I was salvaging a mission that had just been completed which at varying times had been home to a Kronos, Dominix, Raven, Cormorant, and Damnation. Conventional wisdom is to not attempt bait-and-gank on multiple dangerous ships, but hey: Always Bet on Stupid. It never hurts to place your bets when the stakes are low for you and high for your adversary.
I was in the last room, with only the Kronos present, piloted by elevashen. I looted, and the Kronos fired. Well, he was done killing all the rats in the mission, was almost done salvaging, and was 50km from the warp-in anyway. As I docked to grab JerkRaven, I told Khalia that it would be a miracle if the guy stuck around and yet another miracle if I could get close enough to point him. Still: Always Bet on Stupid.
I returned to the mission in JerkRaven, navigated through several acceleration gates, and finally got into the room with the Kronos at 60km. I started toward elevashen, fully expecting him to warp off. Instead, he sat stock still in the Marauder until I reached about 30km, at which point he turned toward me and locked onto JerkRaven. At 28km my overheated Warp Disruptor II was in range, and I had him pointed.
Bringing him down took a little while, as the capacitor on the Kronos was significant and had to be depleted by my two medium neuts. While I was pewing him down, what turned out to be his alts in a Damnation and a Dominix entered the room. They reached firing range just as I was getting the Kronos into structure, and though the Dominix wasn’t firing (appearing to be a RR Domi) and the Damnation wasn’t doing a ton of DPS, I was still rapidly running out of buffer and the RR I was receiving wasn’t fully compensating. I attempted to extract a 500M ransom from the Kronos pilot, but though he said he was willing, it was taking too long, so I finished off the Kronos. Killmail here. That’s a billion-ISK ship with faction fittings.
Sometime during this, a Cormorant piloted by blackcondom entered the room and started flashing red from something like 70km away. I figured he was yet another alt piling on, but he warped away instead of approaching. More on him later.
With the biggest damage-dealer in the room now a pile of scrap, I instructed Khalia to loot it and go drop it off while I turned my attention to namtulaku’s Damnation. Khalia was pretty sure I’d lost my mind, but at that point the loss of a Raven wouldn’t have been a big deal as long as the faction loot from the Kronos was secure. Sure enough, my shields slowly gave way and I was barely making any sort of a dent in the ridonkulous tank of the Damnation, aided by the RR from the now-flashy Dominix. I warped off with no shields and about 90% armor just as Khalia warped back into the room.
I figured the fight was over, but Khalia reported that the Damnation and Domi were just sitting in the room like bumps on a log. Well then, if it worked once, then it could work again! I docked at a handy station for an instant replenishment of my shields and headed back. As I went through the second gate, that Cormorant appeared on my D-scan again. I sat in one of the middle mission rooms, and when he warped in, I locked him and made quick work of him. We learned later that our opponents thought that blackcondom was one of us. So my going theory is that he grabbed some scrap metal I had jettisoned before the Kronos fired on me, then had returned in the middle of the melee. He was there to grab loot, run to the station to dump it, and return, repeating the process. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess.
I proceeded into the final room, where to my amazement I found the Damnation and Dominix sitting still on the Kronos wreck that Khalia had already looted. They waited while I made the long journey to point range, apparently AFK. I locked onto invitashen’s Dominix (knowing that the Damnation’s tank would be a bitch to break and understanding that low-hanging fruit is still delicious), pointed it, and very quickly had it into structure. The Damnation and Dominix both locked me and started firing at this point, but it was too late. The Dominix went down.
Now, keep in mind that I only had one Warp Disruptor on JerkRaven, and that I’d been holding down the Dominix this whole time. The Damnation had been free to leave, but didn’t, even as the Dominix exploded and I turned my point back to him. Even more amazingly, he sat completely still while he spat heavy missiles at me, maximizing the effect of my oversized Rage torpedoes and giving up yet another chance to get away: I had no web, and he could easily have outrun my point had he only tried.
I fired and fired and fired, but Rage torps are meant for large battleships and do little damage against a Command Ship with silly-high resists. I was running out of ammunition, and I could tell that namtulau was having the same issue, as he slowly cycled through several different types of heavy missiles. The death of his drones at the hands of my Warrior II drones, combined with the RR from Khalia and two Ninja Alliance friends, turned the DPS tide, keeping me repaired enough that I could remain at full buffer, saving even the cap from my hardeners to spend on neuts to keep the Damnation tapped out. Khalia brought me some faction torpedoes which hit his small ship a little better, and I started working through his massive armor buffer.
It took over 20 minutes. During this time, he called for help from his corp. Unfortunately for him, his understanding of aggro mechanics was flawed, and the combat ships he requested arrived unable to do anything but orbit us, since the corporate aggro timer against me had run out some time ago. If they had brought RR, the fight might have become much more interesting.
Finally, the damned Damnation died. Note the faction fittings and T2 rigs. He had no local repair capabilities, apparently relying instead on the RR from the Kronos to keep things upright. I grabbed the faction mods and we all retired to the safety and calm of the station to sort our fortune.
And a fortune it was, indeed. By my math, the total haul (not including assorted T2 loot) was approximately 1.7 billion ISK, with somewhere between four and five billion ISK in losses for the three enemy pilots (plus the unfortunate passerby, blackcondom, killed in the crossfire during my rampage). It turns out that the Kronos, Damnation, and Dominix were all being triple-boxed by Shen, the CEO of the corp. Ouch. The two Ninja friends who came to my aid were each given 50 million ISK, with the rest split in undisclosed proportions between myself and Khalia. We probably would have been able to pull this off without the help from the Ninjas, but their help made it a sure victory, and is greatly appreciated. Without Khalia, however, none of this would have happened. His early RR, logistical help, intelligence reporting, and just being there as a tactical sounding board allowed me to focus on the task at hand and make a minimum of stupid mistakes.
What a night! I actually have video of the blessed event, but it would be 40 minutes of mostly boredom, and my video editing software took a dump a few weeks ago anyway and needs to be reassessed first. I used it, however, to grab screenshots for this post. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
