It has been a while since I have posted anything. Frankly, I just couldn't be bothered with work building up and being busy at home. However, I'm here to make a concerted effort to get back into posting and actually be regular about it.
We start our story off again with a tale of wormholes and violence. I received a Jabber ping advertising a cruiser fleet to parts unknown. I logged in and joined the fleet. After poking around in my hanger for something of the right size and "disposable" I decided to instead purchase a shiny new Vexor. Quickly fitting it up with a basic shield tank, some nanos and blasters I undocked to join my misfit gang with our FC pearcy15504. We travelled to the nearby system with the linking wormhole and jumped on through. We ended up in Paragon Soul's LD-2VL system. We salivated over what we saw. The three dead end systems in Paragon Soul consisted of hyper levels of ratting. At the time each system had around 24k rat kills in a 24 hour period.
We made our way down with Pearcy leading in his "bait" Onyx. at MP5-KR our bait was taken by a couple of Drakes and a Phobos. Our merry band of cutthroats pounced and a bit slowly melted one of the Drakes, followed soon after by the webbed to hell Phobos. The other Drake got away and we proceeded to wander around the pocket trying to prod the residents down there to come out and play. In total we bagged a couple more kills including a Sacrilege that probably shouldn't have engaged to start with, but also forgot to drop his point and web before the rest of the gang pounced on him.
After an hour and a half of repeatedly beating up on their people not paying attention (including a poor new guy in a Noctis), we decided to head out. Heading out we jumped through a gate (we didn't have a scout at this point) and found that our 15 man gang of cruisers had finally earned enough ire to get a 20ish man gang of battlecruisers to form up. As Pearcy hadn't gotten there in his Onyx yet he ordered a gate crash, which pretty much everyone but out drunk guy complied with. After gathering up, the rest of our gang we jumped in and started calling primaries. Of course we went for the expensive stuff first. Most notably we took out a Vagabond and Stabber Fleet Issue. We were doing fairly well until the FC went down. About that point our cohesion fell apart and we were slowly picked off.
All in all I had an extremely enjoyable time. I'll say that with at least the Vexor I am enjoying the new T1 cruisers. I'm looking towards getting a couple of my favorite T1 cruiser (Thorax) brought down so that I can play with them in a nano kiting configuration. I'm also finding that you can do quite a bit against a larger group if you maintain your cool. I think even more important than picking the "right" ship is knowing how to use it and keeping a good battlefield awareness is important. As I spend more time in small and large gangs I learn to relax and notice a lot more than when I first started PVPing. I find that I don't get upset when my ship pops. I can even enjoy being destroyed by another gang. It's all in how you look at things that is important.
