Frigates!

Well it seems everyone and his was trying out Assault Frigates last night. It was not one of my better nights PvP wise. The evening started off with me finding a plex which I was going to run with my arty rupture. By the time I got there though an Amarr AF had gotten in the plex. I think: is fine, hopefully he'll get over confident and I'll be able to keep the range open since I'm an MWD ruppy and he's probably trying out AB so I should be able to keep the range open.

I open up the range, take care of the NPC's and charge into a 30km orbit around the button which he's sitting on (why he didn't get maneuveable I have no idea) but as I'm finaly getting in range a 2nd rupture comes in. First mistake of the evening: not orbiting close enough to get solid hits on the AF. When I see that the ruppy drops a flight of T2 drones I know he's T2 armed so once the drones start plinking me I get out of dodge (lost 2 drones in that fight but T1 drones are cheap).

Being unable to raise a friendly force near to come help, they take the plex. I switch to a cov-ops as people filter to the area. As we bounce arround the system we eventualy pair up and get a decent fleet going if a tad light on the DPS. Plenty of AF and Inties to go arround though. Eventualy we run into a bunch of Amarr that are ready to fight. Sure enough we get an Armageddon, that rupture I tangled with briefly and 3 frigates (2 inties and a Rifter). The battle goes back and forth. At this point I'm in a cov-ops. After the first phase of the battle I loose the cov-ops to my own stupidity (was too close to a wreck the rupture evidently wanted to loot and he warped right on top of me, de-cloaking me. Needless to say I went down in a ball of flames.

The second phase of the fight saw me makeing more mistakes - In a AC ruppy this time I had forgot to re-set my orbit distance so after getting close to the Armageddon, I started motering away and proceeded to take massive blasts of laser death with no traversal to help. Poof goes the rupture. Not a big loss that one it was T1 and insured but still the mistake was costly. I ended the fight in a Vigil, getting back just in time to see the geddon go down.

Not my best performance to date. Since I've got a salvage capable probe in system I proceed to start salvage operations and it being late leave the fleet saying FS. Just about all the wrecks had the good loot taken, but that wasn't a problem as there were plenty of T2 wrecks (6 of em - 5 from our fight and 1 from a previous battle with these guys). The salvage out of the T2 wrecks and the 10 melted capacitors from the Armaggedon were sufficient to pay for the hull and the cloak of my next cov-ops with a bit left over. I'm going to have to see if I've got enough salvage on hand for the two scanning rigs. Overall a cheaper lesson than I deserve, that points out the value of salvaging T2 wrecks after a battle.

Still I find it interesting that there was a preponderance of assault frigates this evening. Many many more than I've seen on a typical night. I suspect we'll see the AF prices climb as stocks are depleted, but AF seem to be the roaming ship of choice at the moment. We'll see how long that lasts. Incidentaly a T2 fit Rupture is a thing to fear, the Armageddon did not have the massive impact on the fight that it usually does, but the rupture got many excelent kills and was a full blown T2 plated AC ruppy. You'll notice that he got in on 4 of the kills against our group.

Props to the Amarr for bringing the fight btw. The honors were about even: Isk losses on both sides of the same order of magnitude, they got the plex earlier and we held the field and I got the salvage. I just wish I hadn't made all those mistakes.