FrigFest After Action Report

I joined 200+ people in getting out for the FrigFest sponsored by the Tuskers.  First off big kudos to the Tuskers and friends for all of the work necessary to make that happen.  Thousands of frigates were moved into place, both including the station containers full that some of us had shipped as well as all of the free stuff they had available for people to get and fight with.  It was a blast.  I hope there will be another one and that even more people can make it.

Three Lessons Learned

The dual-rep Incursus is a beast.  You probably already knew that.  Here’s my killboard and here’s what I was flying most of the time.

[Incursus, FrigFest Incursus]
Damage Control II
Small Armor Repairer II
Small Armor Repairer II
Adaptive Nano Plating II

1MN Afterburner II
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
Small Capacitor Booster II,Navy Cap Booster 100

Light Neutron Blaster II,Null S
Light Neutron Blaster II,Null S
Light Neutron Blaster II,Null S

Small Anti-Explosive Pump I
Small Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Small Nanobot Accelerator I

The ammo I was using actually swapped between Void, Null, Faction Antimatter, and either Lead or Thorium.

Lesson 1 - Moar Cap Boosters!
So this was a brawler meant to rep all comers and it did.  The first couple times I died it was because I ran out of Cap Boosters - I think the first time I mistakenly undocked with only the 5 in the booster, then I upped it to having 10 spares, then to having 20 spares in cargo.  The only way I was dying was when I was mismanaging my boosters or ran out of them, or when I had multiple simultaneous attackers.  You can see on my killmails that my ship theoretically has about 3200ehp but I was generally taking 7200 - 7900 damage before dying.

Lesson 2 - Can’t kill what you can’t catch
You’ll see a Condor on a couple of my lossmails.  I was able to do just shy of 1000mps with my Afterburner running, but when you have an ASB-fit MWD kiting ship running at 3000mps+ then you aren’t going to do much if you can’t put a scram on them.  I was happy with how often I was able to get away from kiters, and I found that having some Thorium or Lead ammo around allowed me to drive off or kill some of the opponents who were trying to play keep away.  Bottom line though is that if you are a brawler then you cannot expect to catch some of those ships.  Kiting is a tricky skill though, as I found when I tried to do that in my Tristan fits.

Lesson 3 - Overheat All the Things!
I kept kicking myself for not overheating.  I have Thermodynamics 3, so I don’t have any excuse there.  There were people who I might have been able to kill with overheated guns, catch with an overheated AB, or tank with an overheated repper/booster.  And in the Frigfest it was easy enough to get out of one fight, bounce off of celestial to let the criminal timer go away, then dock back up for repairs.

Non-Incursus Fun

I tried out a Tristan fit as well.  This was a real departure for me both in being a kiting ship as well as being a passive armor tank.  Not fast enough is the bottom line.  I need to up my shield skills and then try something like that again replacing the web with a shield tank, swapping over the rigs, and adding a drone damage mod in the lows.  The idea was to mob a target with the drones, and orbit fast at around 6500m where I can web, scram, and neut them.  That’s too close and it’s too slow to get transversal.  In the FFA setting, that orbit is also bound to take you near someone who’d be plenty happy to latch you down.  And plenty of non-Gallente frigates can project plenty of damage to 6500m.  The passive tank was odd for me as an active tanker, just helplessly watching my armor go away.  It does give you quite a timer though, with plenty of incentive to try to break free and warp off to station to get repaired.


So overall I’m very happy with my performance at FrigFest.  I know a lot of my opponents were those even more new to PVP than myself, but there were plenty of others out there with more renown (Tuskers, Rote Kapelle, RvBers, etc).

I should close with a disclaimer on the killboard.  It shows all the usual craziness of an Eve killboard - I’m shown as having 38 kills, which really only means that I did damage to 38 people who eventually died.  I see I’m marked as the final blow for 15 of them though, and paging through I see there are quite a few where I’m both top damage dealer and final blow.  With so much going on it wasn’t really possible to distinguish if someone was already involved in a fight when you started locking them, and with an FFA format that really wasn’t the point anyway.  Lots of people started with full shields and armor when I locked them and ended up a wreck in space, which is the satisfying part.