AAR: Gergoran's First Time Leading a Wormhole Fight

[Gergoran Moussou]

So when I logged in, we were forming up to fight some people who Urban knows. We engaged in Light Shield and fought them a bit. Urban FCed that one and we did pretty well. Since we were very ISK-positive from that fight, he asked if anyone else wanted to FC when they reshipped and we switched to Small Ships I volunteered.

Reports were Muninns, Scimitars, a Maller, and an Osprey Navy Issue.

Form-up was about as usual for WHC form-ups. A bit of extra time spent getting a ship to Rainton since he just rejoined the Uni and doesn't have docking access for anything but the Astrahus yet. Urban brought out the Magus which is newly being added to the doctrine.

I initially said that the Osprey Navy Issue would be the first primary target because it could kill us more effectively than the others. However, it was pointed out that we might not be able to break it with two T2 logi ships, so I changed that to the logi being primary.

I warped the fleet to 0 on the hole, to jump and fight them on the other side since they were waiting at 50 and we were warping from two different locations (the Fortizar and the Astrahus). I didn't want to warp at 50 because Urban and Rainton were coming in from the Astrahus and they might be scattered. When one of our eyes in Innuendo reported that they were approaching the hole, I called for Rainton to tackle the first Scimitar to decloak.

We took down the Scimitar. When we switched to the next one, I realized that I had been focusing on shooting at the primary target and tagging targets rather than defanging enemy drones as per my ship's role in the doctrine. When I adjusted from that, Urban pointed out that I stopped talking for a bit while I was doing that.

They took me down and started out pulling range. Urban had the rest of us jump the hole (he had already jumped because he was taking too much damage, earlier losses already jumped back to reship) and took over from here. Took down the other logi on the other side. The opposing force withdrew right before I got back on-grid with a new Retribution.

Roam members (9)

Spoiler

Amoni Panala - Inquisitor
DonBasuno Ichosira - Enyo
Gergoran Moussou - Retribution
Macilles - Deacon
Oh' Leeador - Enyo
Rainton Rainz - Jaguar
Ran Rotsuda - Enyo
Urban Oxide - Magus
Willuw Everquest - Enyo

Kills and Losses

(19:57:17) J100346, J211936
Inquisitor -6.09m
Scimitar +475.53m
Enyo -53.85m
Retribution -59.92m
Scimitar +468.29m
Capsule +0.01m

Stats
ISK Destroyed: 943,835,872.3
ISK Lost: 119,863,671.87
ISK Delta: 823,972,200.43
Efficiency: 88.731%

Overall evaluation

• ✔ (Positive stuff)
  Killed nearly 1b ISK on top of the kills in the earlier fight, only lost a couple of ships in our inexpensive doctrine.
  ✘ (Negative stuff)
  Again, focused on a few too many things to do my job either as FC or as Retribution pilot perfectly. Didn't have to worry about being the anchor this time, at least.

[Urban Oxide]

Thank you for stepping up Gergoran.

The objective here was to take away the intimidation factor that leading fleets in Wspace has, it was a prime opportunity for a new budding FC to take the reins after successful engagements beforehand leaving 0 pressure and all the funzies. At no point during the fleet did I feel nor detect any signs of nerves or hesitation and that's awesome, it's a shame you died relatively early but you nailed step 1.

For your second fleet I want you to concentrate on your communication with the fleet, every 10 seconds or so repeat your previous commands like who is primary, secondary etc, ranges and ammo. Having dead air is not beneficial to the fleet and can have a massive impact on the fleetmate's experience. FCs will repeat in this manner to ensure people understand what is happening and what is expected of them, it's also a great way for the FC to fill the silence and sometimes correct bad calls on the fly.

Looking forward to your next fleet.

Urban x

[Budda Sereda]

Congrats with a good start!

To add to what Urban said: you should control fleet. The max thing you should take on yourself is calling primaries, anchoring, etc, but NEVER defang drones.
This well explains Urban's concern that you were silent.
Usually, you should fly the main DPS doctrine ship, and focus on what the majority of fleet should focus. When you mature you might start fly non doctrine ships, many FCs fly monitor, often they fly t2 version of doctrine ship (to increase servavabilty), but that might make it just a first primary, so you do need to know when this can work.

A separate thing I'm wondering, what's a value defending Muninns? They have 5 small drones with relatively low dps. If you can't shoot anything else then yeah, clear drones, but otherwise - focus on primary. Especially, if you don't have webs to slow them down.

Another thing about Retribution and Enyo fit. Could someone explain how the fit works? I appreciate ab portion, but combination of ab with a short range ... how you can kill anything? Opposing fleet was 50km from the gate, I assume Jaguar had MWD and scram+web, but against smart opponent it would die closing the range 100km from the gate... your whole fleet would stay out of range... what do I miss here?

[Gergoran Moussou]

Congrats with a good start!

To add to what Urban said: you should control fleet. The max thing you should take on yourself is calling primaries, anchoring, etc, but NEVER defang drones.

Another thing about Retribution and Enyo fit. Could someone explain how the fit works? I appreciate ab portion, but combination of ab with a short range ... how you can kill anything? Opposing fleet was 50km from the gate, I assume Jaguar had MWD and scram+web, but against smart opponent it would die closing the range 100km from the gate... your whole fleet would stay out of range... what do I miss here?

Regarding the drones, the WHC forum post for the doctrine said that drones should be the priority of Retribution pilots. I guess that in this case, you're telling me that I had more important things to worry about than drones.

Opposing fleet was 50km from the hole. We jumped the hole and held at 1km waiting for them to follow because I didn't want to have the tackle ship and Magus land separately (the problem being that Rainton just rejoined the Uni a day or two before, was still waiting for WHC docking access to be given back to him, so he was at the Astrahus and Urban was there with him having brought over some doctrine stuff). If we were all undocking from the same citadel, this wouldn't be something that I'd worry about and I'd ask the scout to get us a good warp-in directly onto the adversaries. You are correct that the Jaguar for the doctrine has MWD, though. This doctrine uses Jaguars for tackle, then a mix of Enyos and Retributions for damage. Navy frigates (Firetail/Comet/Slicer) also get used a fair bit since E-Uni has a decent amount of lower-SP people who can't fly assault frigates yet. They perform adequately, but are obviously less durable (less of a concern when our main way of surviving is by orbiting close with AB on).

We jumped through, they jumped in after us, they no longer had the range advantage. We jumped back through when they started to pull range again.

We consistently have a lot of success with this doctrine. The only time when I can remember not holding the grid when the enemy didn't have a doctrine specialized in countering this sort of thing was the first of our three fights with WAFFLES a couple of weeks ago when they had a mix of ships (some good against us, some not), and when we took down a Golem a few hours later after undocking for the third fight with them that day (we heard that there was a Tengu around, when we found both it and a Golem, we went for the Golem), that pretty much balanced out all of the losses from the other two fights.

[Budda Sereda]

Regarding the drones, the WHC forum post for the doctrine said that drones should be the priority of Retribution pilots. I guess that in this case, you're telling me that I had more important things to worry about than drones.

As FC - absolutely!

We jumped through, they jumped in after us, they no longer had the range advantage. We jumped back through when they started to pull range again.

I guess you already know WH mechanic, but it worth mentioning it again: you realize you became polarized and they were not? That means if they stood around the whole they would be capable of jumping through when it gets too hot and you could not. I'm surprised after that they lost 2 scimis, lol. I guess, lots of webs did not let them crash the hole.

We consistently have a lot of success with this doctrine. The only time when I can remember not holding the grid when the enemy didn't have a doctrine specialized in countering this sort of thing was the first of our three fights with WAFFLES

My opinion is that Waffles are just smart and skilled pilots with good FCs. They probably would not jump into a arty fleet into a small ships for brawl.
This fight is another confirmation that the doctrine at least has a chance to succeed. And don't get me wrong: I don't blame doctrine (at least not now, until I understand it well), I just don't understand how does it work. Also because that my WH experience is limited to time when I lived in WHC, but with small exceptions, at that time I was mainly ratting good time though !

Are there AAR for those fights with Waffles?
If I was opponents FC I would never imagine you have both AB+Brawl fits. If I jumped to your side (to make you polarized) I would pull at least 20km range (Muninns arties need some range to mitigate your orbiting speed and increase tracking). Maybe that was exactly the plan, but not everyone was fast?

BTW, another thing you guys had try to do is to boosh 1-2 Muninns from the hole. A bit hard to manage with man scrams in fleet, but still doable.