This victory is however quickly overshadowed by the appearance of Eyes.FR, a French wormhole corp that we had repeatedly faced and lost to. Some taunting and assessing later, both parties decide they don't want any - at least not before dinner (food is a big thing in France, I couldn't agree more). Eventually, Eyes come to us with a bit more than we can chew, and ragepings ensue : they have two nestors, an assortment of ten strategic cruisers, command ships and, to top it off, a bhaalgorn. Back of napkin estimates require four guardians to hold up tech 2 resisted ships (the mainline DPS ships of our doctrine), and a lot more DPS than we can field, and thus we contact Event Horizon to see if they want to join in with us - which they do. We thus proceeded to entertain Eyes in local while we formed up.
At this point, we met a stalemate. Our ships were living through their dps, and theirs through ours. We thus proceeded to try several strategies, starting with target switches. We had two ECM pilots attempting to jam off the nestors, basically in vain thanks to the crazy high sensor strength of these buggers, even though a lucky set of jams allowed us to get one nearly to structure. In hindsight, I should have called for sensor dampeners on the two nestors we were attempting to jam. Their bhaalgorn wrecked havoc on our end, shutting down Gribbly's neuting power from the get go and eventually costing us our bhaal as his hardeners got shut down. We then attempted opportunistic booshs, successfully removing the drones blob on several occasions, and separating the bhaalgorn from the fight for a while, giving us some breathing room.
After a while, Conci suggested we use our drones to kill theirs, effectively "defanging" the nestors and the bhaalgorn, removing a lot of dps from the field. This kept us afloat as I was suddenly convo'd by a member of Adhocracy, a blue C4 wormhole corp. They had rolled into bacon and were about to jump on the Eyes fleet when the latter rolled themselves into us, and were asking for our Innuendo connections in order to come help. I swear that convo popping up was the most deconcerting, yet it meant we were going to survive this - indeed, despite the lowered DPS, the rapid target switches and the aptly spread neuts were whittling down our tiring fleet (this was about 45 minutes into the fight, the disruption on the logi was most straining), and the end was surely not in our favor.
Unfortunately, Eyes spotted ADHC as they were about to come into Innuendo and scattered, leaving only a single Nestor stranded...
Final tally :
Isk lost : 4.36B
Isk destroyed : 1.31B
Adrenalin pumped : 8000
Funs had : 11
The good :
Comms discipline was on point, even though a third of the fleet were strangers, this went smooth.
Logi did a tremendous job, we had 3 guardians switch around throughout the fight, they were under real hard pressure and yet performed beautifully.
This doctrine is tanky.
Roles were filled without too much hassle, glad to see the support roles getting some love <3
The bad :
Started getting the drones off field way too late
Lacking knowledge of resist profiles regarding ammo choices
I need way more ammo in my damnation
Should have asked for suggestions about what to do. In hindsight we could have tried bumping the nestors apart, should have jammed the bhaalgorn instead of trying to jam the nestors, and spread sensor res damps on the nestor coupled with better target switching.
Where my tackle at ??? They should nearly all have been caught at the end.
)
