Stealth Bomber Blog: Now with 100% more MS paint

This week I am going to be trying something new. Not only am i going to try and type some battle reports for you, but i am also going to include my rather grotesque MS paint drawings to try and accompany my verbal symphony of the fight. The last week for me has been a roller coaster emotionally in game for me. I guess we can start with the good. the first is a really juicy bestower kill I chanced upon, and some funny mind games with an anathema and rake pilot. Lastly- me and my corp have found a new corp to fight- and it looks like instead of paying us, they are going about everything the hard way, and trying to fight the inevitable.

So lets start out with that nice bestower kill shall we? Lately RL issues have been getting in the way of me and my corp having some nice quality gang time, so sadly many of us have been going solo. i was going about my normal roam, when I ventured into a C2 worm hole. Now this hole had a C4 static, and finding nothing of interest in the C2- i decided to plunge deeper into WH space. Upon entering the hole, I noticed that there wer a few sleeper wrecks, and a ship or two. Now this is where I got a bit excited. I had hoped that these boys would have been at a combat site, but sadly after using the ship scanner- this didn't seem to be the case.

I hate having to release probes, because as you all know- doing so in worm hole space is akin to shouting in local. I did everything in my power to stay out of D scan range, and to scan as quickly and accurately as possible- but sadly it was to no avail. The ships either cloaked up or left the system. Decided to give my prey a bit of reprieve, I decided to scan down the C4's static C3 and cloak up. I decided to go into the gym and kill some time. When I came back- I again noticed that the two ships were out gas mining. However it seemed that I had spooked them, they were flying tengus now :(

I checked wormnav on the hole again, and noticed that there was a higher number of jumps through thte hole while I was away. i decided to wait on the C4 / C3 static and watch what would come through. (Perhaps they are trying to making to the high sec hole on the other side of the C4- into the original C2 I had originally ventured into. I didn't have long to wait- as not more than 10min after watching the hole, it shimmered and out popped a bestower :)

I was sitting 5K off the hole, so once he didn't wait his session timer out- I decloaked, and began the procedure of killing. I overheated the torps and watched as the beautiful blue orbs o light streaked from my ship. They crashed into his slaver hull, and I watched as it shuddered into 25% armor. (ouch looks like he is cargo fit.) As my second torps raced out of the tubes- i clicked approach, and closed the distance between our ships, eagerly expecting some loot. I was not disappointed. Now don't ask me why someone was carrying tags through worm hole space. Frequent readers of this blog will know that people do some pretty crazy things, and I guess this will chalk up as one of them. The loot was nice, and it will easily cover the next few bombers I lose. Sadly I didn't get the pod- and the bestower pilot left through the hole, back to his space.

Moving on to another story- The story of our current worm hole camping starts here. I jumping into a red giant c2 worm hole, and clicking d scan i found some sleeper wrecks and a proteus. i jumped on the ship scanner, and once I had him narrowed down warped to the sleeper combat site. i love getting ships like this :) I can jump into a system, and had eyes on my target within 30 seconds- all while staying cloaked. interestingly enough, the proteus jumped out of the site after finishing the last kill. Next him and his other friend both jumped into scanner frigs, and dropped core and combat probes. Had they seen me? I book marked the site at about 250K off- and warped off to their POS to get some eyes on them. After about 10/15min of searching the holies gave up, and both returned to their pos. confident in the fact that I was not there, they decided it was safe to clean up the sleepers.

They were betting on the fact that becuase the site had despawned, there was no way I could find or detect them with out releasing probes, and revealing my presence. Sadly for them, I am a professional. And in the words of the TF2 spy "Be fast, be efficient, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." here is where things get funny. Once the holies returned to the pos, one jumped into a noctis, and the other a manticore. Now the manti warps off and cloaks (wonder where he went....) and the noctis proceeded to the sleeper site. I warp to my warpin @ 250 and watch the noctis clear the site. i warped to one of his tractored wrecks @ 20K Once he just finished clearing up everything- I uncloaked, and began the symphony of death. My overheated torps slammed into his hull, and the noctis was down in no time. Just as I had finished off the noctis, our friend in a manticore decloak about 90K off my starboard bow high. He starts to MWD burn at me (at the terrifying speed of 990m/s) I looked at him for a moment, and dismissing him as a threat- turned my attention the pod

I finished the pod, and gathered my loot from the noctis wreck. During this entire time, our intrepid friend in the manticore was still burning towards me, and once he got within 30K dropped a bomb... I had my mwd turned off, and was in no danger of dying, so i watched the proceeding few seconds with interest. the manti pilot after shooting the bomb, continued to mwd towards, and applied a long point on me. He pointed me for about 1 second, then the bomb went off. It seems that our newbie bomber forgot that the bomb has a 15K explosion radius.... And a frigate with an MWD on- will get insta popped.  Well that is exactly what happened. Sadly I didn't have a chance to get the kill mail, and whats worse is I didn't grab his pod.

I typed lol gf in local and decided to get some home work done. As far as i was concerned- two ships, and one pod down- along with some juicy loot. Luckily for me, while idly doing some home work, it seemed that the manticore pilot wanted to have a conversation with me. GF's were shared, and he complimented me on my nice kill. In turn I let him know the mechanics of bomb launching, and told him to keep trying- as bomber dogfights are really funny. Torps don't do much damage to a high speed, low sig target. Anyway I decided to peek around the system again, and stopped at their POS. It seemed that a few more corp members logged in, and were going about their business. I noticed a character flying a BS :) and got happy. (perhaps my solo BS kill is coming soon!) But what suprised me the most about this character- he had under 10mil sp, and could fly a wolf, tempest, hyperion, cane. Now this pilot after getting out of his tempest, graciously jumped into his hurricane.

I had all the time in the world to study his fit, and calculating his gunnery skill- determined that should I ever meet him 1v1, he would be an easy kill. (T1 guns can't track worth shit XD ) It seemed that this cane pilot had an agenda however. After visiting his book mark can, he warped off to the high sec hole, and his partner jumped into an ITTY 5. i watched the Itty fly to the HS and under the watchful eye of the hurricane, jumped through to high sec. I was aroused. So i set up camp about 20K off the hole, and waited. Now our hurricane pilot was very very serious about his job. Once the itty was gone, he warped back to the POS and came back with 2 med warp disruption bubbles that he placed around the WH.

Once those were set, he flew about 7k off the top of the hole, and cloaked up. having sometime to look at the situation (and already knowing his fit, and his range of guns) I took up position on the other side of the hole, about 20K outside of the warp bubbles. Now i am yet unsure if the cane pilot knew what a cloaking delay is- but so be it. He would find out for himself. A short while later the Itty jumped through. The cane uncloaked promptly, and let loose with some Ewar drones. At this point i was scratching my head. I waited patiently for the itty 5 to slowly move outside of the warp bubbles, and close enough to me- that the cane would not have a chance in hitting me with his autocannons. Just as the Itty was making it out of the bubble, the hole shimmered- and out popped a neutral buzzard! This was my chance. The hurricane was distracted in dealing with this clear and obvious danger.

I guess he forgot about me in the heat of the moment, so i used these seconds to strike. I uncloaked- and had the Itteron down in 3 shots. during this time the cane had the sense to target me, and begin shooting. It is the most nerve wracking sound to hear autocannon's hitting your hull (and then a message prompt: Hurricane gallium 1 autocannons miss you completly.) I debated engaging him, but his ewar drones were on me- and jammed me on the first cycle >.> So now here is my MS paint drawing. The purple thing in the middle is the worm hole, the black circles are the bubbles. Dark red circle is the cane optimal, and lighter red is the optimal +falloff. yellow is moment paths. Hope this explains it XD

Your going to want to open this link in a new window.... as it is not sizing well.



I will end this blog with some sadness. A good friend, and long time recon pilot of ours has decided to leave. I am saddened, and I hope that you find success in what ever venture you choose, and if CCP ever eliminates local in 0.0- that you will join us in our new playground. Take care m8, you will be missed.

Hope you enjoyed this week, Take care!

Warp Core Stabs: Stabbing where it hurts

An interesting week for me. I actually had some laughs :) watching people that are caught in the grips of worm hole madness are quite funny to watch. But before I go into that, I feel like I should weigh in on the hole 'no ABC' ores for WH discussion that is going on. (I promise to keep this very very short.)

Why mining in worm hole is very very dangerous: To somehow think that a hulk can just decide to go and mine, and not have anything to worry about is plain wrong. For those of you that read my blog- you know that I murder miners, in fact I would say that I slaughter them. If I am camping a hole, there is no way that you can ever mine safely. I already have the grav sites book marked, and I never need to released probes. If i do have to release probes, I can scan and use my d scan in such a way- that I can 100% the site in under 45 seconds. Long story short- for those 0.0 botting hulk pilots safe 30+ systems deep in a cyno jammed system with blues everywhere- you have no idea what dangerous is. Becuase of the danger apparent in worm hole, ABC ores need to stay.

In conjunction with my ABC mining rant- I have yet another miner kill to share with you. As per usual I had logged on in a non D scan safe, and proceeded to warp cloaked to my other safe, and started to D scan the system. I quickly saw the covetor, and narrowed my d scan to 15 degrees and pointed at my grav site book mark. Confirming my suspicions, the covetor was there- so i urged my ship into warp. Once i landed I noticed that this miner was mining out of a can (bad idea) and I also had noticed that i was 172K away from the miner and the can. I opened my tactical overlay, and confirming that should I warp on the can at 30K i would not be de cloaked- warped to my prey.

Now dear reader these are the kills that I do love the most. The target had no way of detecting me. I was perfectly stealthy :) The second that I had detected the covetor- the game was over in my mind. As i dropped out of warp, i started my orbit at 19K and once my purifier settled into it's comfortable vector, uncloaked- and let loose hell. Again this worm hole proved to be very deadly to this miner. Not only was there 0 local, but because this worm hole was a Pulsar effect, the covetor that my torps were now slamming into had a + 44% to his sig. Again this worked out nicely for me, and the covetor dropped in a blink of a eye. I looted and popped the wreck, and decided to see what would happen next.

As i was waiting a very very curious thing started to happen- the now dead covetor pilot warped back to his pos, and re shipped into an ibis. Once inside the ibis this character had the gall to warp back to his can, and start taking some of his precious ore out. I was absolutely blown away by this stroke of stupidity. If you just were blown up, why would you re ship in a non combat ship and go back to your can, and begin trying to remove the contents of said can? I was laughing so hard i could hardly contain myself. The entire time this deranged holie was scraping out his can, i was sitting about 15K away.

I was un sure of what i should do at this point. Should i blow him up? Should i blow the can up? or should i wait- in the hopes that the taret would assume that I had left this system, and hope that this fool decides to venture out of his pos in a more...... expensive ship? In the end i decided to give this strange lawbreaker a reprieve, and allow him to scrape up the fruits of his illegal labor. Sadly he never did come back out of his pos, and after scooping the last of his ore- he logged off.

Changing topics- the reader will again find our intrepid stealth bomber pilot roaming around a string of holes in  c1-c3 space. Venturing into a C2 worm hole, I hit my Dscan and noticed that there was a number of sleeper wrecks on scan, along with a dominix. Still sitting on the hole, and still cloaked and invulnerable- I hit my ship scanner, and narrowing down the combat sites with my dscan- warped off to the sleeper site, only having to decloak once (moving from the hole to warp, as during this time my cloak goes off for about 1 second. This is because my covops cloak needs to be activated) So again for all of you nul sec people that feel worm hole is ohh so safe- please realise that unless you had a scout sitting on the hole, there was absolutely no way that anyone could have detected me. I scanned down your site, and can move around unhindered, all with out your knowing.

As i landed on grid, I checked out the domi pilot and was very surprised to see a barely 2 month old character flying a BS class ship. Now I am not sure if all of you know this- but DON'T FLY BATTLESHIPS IF YOUR A NOOB. Now at this point i was getting very excited, as I have yet to get a solo BS kill with my bomber. I had come close on one occasion (hyperion, got him to 30% armor but myrm showed up with T2 warriors :( ) Anyway on to this dominix. I was sitting inside my cloaked purifier marveling at my luck- when i noticed that the dominix started to warp off. Surprised, i followed where his ship was pointed while in warp- and followed him to a nearby planet. Again the stupidity of noobs never stops amazing me. At the planet about 200K away from where I had dropped out of warp, was the dominix, and 2 jetcans.

WTF? is this what the domi considers a safe? does the pilot not realize that you can warp on cans provided you are more than 150K away? Chuckling to my self and enjoying the fact that I was just about to partake in my first solo BS kill. I warped to one of the cans at 50K and made a book mark. I watched this domi rep his armor a bit, and return to the sleeper site. At this range I determined that the domi was blaster fit. Once the domi warped back to the site- I followed and watched him clean up the last 2 cruisers. He was using t1 hobbies (lol) and the second the cruiser was down, I engaded.

I already had my orbit locked in and was orbiting him nicely at 19K the second i uncloaked i disrupted him, and had my torps screaming out of their tubes. The first torps hit home, and melted his shield. Getting into armor now, i began my overheat and watched as it only took 2 volleys to drop him into 50% armor. The domi had yet to lock me, and I thought that I would have an easy kill- when the unthinkable happened- he warped.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU


THWARTED AGAIN!


As i followed his ship in warp again- I was amazed when i noticed him warping right back to that stupid can safe he made 200K off the planet. I followed as quickly as I could, and slammed my warp button. As my ship lept into warp i reloaded my torps, and cloaked before I hit the grid. I landed about 35K away from the domi, and noticed that again he was repping his armor, and was realigning. Swearing, I uncloaked- when a catalyst uncloaked as well. Switching priority immoderately (as i was unsure if it was salvager / rail fit) I quickly changed targets and let fly with my torps. The destroyer was instapopped. I took the pod down too- as the domi began to warp again.

I finished the pod quickly and had a chance to launch another volley at the BS. Sadly they couldn't reach home before he began to warp- and following him again noticed that he was warping back to his sleeper site (again?!) Again i followed- I started to reload my torps, and again cloaked before hitting the grid. I had warped in at my far safe- so i noticed the domi at 200K close to a wreck. I warped to a wreck near the giant battle ship, and again dropped my cloak and started my orbit. Again my torps screamed out of the tubes and hit home on the armored beast. I was dropping him quickly, and when I began to see him start to align again- weighed my options.

I could try and bump him and stop him from aligning, but i decided against this. Domi's are very very dangerous to bombers. They have HUGE drone bays, and while he was a noob, and was using t1 drones- I was still worried with the fact that I could not see all of his hard points. What if he was heavy neut fit? (yes i know that would be retarded for a PVE domi- but this kid that was flying it was retarded as far as i was concerned.) Sadly i didn't not go for the bump- and let him warp off- in 25% armor. It's sad becuase now that I look back at the situation with my 20/20 hindsight, i realized that I had made the wrong decision.

I should have bumped him. That second engagement, he didn't even have me targeted, and becuase of this- it would have taken him some time to target me provided i turned and burned at him. with me hitting him going 2.3k/s i could have continued to do so until he died. In fact, becuase he was so low on health- i could probably have kept bumping and killing him before he even had a target lock. Ohh well, I guess you live and learn. I can only hope that my next BS kill will be coming soon.

Anyway thanks for reading and as usual

Fly Dangerously!

Boom Boom Pow

Hey folks- Yet again another blog. But first-

Shout out to Seraph Minayin- all donations are very appreciated, and will go towards thwarting non licsenced PvE players in WH space. Thanks again :)

To start out this blog post, I am going to post one of our greatest kills to date. Sadly I was not able to have a part in this epic kill, but luckily one of our pilots had a chance to score this: SOLO ORCA!! Awww yeah- that was a nice 80 points, which catapults my corp even closer to above the top 5K in eve corps <3 From what I was told the story was quite hilarious :) Apparently this person was trying to close a hole with his orca. When he was found out by a single stealth bomber. Triski has been flying with us for some time, and like a good bomber- waited patiently until hole hole had collapsed behind the Orca- before striking. After a fairly long fight- the orca finally was sunck, along with the pod. According to the first hand accounts the pilot was not flying with proper worm hole collapsing licensure- and had to be reprimanded.

Let this be a warning to all of you who thing that you can continue to collapse natural worm holes, and destroy their beauty unabated- we are watching you. So before you decide to collapse your next worm hole, please feel free to send 50million ISK to Peek-A-Boo bombers. (Thanks for your time and continued business in advance.)


Anyway on to some stories that concern more of the author:

Lately we have been camping a worm hole with a group of other bomber pilots. Other than some random kills on my part Boom, Bang, Smash, I have not been contributing much to our war against these unlicensed worm hole bears. As I logged on last night- I was not expecting a ton of action- however this all changed once I checked the history of my current worm hole. It seemed that there was alot of jumps in the past half hour, and becuase many of their corp members were online- and that there was a c4 static, i surmised that they were most likely running C4 combat sites.

Once I had scanned down the hole, and jumped through it- my D-scan greeted me with many new sleeper kills inside the C4 along with a noctis :) I was getting happy, and once I had hit my ship scanner- and pinpointed the lone noctis I hit the warp button. (So much you can do off of your invincibility timer) Sadly as I was in mid warp- I recived an in game chat from one of the targets I was stalking. Sadly it seemed that these law breakers had enough of our harassment- and had placed a covert ops ship on the worm hole. He clearly wanted to let me know that he knew I was there, and was aware of what I was trying to do. I didn't think much of this idle threat at the time- as I was already in warp to the noctis. Sadly- I landed about 136K away from any warp able sleeper structures once I hit the grid, and by the time I had reached 150K the noctis had already warped away.

Well the noctis had not yet finished cleaning up this site, so i figured that I could bide some time and wait for him- while entertaining my rather pompous guests. they were spoting off the usual (in chat and local) the basic- your so noob, you can only hurt ships that don't shoot back... SB's suck, get a life, learn to pvp noob- come over here and fight us blah blah blah kind of shit. Sadly what they don't realize is that the more vocal they are about their hate for me, the more I realize that what we are doing is working. The fact that having a single pilot online, and in a system can garner such a response from 7 pilots is simply astounding.

Smiling to myself (and figuring that they were not going to come back to this site for some time, I decided to go and take a quick shower, while I waited for the noctis to reappear. Luckily for me- just as I had finished drying off, and when I came wakling into my room- i noticed that my overview had exploded with ships. Figuring that I would not have a shot at the noctis- I took some time to look over the idle comments in my chat, and in local. I can sum up their comments with this quick video- (liky if the video doesn't work for you- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La19JLxOFPQ&feature=related )

Basically after a lot of fist pumping and chest beatin (can of curse telling me that i am a mother fucker, and a pussy faggot) they come to clear up their site with no less than: A machriel (with seebo) 3 spider tengus (who are shield repping the noctis) a navy domi, with bouncer 1 drones out.... and a noctis clearing everything. clearly it is they who are not afraid, and clearly I am doing nothing to disrupt them- nothing at all in fact. Even thought I didn't get a kill that night, I knew that we were doing so much more. the fact that a single bomber online can cause that much mass hysteria, is a god thing for me. And even better- once I was leaving the hole for the night and found 2 warp bubbles and a few interceptors trying to stop me- I knew that me and my guys were doing their jobs. Very very well.

You see ladies and gentlemen, when you fly stealth bombers- you can sometimes come home with out a kill. However the fact that a single pilot in a single frig can illicit such a response from so many people, and garner such hate- makes the stealth bomber the king of psychological warfare. To me- that night was a victory. I hope that anyone flying stealth bombers realizes that your stats are not always going to look the best, but- when you come across people who still remember you and your small gang as 'stealth bomber pussy bastards' months after you had stopped terrorizing them- you have to realize the sort of power this little ship holds. Our group has made worm hole coalitions and alliances dissolve. We scratch, and we keep scratching at an organization. Everything you do in game, and in worm hole becomes a chore, and a task. People get frustrated, people get stupid, people get impulsive, bored and tired. they leave, they quit, and fall apart.

After all of that- we in our little frigs are still here watching, waiting, and resilient. To me there is no better ship in eve :)

Hope that you all enjoyed this blog post- and as per usual, fly dangerously :)

Chessur

A guest post: The LIfe

 Sorry about my hiatus ladies and gentlemen. Don't fear- i have not left you good people. I am still playing, and i will try and write some more :) this week we have a guest appearance in my blog, and next week- I will share with you our first orca kill...... a solo orca kill XD

The Life

… the WH-space life that is. Its not for everyone, you need probes just to find “gates”, the gates move daily,  you don’t have local as an intel tool, it requires effort more so than K-space just to exist let alone survive… So why live in WH-space you might ask? Some carebear or rat for the lucrative fruits, others stalk and kill them and deny them of these fruits.

WH-space presents distinct advantages to hunter killers who like to do it cloaked, no local combined with your cloak gives vast advantages found nowhere else in New Eden. The prime advantages are as follows:

·         You can set up bookmarks, gather intel, assess stats of the system and basically know all you need to know about a system and its occupants without them having any clue you are there.

·         You choose when to reveal yourself and engage, when the odds are in your favour.

·         You can position your fleet at optimal ranges around your target while they remain oblivious.

·         You have the element of surprise that 99% of the time results in a fight or flight response from the prey (usually flight unless they are tackled and have no choice).

·         Fun times.

The general who is skilled in defense hides in the most secret recesses of the earth; he who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven. Thus on the one hand we have ability to protect ourselves; on the other, a victory that is complete.

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

When we have prepared our engagement right and have the ideal fleet make up for our prey our victory is most certainly complete. All that is left of the enemy is tears and emo rage (especially If we have Falcons). Which reminds me, Ewar is so important in cloaky fleets, the Force Recons offer excellent platforms for Ewar and should be fit to take advantage of their bonuses to the fullest. Cloaky ships are generally gimped in some way, which is totally reasonable as the warp cloaked ability makes up for this gimp, I see so many forum fags cry about DPS is lacking blah blah blah (T3’s for example)… what these fools can’t see is the power of the cloak.

This then brings to mind, so how do you compensate and leverage advantage with these so called gimps? Ideal fleet composition and well fitted ships. A well put together cloaky fleet will cover each others’ weaknesses, so as a whole you will be a solid death machine much like the Spartan Phalanx. Lets look at each cloaky subset of ships with pros and cons:

·         Bombers

o   Pros

o   Face raping DPS if fit well and the ability to do this at range.

o   Cons

o   Pathetic tank (tank you say??)

“Glass cannons” is a great description for bombers. You can solo in a bomber but your target list is very small and usually defenseless. But as dealers of raw DPS in a small gang they are godly with virtually no targeting delay from decloak and especially if the enemy is jammed, damped, webbed and painted. This DPS is not universal though, it is meant for slow and large targets, but fortunately our Recon brothers (in particular the Rapier) can allow his DPS to be applied to smaller and faster targets thanks to web and painter bonuses. Gang fit bombers should always be fitted with painters anyway. So who should bomber pilots be scared of? Most ships actually, but in a small gang its frigates and drones in particular. Speed tanking with a  MWD/nano combo is viable only to turreted enemies, but if you screw up you will most likely die. Missiles and bombs will make short work of any bomber running a MWD.

Bomber Gang fit:

Highs: Cloak, Arbalest Launchers, Core probe launcher (bomb launcher optional, but WH space requires probing unless you have a scanning alt)

Mids: Afterburner, Painter and other long range Ewar mods

Lows: As many Ballistic Control Units as you can fit.

Rigs: Range or damage rigs, you want to be able to launch and land torps from atleast 60-70km and hit with maximum damage.

In summary: Bombers are the primary DPS dealers in a cloaky gang and should do so at range to compensate for their “glassyness”.

·         Force Recons

o   Pros

o   Ewar goodness and drones.

o   Cons

o   Lower DPS than Combat Recons, highly specialized bonuses (this is actually a pro in a gang situation)

The Force Recon range of ships are specialty Ewar platforms and should be fitted as such. They are not solo boats (aside from the Pilgrim and Rapier to an extent) and should be thought of and fitted as cloaky ewar platforms and thats it. Don’t bother trying to get good DPS out of them, they should be fitted to take advantage of their Ewar bonuses and whatever DPS you can get out of them should be the last thing you think about. Drones should be seen as the primary anti frigate DPS. As above, the bombers are doing the damage dealing and the role of the Recon is to protect your bomber brothers so they can keep dealing it. In an ideal battle the Ewar should be shutting down any enemy DPS negating the need for hefty tanks. The Pilgrim though should still have a reasonable tank as he needs to get in the face of the enemy and we don’t play in a perfect world so Ewar can fail. I won’t go into detailed fits for each recon, but as said the bonuses should be taken advantage of to the fullest.

In summary: Force Recons are cloaky Ewar platforms with anti frigate and drone capabilities whose primary roles are shutting down the enemy and to protect the bombers.

·         Strategic Cruisers

o   Pros

o   Massive tanks for a cloaky ship, reasonable Ewar bonuses, cloaky command ships

o   Cons

o   Friggin expensive, low DPS compared to non cloaky counterparts, tend to be primaried, average Ewar Bonuses compared to Recons.

I love T3’s, not only because they are versatile but they make great cloaky command ships. I like to think of them as advanced Recons, but I don’t like to fit them as such. They can receive bonuses like Recons but not as good as their younger brothers. With versatility comes compromise whereas Recons are specialized. The best role for T3’s in a cloaky fleet is either heavy tackle or command ships, I prefer the latter. With command bonuses the T3 is enhancing the already awesome Recon Ewar bonuses and therefore generates even more tears and emo rage: put yourself in the overpriced precision boots of the target for a minute, your minding your own business running a sleeper site next thing your being pointed, webbed, damped and jammed while taking massive damage all from 70km or so away and you cant do a damned thing about it and you didn’t even see it coming, its enough to falcon punch your monitor and rage quit Eve forever. Dare I say it, its overpowered? I don’t think so, the high price tag for T3’s gives you the right to such power.

In summary: Strategic Cruisers are awesome.

There are Covops Frigates and Blockade Runners that should be given a mention, they have their uses but are more of a utility ship rather than a combat ship. Covops frigates are great scouts, but that’s about it, any other cloaky can fit this role anyway, they are the best probing ships in the game but again other cloakies can do this good enough. Blockade runners, well they can carry your shit around with minimal risk, they can act as little jump freighters via Black Ops bridges and can launch large bubbles but other than that serve little relevance to a combat fleet in general.

Black ops? So where do they fit into this? They don’t. Until CCP decides to let us jump bridge between WH systems they serve very little purpose in WH PvP. It is theoretically possible to jump between WH systems as the “WH Galaxy” is structured much the same way as K-space but is linked randomly by worm holes rather than fixed gates. But even with this ability granted I see little practical need to jump bridge between WH systems that aren’t already connected by a natural worm hole. One possibility I see though is a new type of cyno bridge, a “worm hole generator”, this would allow you to create an artificial worm hole bridge between and 2 WH systems allowing you to circumvent hole camps.

So to summarise everything: WH PvP is demanding and yet fun, especially in cloakies. Its not for everyone, if you like flying a Drake and hitting F1 and then expect to win and rack up a ton of kills on your killboard your going to hate it. Cloaky PvP in wormholes is for distinguished gentlemen who like a well organised precision kill. Organising a cloaky fleet and setting yourself up takes time and patience, you can go without kills for days and sometimes weeks then get a flood of targets. Its heavily reliant on team work for success and by this I don’t mean the whole team is blowing up pixels, specific roles need to be filled meaning that not everyone is blowing things, some roles are helping your corp mates blow things up more efficiently and successfully, but you get on the kill mail anyway so who cares? Its all about the successful kill as a team with no losses (if you can help it).

You have to be like the crocodile, laying in wait for the wildebeest migration, for when you can be certain of a feast to then go back and live off very little for an extended period of time. Your regular kind of PvP I liken to a pride of lions, they are proud and visible and seek recognition, pack ravaging their prey and gorging themselves on the tasty lewts on a daily basis… are you a crocodile who had reached the peak of its evolution millennia ago and survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? Or a feline that demands recognition and subservience with a regular mill of prey to devour?

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy.                                

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

How does this apply to cloaky PvP? Our corp doesn’t have a home, we don’t hold sov, we don’t have a POS in WH-space, we are nomadic. Considering the amount of corps we have terrorized we have yet to receive a war dec. We would laugh at a war dec anyway as it is pointless we don’t have a station or POS to camp and when not camping a hole we are scattered about Empire and usually fly cloakies anyway. We are untouchable unless we allow it, this is the power of the cloak.

Fly cloaked!
Nefilus Drey, CEO - Peek-A-Boo Bombers.