[AAR] Intro to Fleets Merlin Roam

[Tomlin]

I hosted the Intro to Fleets course and we went out for a nullsec roam afterwards. This was quite a few peoples' first fleet, and we had a few veterans along too.

People sorted out getting into ships well overall. We opted for no logi, but had Jalxan triple-boxing specialty roles for us in punter, boosher, and bubbler. We did a bit of practice in space aligning, anchoring, etc. We yeeted off into Null with a noise filament and landed in The Kalevala Expanse. We went through a few systems but couldn't catch anything before it tethered up. We were heading off to take another filament when a jaguar came through a gate behind us and we tried to engage. Since we had timers, I opted to stay and fight, so we threw up a bubble as scout warned us a big kitchen sink response fleet came was coming in, starting with a Golem and Broadsword. We primaried the Broadsword and tried to burn it down, but couldn't break it. I called a switch to the Retribution and we almost got that down, but their fleet wiped ours before we could.

https://br.evetools.org/br/6646c3cd03aec30012694444

It was still early-ish, so I pinged again and we got a few more people in to go out for a second round. De W Javqe joined in to fill a bunch of specialty roles for us on this on as Jalxan was still extracting some pricey pods he saved from our first wipe. We took a signal filament this time and landed in Fountain. We only had 1 ship in system, an ishtar with a packrat MTU. The Ishtar got off, but we figured we'd take out the blingier MTU. After it died we went to the outgate and had a few ships jump into us. Again, scout called a kitchen sink response fleet landing on the other side, but we opted to take the fight as we were already engaging a Dominix. We got it into about 1/3 hull before their fleet took us out.

https://br.evetools.org/br/6646c3a1f68f7000119e72e8

Overall I think form-up went well, and new people were able to sort out ships and get in them fine. We got out into space in okay time, and had some fun. Unfortunately we didn't manage to kill a single ship in either yeet. I wanted to make sure that everyone got experience with PvP and attacking targets in a mass fight. I think we did get that experience, just more staying alive longer and killing people would have been nicer. But that just means everyone will have to come back for more fleets! I'll try to put some more USTZ fleets on the calendar like this for the coming weeks.

Overall 39 mil isk destroyed, and 721 mil lost.