Redemption

Friday's lowsec roam was week two of our new Blarpy + Scythe concept. It is basically similar to the Harpy leets that do decimated the TEST/N3 fleets in Fountain recently, except with Scythes for more rep power and survivability. Gate guns and all.

I got to the form-up system ahead of time. The SWIFT guys, who form the backbone of the fleet numbers, had their wormhole fortuitously connecting in to the staging system that day, which assisted in us forming up. Except, not being mandatory, we had the guy with the sec status fetish (5.0 and unwilling to GCC because hes afraid of having his Incursions privileges revoked) alts, and one guy mining in another channel on comms and in another fleet. Well, aside from the miner, who wasnt in fleet.

Anyway, literally a minute before the roam starts, the miner guy hops in our channel and calm as a toddler on Aderol, announces a Tengu has him pointed in the grav site.

The alts go back to the POS and reship into Proteuses and a Geddon, and the roam fleet gets me a warp-in on the hole in hisec. As the Tengu is pointed (being bait, ofc) half my fleet drops and joins the home defense fleet, which isn't adverted for me. I eventually just get the grav site name and warp in when the hammer falls - Proteus, Rapier, Cyclone and Falcon come to bail the aggravating Tengu.

I hoof it for the Rapier as it's closer, and standing away from the enemy fleet, so we need tackle. I tackle him and begin gnawing away on his tank. I slowly solo him, with Falcon jams dropping off me much to the chagrin of the Rapier pilot. Well, I say solo because someone's drones whored onto the mail.

We manage to clean up the Tengu, Proteus and Cyclone, and a Kestrel of fail fitting drives the Falcon off field. It takes a lot of effort to soort the situation out; two concurrent fleets, in comms, with various people not having their overviews set up. Like, who is in that Harpy named Colon Cancer?

Colon Cancer kills 1 in 12 men, you see.

The B274 to our staging system has collapsed by now, so we have to probe ourselves out, and leave the Sec Fetishist behind to nurse his connections and lurk. Of ccourse, by now the non-SWIFT guys are all massed up in the staging system and the SWIFT guys and FC (being me) get dumped 17 jumps away in Koraka. We decide to meet in Abune, and roam the Nennamaila to Tama pocket.

I won't go into excrutiating detail, but suffice to say we scalped a total of 17 kills. We had three lossmails, all by the same guy. Humang has a skill at getting fights, the only problem being he's always 1-2 jumps behind the fleet reshipping and decides to randomly jump into a medium plex and takes a figght vs a Vexor, for example, and we are a bit too slow to get back to him.

The interesting part about is the pod loss to good old Santo Trafficante. This time, a smartbombing Panther. He has a skill, that guy, which unfortunately eclipses Humang's skills - and in this case was the skill of picking the gate to which someone will warp their pod.

The other interesting thing about Santo is that he is actually apparently making a lot of ISK now that Retribution has dropped. Bounties on pirates are now eminently more collectable because now you just need to kill the ship. previously, podding pirates in lowsec was basically impossible and hence bounties stacked up. Since there's seas of butthurt washing about EVE, people are putting bounties on one another and collections are escalating. Santo seems to be collecting his fair share of bounties.

Overall, we are having a lot of fun with the Blarpy/Scythe doctrine, as we can confidently send in the Blarpy to gain tackle and it will survive long enough to get reps. It's just a shame we haven't yet got to take it toe to toe with a decent small gang.