AAR: Death by Greed

When you have been hunting, PvPing, scouting, or really doing anything, for a long time, after a while it just sort of becomes instinctual. You don't even realize you are DScanning until you catch yourself doing it in high sec. You automatically start looking for a POS when you see a Force Field on DScan. You go straight to looking up killboards when you find someone ratting. There is a lot of things you do you don't realize you are doing, you are just listening to your gut and muscle memory.

It is when you go against your instincts is when shit hits the fan. You may want to gank him, you may want to try to get a good fight, you might want to rat in that system, but gut feeling tells you no. It is when you do it anyway is when you get killed.

See, when you are looking for a target to drop on with Blops, you tend to hunt in renter or ratter heavy systems, not PvP alliance's space. So, problem number one: choosing to hunt in Deklein, Goon central. Before any solo drop you look up the killboard of the target in question. This particular target had not lost a ship in a year and a half. Problem number two: droping on someone that clearly was either extremely lucky, or was saved every time he got in trouble.

So, here I am sitting on grid with my cyno, cloaked up, in the middle of a Goonswarm region, watching what I was 98% sure was a bait Ishtar. I sat there for what must have been 30 minutes debating back and forth in my mind weather or not to drop. Earlier in the day I had dropped on an Ishtar and killed him with little issue (thanks to Michael for scanning down his safe spot, even though he died like an idiot to Wasps). I had no concerns about breaking him, just what would follow if I bit. Perhaps that more than anything galvanized me into action, the excitement and prospect of a kill was a bit too great.

My Arazu can point up to 51km, so I cyno'd in around 40km off the Ishtar, to give myself plenty of breathing room if shit did hit the fan. The Ishtar just stayed there though, not moving at all. He did put drones on my Arazu, but at this point I am not sure if it was not just an auto-aggression from the drones. He had just gotten into armor when the Hound uncloaked and tackled me.

Now, I had a neut on my ship, so I easily turned off his point, but I stuck on grid anyway to kill the Ishtar which was now in hull. That is what killed me. I could have left, but I stuck around anyway, which brought down on my head three Panthers and a Proteus. I killed the Ishtar and his pod, and I even got the Hound, but there was no saving my Redeemer and Arazu. Greed and ignoring my gut instinct got me killed.

Ironic, as yesterday when I posted about EFTing Black Ops, latter that night I got killed. This has not curbed my enthusiasm though, as what happened was nothing more than a learning experience. If anything, it maintained it, as it just goes to show that the more you explore, and get out, and scout, and poke around in space, the more interesting things you will find.

Good fight Goonswarm, until next time.

Battle Report

Blöd