Upheaval, Reflection, and a Special Day

Yeah, it feels like a year has passed since the last time I posted. To make a long story short, I had a bunch of RL stuff going on that I'm now trying to put behind me. Within EVE, I left the Tuskers a year ago yesterday, joined Death by Design with Predator Elite and friends, stopped playing entirely for a while, then I rejoined some old friends in Molden Heath under the banner of Calamitous-Intent (which seems to be a Voltron-esque amalgamation of former RANSM, R1FTA and THC2 pilots, among others). After joining 7-2 I promptly vanished once again, and only really returned to the game about ten days ago.

Just for the Hull of It

One of the recurring themes of both my PVP career and my "ooo, shiny!" approach to skill training plans is being unable to decide which ships I want to fly. Recently I took the opportunity to sit down and look seriously at which hulls I've been undocking the most. The results I ended up with were very different than I thought they would be.

The RANSM has been offered and paid...

Hey all, sorry things have been quiet from me lately. It's been longer than I'd intended since my last post. I don't even really know how to describe what's been happening over the past few weeks. I've been dealing with a ton of RL health issues, and as a result I wasn't online regularly for practically that entire time. (As a measure of how sick I was: I started a three-week skill train, finished it, and left my account not training for a good four days after it was done before I realized I needed to log in and change it. Yeah, THAT sick.) Before all the RL stuff happened, I was starting to feel a bit of a creeping malaise regarding EVE, but I couldn't figure out why - I'd left factional warfare, joined a new corp, was making a solid attempt at being a "serious" pirate (or at least a "not sure if serious" pirate, as I imagine Sulei would say), and things were generally pleasant. I didn't know why I was still feeling unsatisfied when everything looked good.

Updates!

It's been quite a while since I've updated this blog. I'll try to remember everything that's happened since then, but if I leave anyone out by accident, my apologies!

I think I can safely say I've resolved my dilemma about flying Minmatar. The answer ended up being "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", and looking back I'm honestly glad I've made the jump. I still have a special place in my heart for Gallente ships, but I've been spending more and more time flying rustbuckets with guns - even I'm shocked to see that the last few kills I've gotten have been in Firetails and Hurricanes, respectively. In turn, that lead me to a couple of other discoveries regarding my style of PVP.

The Start of the Journey

Ships I can already fly: Primarily Gallente, BC hulls and down, though BS combat is of a more Caldari flavour. Ships I've currently taken to the field in are the Ishkur, Thorax, Deimos, Brutix, Myrmidon, and a couple of painful times each in a Dominix and a Raven. I CAN fly Gallente and Caldari HACs, recons and logistics ships, but aside from one run in a Deimos (where I managed to take down one of the Vaga pilots before the other four swarmed me, not to mention the Falcon backing them up) and a less impressive bout with the Arazu I haven't really taken the opportunity to do so.

Ship Goals:

• Perhaps first and foremost, get into the habit of flying cheaper ships until I can more regularly get out of a fight with the hulls intact - yes, I enjoy the "Diemost", but the advantages it offers over the Thorax aren't ones I can utilize best right now, and 100mil hull losses hurt.
• Fly drone boats more often. I'm skilled much more heavily for drones than I am for gunnery, thanks to years of flying missions in the Myrmidon, Ishtar, and my current baby, the Rattlesnake. On the other hand, I fly the Myrmidon relatively rarely, I fly the Ishkur like it's "T2 Incursus with more drones", and I don't think I've ever taken a Vexor into a fight.
  
• Give serious thought to learning to fly Minmatar. After what meagre experiences I've had with an autocannon Myrmidon, I'm thrilled by the idea of being able to hit something more than 5km away with guns. (The downside of having spent an EVE career flying blaster boats.) My gunnery and missile skills are reasonable, as are my armour and shield tanking skills, being balanced without shining too much in any one area. I could stand to brush up on my navigation skills, but otherwise, the only real barriers to being able to fit up a Rupture or a Hurricane are Minmatar spaceship command skills and training for T2 medium autocannons and artillery. (Whether I can really fly a Minmatar ship is another matter entirely...)
  
• Once I'm more comfortable with frigate and cruiser combat, learn to fly recons. Though I can fly both the Arazu and the Falcon, my total experiences in those ships have come out to one dubious spying run during a highsec war and a sparring session with a corpie to test my jamming effectiveness.
• Train a Thanatos, less out of any intention to use it in large-scale combat and more to finally get it out of the way.
  

PVP Goals:

• Start soloing, or at least running in fleets of five people or less. I've been shying away from solo PVP due to my perceived lack of skills, but I'm finally getting around to the conclusion that I'm really only going to learn how to solo by doing it, including the pain of losing ships to mistakes. (I've heard it referred to as "tuition for the learning experience", which I quite like.)
• Eventually, learn to lead fleets. I'm not sure how common it is to be more attracted to the idea of strategy and tactics on a larger scale than individual fights, but FCing has always been a draw for me. (I'm also the kind of person who prefers strategy games to first-person shooters.) I say I want to do this "eventually" because even though I'm actually MORE interested in leading fleets than in more general PVP, I firmly believe in not asking others to do something I'm not willing to do myself. Plus, any FCing I do is going to be less effective if I don't brush up on my own experience first.
  

Of course, I'll be adding to and refining these goals as I go, but I think this is a good place to start - if nothing else, I certainly don't have any shortage of things to work on!