Fail-ganking Like a Baws

Salutations, dear readers.  It’s been a while.  Apologies, but this is not the continuation of the prior post.  One of my major faults as a writer is that I am too verbose, and I end up splitting things into multiple parts.  But then, of course, time marches on, I do other things, and finishing the follow-up parts to a post about something that occurred a month ago seems ridiculous.  So this is not the follow-up to the last post, and I’ll try not to make multi-part posts in the future unless all of the parts are finished in advance.

Anyway, it’s been a while, in part because I haven’t actually played much EVE in the last three weeks or so.  I’ve been playing other games while my skills train up.  One of the blessings and curses of EVE is the skill training system.  On the one hand, I’m glad that my skills continue to train while I’m not logged in.  But on the other hand, I sometimes find myself asking why I should bother logging in on a particular day, if I need a certain skill and that skill still has three days before it finishes training.

But the skills I needed have finally finished up, so now I’m back in the cockpit and ready to actually start ganking mission bears.  To that end, I invested my ISK into a brand new shiny Hurricane, decked it out in the latest tech2 autocannons and sundry tackle apparatus, and launched my new baby into the aether, a blank area on her hull primed for a tally of hapless victims.  My eyes flashed with ambition and excitement, my fingers primed to lock point and rain hot space lead upon the unwary and unfortunate.  Today, I became a true ninja.

And then nothing happened for five days.

One of the things that other ninja blogs don’t mention is that stalking and ganking the mission runner is much like fishing or hunting in real life.  There are long stretches of absolutely nothing occurring, punctuated by sporadic moments of action and violence.  For every bagged deer (to reference the type of prey I hunt in real life), there are innumerable hours of just standing around staring at the woods and freezing to death.  Such is the way with mission runner ganking.  For every killmail and fail-fit, there are dozens of scanned down missions where the bear never shoots, or even really acknowledges that you’re there.  Occasionally you get a mission runner who pops his wrecks as a desperate attempt to get you to go away, and now and then you’ll happen upon someone who will call you out in Local, as if that would do anything, but most of the time the prey responds in one of two ways: (1) ignore you completely, or (2) warp off as soon as you land on grid.  Now, the truly gifted ninja can often goad or harass the MR into shooting or taking some other action, but such tactics are beyond my rudimentary and largely theoretical knowledge.

And so my beloved Hurricane, dressed to the nines with ammo racked and chambered, sat collecting dust in the hangar for almost a week.  Now and then I would fly her around the system and back, just to make sure her moving parts didn’t rust from disuse, but we were both itching for action that I just couldn’t find.

Until, at last, a buck walked into the clearing and approached the salt lick.

A smile came to my lips as the scanner ticked off “Raven: 100%.”  Finally, a battleship I could take.  The last couple of days had given me nothing but faction battleships and marauders, and while I am more than willing to relieve someone of a grossly overpriced shiny ship, I don’t quite have the confidence to just warp in and start tangling with a Navy Issue, and Marauders never shoot.  With equal parts anticipation and pessimistic reservation, I undocked my Vigil and warped to 0.

Unlike most mission sites, this one did not have a gate or multiple rooms, so I landed right in the thick of things.  The Raven sat at low burn about 100 km away.  Rats, both alive and dead, littered the area.  From the location of the wrecks, it seems the Raven had landed in the middle of the room and then started puttering along while it went to work.  Of course, since a Raven can barely top 100 m/s on a good day, it hadn’t gotten very far, but it had been in the site long enough to drift a ways away from the warp-in point.

I set right to work, pulling into a tight orbit around the nearest large wreck and locking salvagers.  The wreck contained some worthless missiles and a cheap module, but I snatched it up for the aggro.  And lo and behold, the angels descended, and the Metatron said, “Thy faith shall be rewarded,” and the Raven locked me up and sent a volley of cruise missiles my way.

Giddy with excitement, I rushed back to station and leapt into the Cane.  With all my telepsychic power I demanded that the undock procedure to hurry up, and for the ship to align and enter warp to happen immediately.  Moments later I landed in the mission area.

100 km away from the Raven.

The magnitude of my idiocy crashed upon me, and amid a string of curses I pointed the Cane’s nose at the Raven and said, “Go!”  And the Cane went, at the blazing speed of 350 m/s.

You have to understand, up until this moment, the two ships I flew most often were a Vigil and a Rifter.  Both of those can break 1000 m/s with an afterburner running.  The oppressive lethargy of larger ships like Battlecruisers had yet to sink in.  The idea of tooling around in the vastness of space in a ship that can barely make 100 m/s was beyond my imagination.

As the distance to target slowly ticked down, I made several calculations amidst nervous anger.  My warp disrupter, overloaded, had a max range of something like 30 km.  My speed was 350 m/s, and my distance to target was 85 km and falling.  My lock range was 49 km.  I figured if I managed to get into lock range, I could send my drones at the Raven and hope they would distract him long enough for me to get into point range.

But the angels giveth, and they taketh away, and at 60 km away the Raven, realizing his missile volleys were barely denting my shields and that he was currently tanking about twenty rats, warps away, leaving his drones to their fate in his haste.

Oh how I cursed my incompetence.  But I was tenacious, and I intended to get that damn Raven when he warped back in to try to finish the mission.  I knew my mistake was not making a new bookmark closer to the Raven while I was still in the Vigil, so I decided to plant a new bookmark right where his drones lay, so that when I warped back in I would be right on top of him.  But the rats frustrated my purpose.  There were too many of them, and they all turned on me once the Raven ran off, so I didn’t get very far.  I managed to drop a bookmark 50 km away from the drone before having to warp off and repair.  I had a hunch my prey would return quickly, so I docked up, repaired the Cane, and jumped right back to the site.

Just in time to see the Raven warp away, drones in tow.

By this time I was not surprised.  Nothing in this gank was going as planned.  I still thought my initial plan was sound, so I decided to stay on site and try to plant a bookmark close to where the Raven was warping in and out.  I didn’t get very far, of course, under the concentrated fire of the mission rats, so I had to settle for dropping a bookmark 40 km away from the Raven’s warp-in point and make haste back to the station.

Or rather, that was the plan, right up until I hit warp and nothing happened.  I checked the Overview.  The lone remaining rat frigate was warp disrupting me.

Well, shit.

I locked it up, applied web, and laid into it with the 220s.  Nothing.  Misses across the board.  I started to sweat.  Was I really about to lose a Hurricane, a virgin Hurricane no less, to my prey’s mission rats?

In a panic I dumped my drones and engaged them on the frigate.  Slowly, slowly, my babies began to eat into the rat’s shields.  Meanwhile, the rest of the mission rats had chewed deep into my armor.  Lacking any type of active repair module, I was now in a race.  Could my drone kill the frigate before the rats killed me?  What a ridiculous black mark this would be on my record: a brand new Gank-cane blasted to bits by mission rats, after the actual mission runner was long gone.

The frigate was at half armor as I went into structure.  I continued to fire the 220s at the ship, I guess for moral support for the drones, while I checked and re-checked alignment to make sure I could warp the moment I was free.



The frigate went into structure.  Smoke and fire bellowed from my hull.




An explosion in space.




I mashed the “Recall Drones” button.  I would not leave my saviors behind.




“Warp Drive Active.”




Salvation.




Thus did I avoid the most embarrassing turn of events ever.  Thus was my career saved by four Warrior I’s and a Valkyrie I.  They have secured a place in my hangar forever after as the Drones What Saved My Ass, and they shall enjoy a happy retirement.

So what did I learn from this almost-debacle?

(1) If the mission site is just one location, and there are no acceleration gates, make sure you plant a new bookmark on top of the mission bear.

(2) Hurricanes are slow lumbering brutes.  Don’t expect to run anyone down.

(3) If the mission runner warps off, get the hell out of the mission.  Don’t try to tank the rats, and be aware that frigate rats can potentially point you.

(4) Take care of your drones.  They will save you.

(5) The mission rats are more dangerous than the mission runner.  That’s why you want them attacking the mission runner.

There is also an interesting question that arises out of this whole incident, one that both confounds and irritates me.

(*) If there was still a point frigate rat alive, why the hell wasn’t it pointing the Raven?

If it had a point on the Raven, the Raven wouldn’t have been able to run away as I slowly lumbered toward it, and the operation might have worked out a lot better.  So what gives, mission rats?

I expect you to back me up next time.  We both want the same thing.  You point my mark, I help you kill him.  You win, I win, we all win.  Deal?