[AAR] Tuesday Nullsec Roam #3 - Now on Wednesday

[Tomlin]

The Tuesday fleet ran into some scheduling issues and got bumped to Wed this week, but we had a good time still.

Initial form-up was 30 people strong, and Asuma Erata mentioned bookmarking a wormhole in Stacmon that led to Tenal, so we decided to go that route instead of burning to Thera. We had a mix of harpies, merlins, bursts, kirins, some links, a bubbler, etc.

We hunted Tenal a bit and went into Branch. One of the scouts tackled a Golem in a haven, so we took the fleet in. It was smartbomb fit and started causing trouble for us. We had it bubbled, but our merlins couldn't safely outrange the smartbombs. We spent some time just having people go in and out of range as their shields got <50%. This kind of worked, but as a whole it was a lot of damage spread across the fleet. We didn't seem to be breaking the Golem, so eventually I called for a disengage.
On reflection, perhaps we could have killed it if we stuck around. I called for a disengage since we didn't seem to be making a dent and the smartbombs might have been stressing logi too much. I should have asked logi, so that's a learning.
We did lose 1 scout and our ewar here unfortunately:
https://br.evetools.org/related/30004373/202405221900

As we were warping out, our other scout jumped into the next system and found another Golem on a gate. I laughed and said we'd try again. We jumped the gate and engaged this one, and it went better. Surprisingly it aggressed us back and didn't play gate games. We decided to boosh it off the gate, and I called for people to stop scrams and only point it, but unfortunately we missed a scram or 2 and the boosh took half the fleet away but not the Golem. Thankfully there was a bubble and points on it still, so we burned back and burned it down. No losses on our end, just a nice kill and loot scoopage. Special shout-out to Mosq here who put up a stop bubble on the other side of the gate and stopped that original Golem from coming in to help out its buddy.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/118043385/

After this we roamed a bit more but couldn't find any more fights, so we went back through the WH to drop off loot and take a break. It was late, so a few people left, but a few others joined. We had ~19 this time, so decided to take a Signal filament and find some fun. I did promise that we'd be a 1 hour max fleet, as we had already been formed up for over 2 hours. We formed up with a similar comp, just 2 links/booshers this time instead of 1, and a smaller logi wing.
First filament took us to Malpais, where we couldn't find anybody to play with. After going through half the region we took another filament and ended up in Querious, where we've had a few good fights in the SE pocket lately. We headed down there and spooked some locals into forming a response fleet to trap us in at the bottleneck. Unfortunately they only had 5 people online, so they couldn't give us a fair fight, and brought out 4 golems, a sabre, raptor, and nidhoggur. At this point we were kind of trapped there, and I had promised a shorter outing, so we started playing gate games. We bounced for a bit, but eventually committed in for a fight. We took down their small stuff, but the golems were sniping us from 100+ km off the whole time, so we went down.

https://br.evetools.org/br/664e6bd203aec30012694bde

A few people did survive. Thank you to Harnser Kynes for leading the bus back home after I went down.


Overall:
~2.95 bil destroyed, 541 mil lost.

We also safely extracted ~900mil in loot from the Golem. Thanks to Donk for hauling it to Jita for us even. Here's the breakdown and payments everyone will be getting, ~56 mil per person who x-ed up.

In terms of learnings, I think a lot of people learned about booshing on the fleet, which was good. I'm also going to check in with logi and others more before calling for a disengagement like I did on the first Golem. Might have been able to get another tasty kill with that.

Also what's the deal with all the Golems today?

[Shaemus O'Conor]

That very early loss of my Griffin was completely my fault, sorry. While I was sitting at my optimal and out of the bubbles, my align to a close celestial command did not take (forgotten to triple spam it as usual) and I did not check to see if I was actually moving. So once I got a couple jams off and he boxed me the warp command took slightly too long and with that poof went the Griffin.

Sounds though like you had some more fun afterwards! Good job!

[Asuma Erata]

Definitively learned about Booshing, was very interesting suddenly seeing half the fleet vanish as I kept reps on the Scout who had the Golem pinned down. Got to practice my positionals a bit more as a Burst Logi which was interesting, after the last fleet I was in I redid my entire interface and I think I am liking the way I have it now. Definitively getitng into the hang of things a bit more when it comes to fundamental skills.

I still get a bit dissoriented when a large fight breaks out and can sometimes lose track of where I am on the field, and or important allies. But every time it gets better.

Sadly I did not even notice that the Griffin went down in the first fight untilt he rest of the fleet had gotten away, probably should have had it targeted at all times just in case but alas did not do that.

[Shaemus O'Conor]

Sadly I did not even notice that the Griffin went down in the first fight untilt he rest of the fleet had gotten away, probably should have had it targeted at all times just in case but alas did not do that.

Haha, all good, ideally a Griffin should only need/get reps after a fight, as preferably he should be bouncing off towards somewhere and come back to restart the "align-lock-jam-get boxed-warp-return at optimal range" cycle all over again as soon as someone looks funny at it.

And besides, I was sitting quite a bit away from the fleet as my jam range is so much longer than where Merlins usually fight so your reps would probably not have had the range anyway. And considering that it takes at most two cycles to blap a Griffin they would not have done much good regardless

All reasons why I actually do discourage people to put Griffins as snowflakes on their logi watchlists, there are far more important and efficient rep targets to keep track of.

PS: All the above only applies to Griffins; Kitsunes, Blackbirds etc. need a bit more nuance.