An Evening of Agony

Agony Unleashed have been running monthly public roams for some time now. I had not managed to make it on of these roams so when an evemail arrived last weekend announcing the February roam I started making plans. First of all I forwarded on the mail to my entire alliance to try and draw more of us from our wormholes; the best experiences you have in EVE are the ones you can share with friends and talk about later. I attracted two more Zeroites to come on the roam with me - Kennesaw and Epigene. The three of us made our way to Stacmon with our destroyers of choice: a Thrasher for Kennesaw; a Catalyst for Epigene; and a Serpentis Catalyst for myself. I also had three spares available for the inevitable loss of ships I expected to occur.

Getting everyone into the fleet was quick and efficient and before long we had a fleet of around 55 pilots ready to head out. We were introduced to our FC for the night, Itkovian Beddict, and we set off for Dastryns to pick up our fleet mates afflicted with low sec-status. With our first jump into lowsec time was taken to remind everyone how to follow orders - anchoring on the FC, burning to get in position, and aligning ready for warping as a single unit. It was while practicing these maneuvers that the FC uttered the quote of the night - "Is... is that a Drake?!". It really was a Drake but I'm fairly certain it was a troll-Drake as the pilot didn't take much persuading to reship to a Destroyer lest he be left behind to die.

With the amusement and practice out of the way we set route for Vestouve and were on our way. Very quickly we ran into a Suddenly Spaceships Battlecruiser gang in Aunsou. To my shock, delight and amazement we engaged and killed 10 of their ships, including two T1 logi. We then killed another pair of Ishtars from another corp who wandered a little to close to us. The battle report is more than a little confused. With much excitement and rejoicing over what just happened we headed back to Stacmon so those who lost their ships could get new ones. Only half an hour into the roam and we had killed over a billion ISK with our Destroyer fleet. Superb!

After everyone had reshipped we set back out on the same path towards Vestouve. This time we made it all the way there before one of the scouts called in tackle on a Nightmare. Could we really take that with our fleet? Turns out we probably could have but that Nightmare burned away from us at almost 2000 m/s. That speed was just with an afterburner fit! I had no idea they could go that fast. Once he burned out of tackle range he warped off to a station and an Archon undocked in place of the Nightmare. Attempting to kill that would be pointless so we moved on and into nullsec.

We didn't have to go far to get properly engaged for fight number two. This time we found a cruiser gang and buoyed with the knowledge of how the Battlecruisers faired against us I knew how this was probably going to go. We engaged and took out a further five ships including a taste 600 Mil Orthus. It was at this point I realised my 1600 rounds of Spike ammo were dangerously low. I had never expected to live this long so didn't want to load too much ammo destined to simply appear on a killmail. Sadly we didn't encounter anybody else willing to take us on for a fight and I managed to restock my ammo on a brief cross-hisec jump we made. It turned out I needn't have worried as our final prowl around lowsec yielded us no targets willing to engage us.

My many thanks go out to Agony Unleashed for organising these regular NPSI roams. Also thanks to Itkovian Beddict for being a great FC. Thanks to the people scouting for him too, they were awesome. If you are interested in dipping your toes deeper into PvP (and you really should) you would do a lot worse than joining the in-game mailing list 'AGONY PVP UNI' and watching for an email announcing the next one. Rumour was it should be in the middle of March.