Dronewars

Today's theme in combat was drones.

My Maulus (named Cockbag) gets most of its DPS from drones. EFT may say the rail guns do something but the way frig comat is and the way everything goes, they don't really.

Likewise a Dragoon's main DPS is drones. You may see the odd LML or laser Dragoon but mostly they rely on drones.

2 Dragoons vs one Maulus would normally be a little predictable. But the good thing about the Maulus is, two damps. The average Dragoon has around 45km lock range, which you knock down to 24km. So when faced with two Dragoons, the plan is to orbit in to about 40-50km, launch the drones while damping the enemy down to "no locks for j00" and let your drones do their thing. Total immunity because in order to get their drones to attack you, the enemy has to first lock you.

As it turns out, nearly as good in practise as in theory. Got one down to half armour, but they realised they could wash their drones in and out to get aggro against my drones, and then against me when I reset a damp.

So I lost a few drones.

Then later, when a corpie got bounced in a plex by two AFs (Vengeance and Retri) in his Maller, I docked the Maulus up literally to replace the drones lost in that engagement, and dusted off the dual-web Vexor (named Tampon Slinghot) to go save the Maller bacon.

That didn't work, but our friendly AFs stuck around and came in for the scram. I launched...bouncers. Hahaha they thought, and started shooting them. Except we were spiralling away from the bouncers as they realised, a) the Vexor was a bitch, b) wtf happened to my speed, c) um...now I'm 10km away from those Bouncers my roflkets aren't hitting them and I sure as shit aren't going back.

This is when the world of pain started, and they started nomming on my 1600mm plate. To no avail. Nor did the nos/neuting help much. Or the attacks on my 3 hammerheads I got out when a bouncer went tits up.

Kill: Keiko Shikkoken's Vengeance
Kill: thanatos hurrinell's Retribution

This got the old blood pumping as I hadn't really realised that the dual-web Vexor was capable of taking out two AF's in one sitting. Five T1 frigs, yes. But that's different. 

Thus, we swapped a snoozing Maller for two armour AFs.