In any case, there was a real danger of being kited to death unless Starwalker could shake these Hookbills and so he tried to time an overheated run of his MWD to escape. It failed and he had to turn overheat off again or risk becoming more or less stationary. He then remembered that he had not let loose his Warrior IIs and so he launched them. At first they also appeared ineffective, until he realised that he had not actually set them yet to engage the target.
Starwalker knew he had forgotten to launch drones before but he also wondered how often he had done that in the past - launched the drones and then left them there idling in space. However, this time it seemed that the distraction with the drones worked and the Hookbill's point dropped and Starwalker did not hesitate to warp away, leaving the drones behind. He then warped to random locations to seal his escape and finally he set off back to base.
Starwalker discussed the fight with Jameson2011 afterwards and it appeared that his assumption about the effectiveness of the damage projection of the HAM Drake was mistaken. He had clearly been kited around 24km by a frigate and whilst he was able to land some hits they were clearly not enough to drive the kiter away. In the absence of chasing the kiter away with firepower he had not been able to get away through manual piloting and it was only the drones that had helped him to escape.
It looked like the metagame, at least in this case, was driving Starwalker to favour speed over damage projection and he would have to consider that when selecting and fitting ships. He was also aware that a number of his Navigation skills were still at level 4 - in particular Acceleration Control (5% speed boost). He would need to correct that soon if he wanted to place more emphasis on speed.
No comments:
Post a Comment