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I should be finished with Assault Frigates V today and, per my earlier mentioned timeline, am now ready to fly AC fit Vengeances. It seems only fitting then that I bring to you this tale of my first outing in a Vengeance. It was over two months ago now, which clearly shows that I wasn't ready for the hull yet at the time. Sometimes new shiny is just hard to resist, and I hadn't yet adopted my 1 year skill plan and set dates for when I would be ready to fly what ships. I just saw that I was able to train Assault Frigates and so I did. My first one lasted about 5 minutes.
Undocking as the wingman for a Tengu and Drake, I had a lot more firepower with me than I was used to. Our Tengu was able to cloak and probe, so I was hoping to see some of those oh-so-lucrative mission runners in my sights before long. We had only gotten one system over and were waiting on our Prober to see what was in the neighboring system when I spotted a Jaguar on scan. Now, normally I steered clear of Assault Frigates in my Punisher, but I too was in an Assault Frigate and surely was a match for him. Having no experience in flying the Vengeance before, I had lifted a fitting from The Blood Money forums posted by a much more experienced pilot. In short, it was a dual-rep cap boosting fit. With my skills, it tanked around 220dps as long as I had boosters in my cargo, which was about 12 minutes. There was no way that Jaguar was going to break through that kind of tank before my backup could arrive.
Landing on the Jag at a belt, I quickly called point and awaited my backup to show on grid. A full cycle of my cap boosters later, and it was evident that I could tank what the Jag was dishing out. Just a matter of time before backup arrived. The good news was, it wasn't long before the first ship warped in. The bad news was, it wasn't my backup. A Sentinel exited warp practically up my exhaust pipe, and a moment later I heard my least favorite phrase, "The Capacitor is empty." Hitting my booster again, and repping back to full armor, it was only a second before I heard it again, only this time my booster wasn't done reloading. With my active tank disabled, and having practically no buffer, my ship exploded with an amazing quickness.
Lucky for me, my pod was able to witness my own gang's Drake arrive, and he reported the Jaguar and Sentinel bugged out immediately. With friendlies scooping my wreck, the loss barely cost any more than my standard Punisher fit when I don't get my loot back. I did manage to learn a few things from this fight. Allow me to share them with you.
1. A purely active tank relying on cap boosters is pretty awesome on paper. Against enemy neutralizers, you might as well have been piloting a wet paper bag. It was certainly unlucky to have run into an E-WAR Frigate specializing in Neuts, but anybody sporting them would have disrupted my cycles enough to get some damage through.
2. I hate to blame anything on bad luck, but well...sometimes it really is going to play a part. I had seen both of those pilots in local, and neither of them belonged to the same Corp/Alliance. What were the chances they were working together? If you're me, I'd say the chances are pretty high, but you can't not get into fights just because people might have backup. After all, this time I had backup too. My Battlecruiser backup was just a lot slower than his Frigate backup.
3. I wasn't fitting the ship to its strengths. The Vengeance gets a bonus to cap recharge, which I was all but ignoring with a Cap boosting fit. The next Vengeance I flew had plates in place of that second Armor Rep, and runs stable with everything. It fares a bit better than the fit I was sporting in this fight.
Speaking of the that Vengeance...I lost it when my three man gang engaged a Hurricane, only to have two Dominixes/Dominii/Dominiwhatevers arrive. The 'cane had a point on me, and although the Vengeance tanks pretty well, it doesn't tank a Battlecruiser and two Battleships well enough. At least my gang-mates got away with their ships. It's been about two months since I last undocked in a Vengeance, but hopefully I'll soon have some stories where I actually win a fight in one.
Regarrrds,
FNG
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