Guristas Extravaganza

Hi All,

 

GE is a fairly notorious mission to run, not the least of which is because of dire pith despoilers. These little frigates (and there are three of them in one particular room) all jam. And reasonably frequently too. Now H, who runs a pretty mean navy meg its already high native sensor strength AND has the sensor boosting skill to V will still get jammed regularly by them. Garde IIs pumping out 280 DPS are great… not so much when you can’t direct them to kill off the jammers though (they have a tendency to go after signatures of similar size i.e battleship sized targets).

So here I am plowing through the missions after having had a wine or two (OK – mebbe three or four) and figuring hey, no worries, I can solo this as I’ve done so many times before. Anyone who has seen the movie Dune will remember the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam saying “One small point….”. In this case, actually there were three:

 

1/. Being jammed out the wazoo.

2/. Navy Megathrons chew through the ammo due to their rate of fire bonus- and I was running low on both CN AM and Javelin

3/. Downtime being announced at a very inopportune time

 

Lets just say that this was the closest I’ve come to a serious oops in a quite long time. It became something of a race between downtime, running out of ammo, or too much DPS on the field for the tank to hold. I don’t really like to pull in an alt to help unless I’m blitzing missions for standings as it feels a little like cheating, but in this case and with both time and ammo running out, I didn’t have all that much choice.

So, tab, log on Photons in the Paladin, fleet up and race to system. Warp to H… gate, followed by gate… followed by gate. Five of them in fact. Come on, come on… In the mean time, switching back to H for more killage and directing sentries. Now, and this is was really the question, do I kill all the triggers and hope that the Marauder arrives in time to kill the mission target. With cluster shutdown in three minutes that was the go.

If you happen to have triggered all of the DPS in GE in the second to last room you will know it is nothing to be sneezed at. Despite having 80%+ resistances and a faction repper, the Angel was getting into trouble. Webbed but not scrammed, the option to get out was there, and I took it just as the Marauder arrived on the field. There was time enough for one bastion cycle (one minue).

One minute to kill the boss and get the hell out before downtime…

In the mean time, and having taken a little structure damage, the Angel had warped to the gate, jumped through and was headed to station. Tab back and the Marauder had finalized lock on the boss and was applying tachyons will all due prejudice, tank holding under bastion – just…. aligned to stargate in preparation for full bug out.

Tab back to H, docking request accepted. Come on, come on! Tab back to Photons, and confirm boss destruction and holding for bastion exit. Once the cycle had completed, the tank was definitely not holding, and it was a case of warp warp warp, and on confirmation, I tabbed back to H sitting safe in station. Called up the agent and completed the mission.

Cluster shutdown in 8 seconds….

Phew.

 

FS

H

 

P.S I don’t know what exactly caused the issue tonight. I’d upgraded the capacitor support with a T2 rig and implant (though the fitting screen didn’t show any difference, not sure why – there should have been at least a 10% improvement) on the Navy Meg and she had been blitzing the first few rooms. I had been aware that ammo had been running low, but had been a little surprised at just how fast she had chewed through 10k CN AM. Overconfidence perhaps? Had completely forgotten about downtime though. What can I say except – D’oh!