It’s relatively easy to blog about cool and funny stuff, victories and war stories that end in your favor. On the other hand, it’s not easy to write about something that went wrong.. 

But, when we started this blog and the show we have decided we will go with complete disclosure of both the good and the bad…

We lost our first T3 ship last night.

…It was the Proteus Utility Ship.

…and 2 Battleships (Raven, Dominix).

…and an Interceptor (Ares).

To Sleepers.

Why did we lose it?

Well I’d say that our major mistake was the lack of Intel on a given Magnetometric Site. We have only tried this particular site once, sometime back in July. We ended up loosing 2 BSs (Megathron and Raven) and a Catalyst back then. In this particular site, there are two waves of Sleepers and then there is a weird trigger for the remaining waves. First of all, we thought it was only one additional wave. heh..

But first things first. The site has 15 Ancient Artifacts for analyzing that hold Relics that we can Reverse Engineer for T3 Subsystems. That particular site also had an Abandoned Talocan Battleship that gives Hull pieces.

Other Magnetometric sites only spawn 10 of those Artifacts, so it’s rather lucrative on it’s own and explains the difficulty – by far the toughest Class 5 encounter we have seen.

On the other hand, we thought the 3rd wave is triggered after you open a few of the cans. That’s what we thought from our past encounter. Turns out that’s not the trigger.

The Raven gets D/C a few secs before we dispatch the remaining of the second wave, so we decide to stop the BSs to wait for him to relog, while the Proteus is till heading towards the cans. We plan to move everyone by the cans and start opening them up one by one. But as I mentioned above, turns out the spawn trigger is not the opening of the cans…

So there we are, a fleet of 5 BSs moving slowly towards the cans after we dispatched the 2 initial waves and the Raven pilot reconnected, and the Utility Proteus, 20KM away from us. I need to point out that the Anomaly of that particular Class 5 was the Wolf Rayet, that decreases the Signature of ships – perhaps the most annoying / difficult anomaly to work with if you get a lot of small frigates buzzing you.

Then the spawn came.

6 Frigates, 6 Cruisers, 3 Battleships at about 100KM from us. Everything targeted the Proteus. With 6 of the frigates MWDing towards the Proteus they got it webbed and scrammed and he was too far from us to be able to do anything. It popped in a few seconds.

Then as we where speechless, they moved on to target a Raven from the main fleet. My scorpion tried to lock all the frigs to jam them so that the Proteus could escape. By the time the Proteus popped, I still had 5 more secs till I could finalize my lock on the frigs (damned Wolf Rayet!!) Once they have switched to the Raven, I had to unlock the frigs and target the BSs (still sitting at 100KM+) to jam them to reduce the damage output.

In the meantime, on my effort to compensate of the loss of the extra reppers from the Proteus and Raven, I start overloading my ECMs only to miss a circle and end up with 80% of my ECM modules burned out. aha..

The Alpha strike was massive and the Raven popped next, after a few seconds, and as it turned out, Luminus’ had disconnected at the most bad time he could ever DC, leaving us with no EWAR from the scorpion and only 2 RR on the Raven. Faster than you could say “Murphy” and while we did a good job killing some sleepers, turns out there was another wave inbound.

I check my overview… some frigs, about 10 Cruisers and 7 Advanced Sleeper BSs (ZOMG). The rest of our fleet has 2 Megathrons, an Abaddon, a Dominix, a Scorpion (with only 2 ECM left) and the Eos. The command is given to warp out – cut our losses, as my Scorpion gets called primary from the Sleepers. Seeing damage bleed into structure, I jettison my cargo (holding 3 Intact, 5 Malfunctioning and lots of other stuff from our previous Mag site) so that when the Scorpion blows up, at least the loot will be intact in case we can pick it up later. Turns out I am being fired upon only from BSs and Cruisers, while the Frigates tackle the Dominix, so I warp out with some hull left, while the Dominix is scrammed and goes down next.

We regroup, and Luminus takes in an Ares to try and grab the dropped loot (some Billions in RE pieces and tags) and manages to return safely 2 times. The third time he goes in, the Sleeper frigs are already on to him and the Ares pops.

We decide to cut our losses and call it a night…

Lessons Learned:

If something could go wrong, it will go wrong at the worst time possible.

Don’t leave anyone far away from the pack.

Disconnects happen at the worst time possible.

Cut your losses sooner rather than later.

When fighting in Wolf Rayet, ECM boats should be equipped with Sensor Boosters.

We haven’t lost any ships to sleepers since the last time we visited this particular site. I guess it shall be our goal to farm it before we leave Planet Risk and go to Class 6 sites.

Turns out from the Relics we managed to save, we where able to make 20 Run BPCs of the Utility Proteus Subsystems, so we are going to replace it in the next couple of days, while we can build the BSs from the minerals we have. So all-in-all not a huge loss in ISK (it could be far worse) but a huge slap in our ego.

One thing is certain. This particular site still remains the only site we haven’t been able to complete. I believe that I speak from all the corp members here when I say “It’s personal”.

For bonus points: Who can name the site I am talking about?