Kiting, sniping and beer

I have been dabbling in a null-sec PVP here and there. It is quite different from what I am used to. Despite playing EVE for over a decade, null is a new experience for me, so in a way, I feel somewhat like a new player, which is quite nice as it lets me re-experience EVE in some aspects. For anyone feeling stagnated, I recommend changing it up and trying new things. I did low-sec piracy, wormholes, high-sec can-baiting, and even some suicide ganking, but I always swore against null-sec without any strong reason to do so. So far, I am happy I challenged and threw myself into a new environment. The people I fly with are friendly, and there's always content if I look for it. I love the relaxed environment, even though keeping track of activities in the corp, alliance, and coalition can be daunting at times. Seriously, so many discord groups and channels. I don't know how people keep up with this stuff.

First impressions

The first fleet I joined was Windrunner (WR) Tornadoes, which basically means you warp bounce a lot and take potshots at the enemy fleet from beyond the 100km range. It was quite fun. I imagine this hit-and-run requires quite a lot of skill in maintaining angles and distances. I have a lot of respect for FCs and the people who do it. For the rest of us grunts, pushing F1 and following aligns is not exactly the most challenging experience. However, at times, I still struggled to follow alignment points. Where the fuck is that ESS again? What the hell is an "ansi". And some other terminology and orientation objects with which I had to familiarize myself. I like the WR concept as it is high-risk. As it happened in my fleet, the FC warped us into the bubble, and the rest is history.

While I do enjoy WR fleets, I am not a big fan of the kiting meta in general. All ships "fight" at the 100km+ distance and try to snipe each other before Logi can react.

I start to see the pattern. The image above illustrates your run-of-the-mill fight: You chase around the enemy fleet, and if they are faster, you give up. Ships shoot each other 100km apart while  2 Scorpions jam from 200km+ behind the fleet. I just don't know about this. In my opinion, 100km should be reserved for battleship-sized guns, and all cruisers or even battle cruisers should be much closer. I even had a bloody Hecate snipe my interceptor from 100km. I mean, come on.

The other day, we went stabber roaming with the corp mates. I jump into a system and find this interesting sight.

A gate camp waiting 150km off with Warden sentries. I did consider if we could jump in, burn the other direction, and warp on them, but I had no cloaky scout with probes, and it didn't really feel like our 4 stabbers were a match for this setup. Overall, props to people for putting somewhat expensive ships on the line, but coming back to my original comment, I really dislike projecting DPS from such a large distance in anything smaller than a battleship. My personal take, you don't have to agree with it.

Let's also discuss ESS. On paper, I understand what CCP was going for, but in practice, it's a fighting location I am not too enthusiastic about. 

You can't use MWD inside and can't warp in the area as it's dead space. The attackers have a major positioning advantage, which is fine, but I have yet to see an exciting ESS fight. If you bring a bigger fleet, the enemy fleet simply warps out. There is no way to surprise in any way, such as a combat probe or bounce off a celestial. You always land in relation to the acceleration gate. I think they should perhaps remove the deadspace outside ESS and just leave it inside. But I haven't played long enough, so maybe others have the best fights on ESS. I need to join more fleets.

You can take a wormholer from a wormhole but can't take a wormhole from a wormholer. if there's no such saying, there should be. I occasionally jump into the wormhole space, looking for targets. Thankfully, I have some corpmates who do the same thing, which is very unusual for people living in null-sec, who are often times allergic to scanning. On one such trip, I got a ping of an ongoing mining activity.

We took a couple of ships and paid them a visit. No local, unexpected ganks and often close and personal fights. I am confident at some point, I will return to wormholes. However, for now, I want to learn more about null-sec PVP. So far, most fights have happened around the home area, but the ambition is to work on a setup that I could pilot to get good fights with only a few people in remote regions. I would like to find a combination of 2-4 ships that I could fly and have good engagements.