How I Roam Around FW Space, How to Start Solo PvP, I was Donated a Nid, Domi Rekting, Dirty Hookbill Fit and Pos Capital Brawls

My favorite roaming routes in Gal/Cal FW space

 

This week I thought it would be cool to talk about the paths I take when I'm doing frig solo PvP around Placid and Black Rise. I made a pretty picture in paint outlying two different routes in different colours. I will talk through them and why they are fun to roam in. I also want to mention while I talk about solo PvP here, these routes also work great for small gang roams.

My two main roaming routs complete with labels

So first off is the red route, probably the one I take most often. It forms a nice loop starting at Nen, going to Tama, to Ostingele, to Nen. It also passes through Heydalies for when I feel like I dont have enough Russian blobbing in my life. This is a good route to take because it goes through some of the most active systems in the area with good pipes in between. I normally would only take frigs/dessies there though, as the potential to be blobbed, especially going from Nen to Tama, is relatively high. You will often see fleets passing through these systems but you rarely get caught on gates. Its when you go into a medium and are met by three Recons you need to worry. 

The second route in green is a much quieter, shorted route. Sometimes if I cant find fights in the first route, I look around in that pocket for farmers who are up for a fight or whoever is around. You go from Nen to Innia through Akidagi and then back to Nen through Eha, again making a nice loop. You can sometimes find some really good frig fights around here and because its quieter can be better for taking cruisers. 

I take these routs pretty much every stream I do and they work out pretty well. I hope to see some of you guys down these pipes soon.

Feel free to comment and tell me where you guys roam, if its similar or if I'm just a complete retard missing all the good PvP systems.

How anyone can get into Solo PVP

I said I was going to do an FC guide this week but when I started to write it up it suddenly occurred to me I'm fucking terrible at FCing and should not be writing a guide on it. Maybe another time.

Instead this week I'm going to make a guide on something much cooler, Solo PvP. This guide is going to outline how any newbie, carebear veteran or line member can start solo PvPing and with a bit of hard work and luck, get some km's they can proudly show off.

I'm going to be going off mostly experience. This means this guide will be mainly about FW space frigs instead of null. However, I will talk about bigger ship types that can work in almost any environment. My advice to anyone who is in the depths of null, get an empty jump clone into a trade hub close to some good solo PvP systems. This also applies to anyone with expensive implants. Smartbombing is something you need to look out for when roaming many active systems at a time, if you loose your ship in a fight and you have slaves in, it could be a paranoid couple jumps back to a station, and without insta undocks you're probably gonna get podded trying to dock up anyways.

Don't be this noob

What to fly:

So first off we're going to start with what ship to fly. For complete noobs, this is where the T1 frigate really shines. Cheap, effective, fast, fun. Take a look at your skill points. What are you skilled into? The main things you are looking for is spaceship command skills, so gallente frigate, amarr frigate, ect, gunnery, missile skills or drone skills, and then shield or armour skills. Knowing what your strong points are in terms of sp is going to help you decide what ships you're going to fly and what kind of PvP you're gonna do.

Once you know what you are skilled into, choose pretty much any T1 combat frigate ship you like the look of. As long as it isn't the Condor, you dirty kiting bastard. Other weak ships include the Punisher and the Slasher. This dosnt mean you cant fly them, but there are better options for what they do.

Next is fitting the ship. I cant go through every best fit for every T1 frig, but if you are completely lost for what to fit, ask in a PvP channel and someone will give you some stuff to work with. I would recommend Bringing Solo Back, they will answer any questions you have, or even better (expect not better) is my channel Kar_Athri.  Generally I would keep your fits cheap, as you're going to die a lot, so if for some reason people link you T1 frigs with T2 rigs or faction mods for whatever reason, adjust to T1/T2 accordingly. Once you have a ship and a fit, buy several of those to jump back into when you die.

How to Roam:

Now we can finally undock and start looking for fights! How do we find fights though? With the most useful tool for any solo'er, D-scan. What you will mostly be doing is setting a destination, then going along scanning all the FW beacons. Set max range, a 5 degree angle a center tracking position on. This way you only have to click on the beacon on your overview and your camera will align to it. Once you find another ship, double click on the result to see info about the ship so you can decide if you can fight it or not. You only really want to be taking on other T1 frigs, so avoid T2 or faction frigs, and avoid dessies, as they will two shot you unless you know what you're doing.

Once you have something to try and fight, warp to the beacon (at 10km!) and take the acceleration gate when you land. Now is where things get fun. Assuming this ship is looking for a fight as well, and will not just warp off because he's farming, the very first think you need to do is lock them up and active your point, web, guns and prop mod. While your locking up, set orbit and launch drones if you have any. From there on, you overload your guns (don't burn them out ffs) and prey to the gods their ship explodes before yours.

The Fight:

The actual details of the 30 second fight is what is whats important though. The mechanics and options of frig PvP can get really complicated, and you will learn all the tricks through experience, but for now we will keep it simple. The main thing is frig PvP is range control. You need to learn about every other ship and what they use. You then need to learn about what you use. Generally, blasters have the best tracking, followed by autocannons, followed by lasers. Tracking is where transversal comes into everything. Its kind of complicated, so we wont go into the details here, as there are better guides already available, but the essence is that your tracking depends on two things; speed and range. The farther out you are from a target, the easier it is to hit. The slower it is, the easier it is to hit and the more damage you will do. This means that if you fly a ship with lasers, orbiting at 500m is not a good idea, because you will not hit your target very often. If you meet a ship with lasers, you should know orbiting at 500m is the best thing to do. You should normally orbit instead of keeping at range because while it means your guns will deal less damage, it will also mean you will take less damage. Its a trade off you will learn when and when you shouldn't make, but for now orbiting is what you should stick to. Overall the general idea is, if you track better than them, keep a tight orbit so you will hit them more often than they hit you. Otherwise, orbit farther out and take advantage of your better range. If they are in your optimal but you're not, you will apply more damage and win. Its all about knowing when you pull range and when to orbit close. This is also where ammo plays a part. You should read through the main types of ammo your guns use and apply them to the different situations you face. Normally you will carry three ammo types, sometimes four.

Of course, none of that applies to missile. They just have a max flight range. If you're not in that range, you dont get hit, but that's normally out of scram range and your optimal range, so keeping at range to apply more damage than them is normally the best option here.

So this concludes the basics of solo PvP. The rest is just learning to react to different ships, learning about everything that is out there and having fun. Remember, you're going to fucking suck at solo PvP when you start, but one day you will get the hang of it and get some really fun fights. Eventually you will learn what you can and cant take, you will start winning fights you shouldnt be able to, and then you will start trying out bigger ships and ascend into a true PvP god.

Understanding solo PvP allows you to understand any form of PvP. Apart from market PvP.

My very first solo kill. Even I was once scurbbish (still am)

What's happening with me

 

My exams start next week. Because of this I haven't been doing much on eve, apart from streaming and getting 1337 solo kills. I have decided though I need to make some kind of comet fit that can defeat the duel web TD armour Hookbill, because those have been giving me hell recently.

Oh also I was donated a Nidhogger on stream last night. Seriously I was really surprised when I saw that contract, thought it was fake or something at first. Two months until I can fly it, I better get training.

Fight of the week

 

Moar BS PvP to show off today. Not the most intense fight ever but a really weird composition of ships that took on my Domi.

I am far too lucky to get a fight like that

I warped to the gate, was about to jump but paused when I saw a gate flash. I jut happened to be a Phobos with some friends. I handled it quite well, taking out the logi first and then taking out expensive shit. The reason I went for the phobos over the Cyclone is because I thought it would be active shield tanked, meaning it would tank more than a Phobos. It also just happens the Cyclone was shit fit beyond belief.

Killmails:
Cyclone
Phobos
Exequror

Fit of the week

 

Now I am aware that showing off a Hookbill fit when only recently I was talking about how they should be lower in Gorski's frig tier list is contradicting myself, but I wont let my pride stop me from admitting when I see a good fit. Granted, this isnt anything too new, but I know there will be people who haven't heard of it yet, or have but just didn't know its potential, like me.

Disclaimer: I am not admitting I was wrong about the Comet being better the Hookbill. Well, at least until I can come up with a comet fit to counter this...but when I do, I will be back to being right!

 

This fit revolves around utility and range control. You have meh dps and decent tank, but you can basically give a big fuck you to any turret boat. Normally dual web is enough to negate a lot of damage from turrets. You either pull range on close range weapons or tight orbit on long range ones. However, with the correct ammo loaded and some piloting skills, they can still hit you. Its the tracking disruptor that really fucks thing up for them. It dosnt matter if you have null loaded with a TE, an optimal range distrup script and trying to hit 7500m off is going to fuck you. Basically, you just remove any damage from turrets on a ship, and laugh as your dps slowly wears them down.

So what counters this fit? I would say either drone boats or other rocket boats as they make your TD useless. So you wouldn't try and take an Ishkur in this fit, but you could kill an Enyo. If you do find another rocket boat and its not a Hawk, you could probably just out tank it. If it does look like you're gonna die, you have two webs so you can just burn out and warp off.

This is fit isnt really that tight, obviously you need CPU skills but you have those at V already right? There is an alternative fit with a 400mm plate which gets slightly more ehp but it required a 2% powergrid implant, two powergrid rigs and AWU V. If you can do that though, by all means.

So go, get some kills and post them in the comments!

BR of the week

 

Thats right, a BR with Did He Say Jump again. People are probably going to think this is all some kind of recruitment scheme for them by now, but according to Hy Wanto, the guy who I beg for interesting BR's every week, not much happened this week, so we're going with this.

The story behind this fight is Did He Say Jump and Gal Mil were defending a pos against DT and SC. The pos was taken which had a moon, though I was told the moon wasn't anything special.

Here we have a nice little capital brawl which seems to be all about the one Moros that could. The Moros of Did He Say Jump with sub cap support took out three dreads before going down. Maybe it was a reenactment of the famous 'I burnt my guns' fight?

It seems once again kitchen sink armour BS's were the name of the game for Did He Say Jump and Gal mil. An expensive vindi was wiped off the field by one of the dreads, and geddons were killed, probably to get the remaining caps off field safely. All one of them.

The other side didnt take many sub cap losses, but then again how could you with that many guardians. Leave it to DT to be that safe. Overall DT and SC ended the fight with an efficiency of 37% and loosing 16b. However, they did remove the pos they set out to destroy, so one could argue it was just an expensive win. What do you guys think?

The BR is quite buggy today, for some reason I cant save it so the link is all weird and its showing the same archon on both sides, so the numbers are a bit out. Here is the link.

EDIT:
Vestion Stenier-Tian > hy wanto
Vestion Stenier-Tian > that br you linked me was of doppel's pos right?
hy wanto destroyer > no
Vestion Stenier-Tian > oh
Vestion Stenier-Tian > well now it is
hy wanto destroyer > idk how that fight started


Yea so just ignore the whole part where I talk about pos's in that br. Who knows, maybe it was still a pos fight.