30 Month Review

The last few months had seen Starwalker able to spend more time in space and that had been reflected in his ascent to a top ranked pilot on Battleclinic. July had also seen a new achievement, the greatest number of kills in one month - 152 and losses - 35. Whilst ultimately his goal was to kill more than be killed he (not so) secretly enjoyed the fact that he had reached Top Ranked status.

He had also started to like the idea that his success ratio was greater than just over one kill for one loss. Battleclinic was reporting two kills for one loss and he wanted to see that trend continue. Whilst he knew that he had improved he also knew that he had lots of room for further improvement and still made plenty of mistakes.

That improvement was visible in a number of ways:

• Better use of heat management with overheated modules, including module fitting placement to minimise heat damage from adjacent modules
• More awareness and use of range during the course of a fight, especially when range control was established
• Better selection of ammunition based on damage type (when selectable) such as rockets in a Kestrel
• Better selection of ammunition based on likely range of fight such as starting a fight with Null ammunition in a Merlin against a Breacher or Caldari Navy Antimatter against an Incursus
• Leaving quickly (when possible) when the odds were heavily stacked against a kill and in favour of a loss such as starting with an apparently solo fight and a gang arriving
• Not engaging target where a kill was highly unlikely such as avoiding an Imperial Navy Slicer or light missile Condor in an afterburner Merlin
• Looking for opportunities to have an advantage in a fight such as engaging kiters at the warp-in point to a complex
• Surviving gate camps more frequently than dying to them

Whilst Starwalker was not a theory crafter he felt that his fitting skills were better than before because he considered how to take advantage of ship characteristics (fitting, bonuses, speed...). Similarly, he looked at Top Ranked pilots and how they had fitted ships such as Miura Bull and Patrick Kasper. Finally, he checked the ship fitting section on Failheap Challenge for ships of interest.

Over the course of the last 30 months Starwalker had summarised his key areas of focus for improvement as ships, combat, skills and base. Today:

1. Ships flown were still predominantly focused on frigate brawlers like the Merlin. However, he did occasionally dabble with larger hulls and had only just lost his first battleship. One way or another he had flown a number of different ships but he still enjoyed the frigate the most. However, he was considering spending more time flying cruisers, although he had not yet decided on which ones
2. Combat - he maintained better situational awareness but still did virtually no manual flying. Whilst he had wanted to improve this area for some time, he still suspected that he would be saying the same thing next year
3. All his core skills were trained to a reasonable level and with over 50 million skill points that was a lot of skills. Starwalker had no particular new ship to train for but was considering focusing on one or two cruisers and one or two frigates to fly almost exclusively over the coming months
4. Covryn had become his main base with virtually all of his equipment and a large number of ships. Adirain and Gultraten were operational bases with a few fitted ships and a jump clone. He had moved Starstepper to Stacmon with the remainder of his ships for easy transport to Covryn

It was strange to think that he had been in New Eden for two and a half years as it didn't seem that long but it was true. He had enjoyed the increased flight time in the last few months but with a recent in change commitments he would not have as much time going forward. Time would tell what that meant in practice.