Successful Habits of Not Dying-ey people

Here's a few simple tips that I have found over the years which all assist in Not Dying.

I say this because yesterday I found obvious bait occator from Hole Control on a U210 sitting 15km off a wormhole. I was in my dual-prop dual-rep Stratios (with 14 kill marks) and my corpie was a couple of jumps away in an identical Stratios he'd just bought. I got him to come over, but said to wait outside the hole because it was bait.

So i neut the occator, and throw out berserkers, and when his tank fails, in comes the hammer. he scrams and webs me, but since I'm at 8.5km and I have an AB on, I burn the 2.5km back to the hole before the hammer lands (2 legions, Absolution, Vigilant, 2 Rattlesnakes, plus trash), and jump out, cloaking up.

Sadly, Isaac is unluckily decloaked by a legion when it breaks jump cloak, and is Vigilant webbed and punted off the hole, dying. Literally on his ship's maiden voyage. But i did note that he was unfortunately 8km off the wormhole, from where he warped in - and a few things can assist you in these situations.

Firstly, i always set default orbit at 3.5km. A cloaked cruiser orbits at between 3575m and 3650m. That's within jump range, and 1.5km outside decloak range.

Secondly, as you hit cloak on the warp in, you can overheat your modules just as you enter cloak. You do this as you enter warp toward the destination, be it hole or ship or whatever. This means they are pre-overheated in case you get randomly decloaked and need to burn a few klicks into the hole. Cloak-overheating is also vital for the Dick Virus smartbomb Proteus, as it's the only time you can overheat the bombs. Likewise, with Stealth Bombers you can cloak-OH the torps.

Thirdly, when breaking jump cloak in a situation like this when you're being chased, you do the cloak-MWD trick and immediately change direction. They will see a vector arrow on you for a few seconds as you cloak up, but once cloaked you'll get a good lick of speed at right angles from that vector. This helps avoid people decloaking you.

Fourthly, you always warp to a moon a POS is at, at 70km. This, by and large, places you 100-150km away from the stick and generally (but not always) avoids bubbles. This is likely due to the way the grid is calculated and propagates away from the origin point of the grid around the moon and where the POS anchors. A bit redundant now there's Citadels, but some people still have POSs.

Next, as you are entering a fight, drop a ping bookmark in-warp as you're landing. Ctrl-B as you see the distance to landing at about 50-150,000km and by the time the server ticks over, you ought to have a ping bookmark about 2,000 to 20,000 klicks away from the fight. If you are flying logi or tackle or EWAR, this will be vital to allowing you do GTFO the fight and break aggro but get back in when needed. it's also handy for depoting up and fitting cloaks and probes if it all goes horribly wrong.

Next, always fight aligned where possible. Needs to be said.