There are good fights, where it's a somewhat even fight, both sides engage, maybe you both lose some ships but there is a clear victor, kill or loss mails to be posted, and everyone is pretty satisfied. Then, there are the truly great fights, where everything goes right, you fly at the very peak of your ability, and nobody dies.
Those stories are often overlooked in the thirst for juicy kill mails, but in my experience, those are some of the most heart pounding, edge of your seat, enjoyable fights, and not very common at all. Their rarity is part of what makes them so special.
I had one of those great fights, a couple months ago. I had just won a Cynabal from Somer BLINK, and I had been itching to try it out in an actual fight. It wasn't long before I got my chance.
I had just logged in, and no one else was around. I grabbed the bookmarks, and decided to go try to flip a few cans with my Cynabal. So, I warped to the high sec wormhole, and landed in the middle of three Hurricanes, on our side, immediately jumped out. While waiting out the session change timer, I began to formulate a plan.
There wasn't anyone else online at the time, and these guys were camping our wormhole, I was on the high sec side with my Cynabal. I knew I could outrun them, unless one of them had a warp scrambler fit. After my timer expired, I jumped back in, and overheated my MWD towards a celestial, they locked me up and pointed me, but, no scram!
I warped to the celestial and bounced back at 100km of the wormhole, and suprisingly they are still sitting there, so I dropped a bookmark, and bounced off a different celestial to the bookmark at 100km again, so I was over 200km away from the wormhole, and they were still sitting there oblivious. After bookmarking my second spot, I burned in towards them, hoping to pull them off the wormhole, once I hit about 50km out, I start taking potshots at the closest Hurricane with Barrage ammo, he was shield fit, and gets into armor rather quickly, at which point he jumps out.
I was trying to be very careful to stay out of overheated point range of these guys, because if I screwed up, I would have died, and my new ship would be gone in a puff of smoke. I have a faction point fit so I can hold them down out quite a bit further then they can reach me, and with the falloff bonuses on the ship, I was actually landing hits from this extreme range. The remaining two of them started burning towards me at once, so I immediately spun my ship around, and burn out of range. This time, one of the Hurricanes warped off towards the center of the system, the other continued approaching me.
Interesting tactics these guys have...
I continued peppering the approaching Hurricane with my guns, he was apparently nano fit, and approaching pretty quickly. So I begun kiting him away from the wormhole, and bust through his shields, at which point his buddy who warped off landed about 30km away from me. He must have warped back to the wormhole at range and tried to estimate where I was, and in his defense, he did a pretty good job of it, but my ship was just too fast and agile, and I burned away from them both to give myself a little breathing room.
At this point we were about 100km away from the wormhole, basically fighting in open space. The two hostiles are burning towards me, and I was kiting them out towards warp range of the wormhole. As we passed 150km away, I initiated a warp to the wormhole at 30km.
A lot of people don't realize it, but you can actually warp a distance shorter then the minimum 150km, if you make a bookmark just outside minimum warp range to an object, and warp to the object at a range between 10 and 100, you can actually warp a varying distance, between 50 and 140km around the grid. It is a great strategy, if you have time to drop the bookmarks needed.
This entire time, I have just been poking away at them from extreme range, so I was not really doing too much damage, but I have yet to take anything but a stray shot or two from the hostiles, and now I am between them and the exit. I was expecting their friend to be back from repairing at any moment, so I immediately burnt in the opposite direction away from the wormhole, as one of them land on it at zero.
I engaged the closest Hurricane, this time melting through his shields far more quickly. His partner warped to zero on us, and pointed me, I started burning away as the first hostile's shields broke, he jumped out with about half armor. Then, it was just me and the final Hurricane, I burned out of his point range, and started trading fire with him. I was at about half shields when he started taking armor damage, and fled back to high sec.
I couldn't believe it! I had actually won! I engaged three versus one and managed to force them all off! I was buzzing for a couple of days from that fight, with no kill mails to show for it, but I didn't care. My Cynabal had proven it was a force to be reckoned with in PvP, and I didn't die for once! It was a great fight.
Some of the best stories in EVE happen like this, and that's why I still play this game. Yeah, it would have been cool to kill one or all of them, but the real fun from this game isn't the kill mails, loot drops, or fancy ships, it's the thrill of a fight like none other, where for just a few seconds, it's really like your life is on the line.
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