Oh no!!!!

Ok, first off, I know it's been a while. I've been pretty busy at work, and I've been using my limited Eve-related time to play the game rather than blog about it. That said, I'm back, and have some new things to blog about.

The biggest thing is that I lost a battleship the other day. Fortunately, it was a tech 1 ship with all tech 1 fittings, but it still was an expensive loss for me, and my first loss of anything bigger than a destroyer.

The sad part is that I lost it in a L3 mission, and in the most noobish way possible. Here is the sad, sad tale...

I was running a mission where you have multiple waves of frigates and cruisers that spawn and attack. The goal is to reach a station in space, blow it up and take the inhabitant.

Everything was going fine, except the fact that the fast ships were difficult to kill by anything except my drones, and I there were so many of them, they were starting to go through my drones after a while. I was tanking everything fine, and with my supply of drones dwindling, I decided that I'd just blitz the habitat, grab the hostage and get out of there. With that in mind, I recalled my drones, turned off my lasers and make a beeline toward the station which was about 55km away.

As I said, the ships attacking me weren't making a dent, and I probably could have stuck around all day with my armor repper and DC going, so the damage was not a big problem. However, that's were the first of my noob moves came in: I decided it would be a good idea to start softening up the habitat from range so that I could pretty much pop it as soon as I got close. I figured this would save me a bit of time and get the mission over sooner.

With this plan, I loaded up some longer range ammo (see last post!) and focused my bank of heavy lasers on the structure. Right here would be a good time to add one more bit of data: Eve Survival had mentioned that the habitat was a trigger for 6 cruisers, 6 frigates, and 1 more ship of some sort (I can't remember what). Therefore, I knew that I should only soften up the target, not kill it, as I would really need to warp out as soon as I did so to avoid a large pack of baddies that could take me down.

Anyway, back to my story. I let loose the first volley from my lasers. You can imagine my surprise when the target was into structure after one shot! Holy crap, I thought, and hit the F-Key to shut off my guns. Of course, the second cycle had already started, and when it went off, the habitat popped, the can appeared, and a bunch of new friends showed up. An aside: does anyone know a key that will abort a cycle in progress?

So now I've got about 20 guys on me, including a bunch of guys that can actually do some damage. The DPS started coming faster than I could rep it, but not too much faster. At this point I made a fatal decision: I was about 45km from the can and decided to see if I could make it to the can anyway. Armor was still high, but started dropping bit by bit. Still, it looked okay, and I thought I could ride it out. Then I noticed the wierd effect on my ship and realized someone was webbing me (by the fact that I was going about half my normal speed).

Now that I was making such slow progress toward the can, I realized that I would not be able to make it and decided that as much as it would suck, I was going to have to warp out. I tried to warp to a nearby station and nothing. Crap, I thought, I'm being warp disrupted! And this is where I had my second noob moment: I had no idea how to get out of the warp scramble! After it was all over, my corpmates pointed out to me the little icon on the overview that shows who is webbing and scrambling you, but at the time, I was completely at a loss. Instead of fighting back and trying to kill the guys holding me, I instead sat there trying repeatedly to warp as I watched my armor then my structure melt away. It was excrutiating!

Eventually, they popped me. I just sat there in my pod next to my wreckage stunned that I'd just lost the best ship I've ever had to a bunch of NPCs. It had been ages since I lost a ship, and I was really mad and bummed out. I will admit that I had potty fingers for a while after that in corp chat!

Anyway, I guess in the end I learned a valuable lesson, but it is pretty sad/embarassing that it took me all the way until I was flying a ship that cost tens of millions of ISK to learn that you can find out the person webbing or scrambling you.

Anyway, that's my tale of woe. Feel free to razz me now...