Sunday 21 March 2010

Scram range = dead range

So here I am, flying 20 jumps back home in my pod. Why is that?

Because I suck.

No I really do. the past few weeks I've been flying nothing but Nano ships. For those not familiar with what a Nano ship is. Its a ship that's fitted for speed and long range damage. You sit outta "scram range" and kill the other guy before you run outta cap (due to MWD usage).

Ive been quite successful "Nano-ing" recently. Ive taken on much larger ships/gangs and actually won, or at least managed to drive them off. But the best thing about Nano-ing is that you can nearly always escape should the proverbial shit hit the fan.

There are situations of course where escape isn't always possible. For example, Rapiers webbing you, Nueted by a Curse, scrammed by a frig while being jammed by a Drake (Yeh, seriously), scrammed by a frig while his Scimatar buddy keeps him alive from 50km away... But most of these situations can be avoided if your smart/cautious.

Unfortunately for me, I'm not very cautious.

A really good example of why fighting in scram range is a really bad idea while soloing just happened to me.

I was out roaming in my Claw. I haven't flown the Claw in a real long time and it was quite refreshing to fly an interceptor again. I roamed pretty far, as it was the early morning, and ended up in a system I used to visit often. Dantumi.

Now in one of the belts I spot a named Thorax. I normally wouldnt engage a Thorax at all, but this guy is ratting... has his name on his ship (which is generally considered to be a bad idea) and after a quick check of his info I see hes only a few months old.

OK free kill.

I warp to the belt. There he is, at zero shooting the rats. I immediately tackle him and begin to fire. The thorax pilot doesn't do much at first..

"Perhaps he thinks I'm a rat?" I thought to myself.

I continue to fire while orbiting as close as I can. The Thorax enters armor... then he decides to lock me. He releases some Valkyrie Is ands send them to attack me. They don't hit me much, I'm small, fast and they cant track me very well.

I'm still pretty confident I can win until the worst possible thing happens. He WEBS and SCRAMS me, and a quick check of my combat log I see hes started firing light blasters at me.

After that, I'm toast. Nothing I can do now. My MWD is shut off, and hes faster than me. I feebly try to get outta of his blaster range. But its way to late. My ship exploded and I'm riding home Pod style.

There was no way I could of known he had those, and in a ship like a Claw there is only one way to find out for certain. That's to get in scram range and hope for the best. that's all well and good, but when you see that 90% of all ships sitting in a belt alone is bait... well you get the idea...

Now there are a few ships that can fight in scram quite successfully while still having a chance of escape if things go bad. Like the duel prop Taranis. But not every ship in EvE has the ability to fit both a MWD/AB with a point at the same time.

What bothers me, is the fact that CCP when they first introduced the scram/web changes (Scrams never used to shut off the MWD, and webs were 90% slowing effect) they said they was because they wanted to give players more of an option when their webbed. They didn't want the players to think "Oh, that's it I'm webbed... no escape now..". The web nerf was a good thing, but paired with the scram buff... I think it's made the "Oh shit, nothing I can do here" scenario even worse.

I suck because I knew this before the Claw/Thorax fight even started.

There is only one way to fly now, While soloing or in a small gang.. and that's Nano. The only solo interceptor worth anything is a Taranis. I wont be flying a scram range fighting ship for a long long time.

6 comments:

  1. Unfortunate to hear, I spotted you flying your Claw, must have been shortly before this event happened. Was hoping you'd come take a shot at my Wolf but I guess that was wishful thinking!

    I was having a similar debate last night with some friends of mine also and you are right. It feels like the Ranis is the only Inty left able to perform admirably anymore which is a shame. The Dramiel has made them all defunct with it's sheer speed and agility, there is really little point in flying a dog-fighting interceptor.

    This is the second nano-age...

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  2. The Claw, unfortunately, has been quite worthless for awhile. It's a shame really. Agreed on the Taranis.

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  3. Man...i never expected to be spoken about in such a blog :)

    Random

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  4. Forgot to mention. You and your Thrasher an hour ago... Now that was something i really didn't expect. Anything, but a destroyer...
    You would've gotten me there.

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  5. > There was no way I could of known he had those

    /facepalm

    What do you expect a Thorax to have in the mids, target painters?

    P.S. "could have" or "could've" ffs

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  6. Hey, there is a way to avoid this, it's called fitting an AB on a combat interceptor. You'll always be in scram range, lack of an ab means you're there always 'till the end, not a win win situation.

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