Skill

This evening I downed a Hookbill with the Vigil. With full loki boosts (and probably snakes), double-damp and double nano, he was faster, had a 31km dissy.

I managed one pass and sling-shotted out of range of the dissy prior to enlisting the help of a militia mate to come help complicate his orbit so i could actually get into web and scram range.

So we went in, and the foe, even with his boosts, muffed the trajectory just enough (and I managed to mash the right button at 11km to get a web on) and he was scrammed. He died.

The thing is...the Vigil I fly is a hard counter to a double-damp Hookbill. Base 75km lock range is immune to them within even Loki-boosted dissy range. The 93% kinetic resist gives you plenty of EHP when they opt (naturally) for Scourges. Plus, even with boosts and nanos and snakes, they really are not that much faster that a proper slingshot and overheat lands you hard tackle.

The guy's skill came in the fact he evaded me first pass, and even though three frigs orbiting at 5km/s isn't easy to avoid a screw-up (and usually I just peel off because of this), it wasn't easy to land that overheated web and wear him down.

He also dumped in mjolnirs, so it was very very close, to be honest. So, round 1 to me, but it's not really something I can repeat with this guy again.

Which brings us back to the fact that double-damp, loki-boosted Hookbills are ridiculous and require no skill to make them work. At 5.9km/s and with two damps, plenty of DPS you can sit immune in an orbit around your foe and kill them. Simple. Easy. Repeatable. No real skill.

That's not to say that you can take it for granted that everyone's a shit pilot relying on boosts, implants and borderline broken setups to deliver endless cavalcades of kills. Some people will clue in very quickly that you have ridiculously broken kinetic resists and reload. You might even not have enough tank to survive them.

Certainly, next time, I will be making sure my buddy has a tank on his frigate (he died) and I will think twice against this one guy in using the Vigil. Which leaves you with very few options, really, aside from surprise ECM or Maulus.

(and on that note, getting tackled on warp-in with a Maulus is easily avoided with double-damp. 7km lock range on your tackler is super-bonus escape from hard tackle time!)

The moral of the story? I won by playing a trump, but skilled people in skill-less setups can be tough. Lesson learned.