Candymen drop a Capital, and other Shiny Explosions

This weekend there were two Alliance shiny roams, both to celebrate the anniversary of the CandyMan Cartel's formation.  Shiny is the opposite of most of the Rifterlings / Point Blank Alliance gangs, so I was curious how it would go.  I was only able to make the second of the roams (titled "Fuck Your Killboard"), which was planned to be Faction BS, Faction BC, T3 Cruisers... and once we found something to fight there was an Archon to be dropped.

How it Went

We stumbled around a bit to get people together.  Most of the corp/alliance fleets I've been in have been more standing fleets, so it doesn't surprise me that as a group we weren't well coordinated for go-time.  From what I read this is normal for many groups for whom scheduled ops are a more regular thing.  We ended up with the majority of the fleet undocked (including the Archon) and doing a conga line around the Sosala station with neutral ships on grid watching us.  Opsec wasn't really a goal though - apparently word had been put out that we were going to be bringing out a bigger fleet than usual to try to make sure we could find a fight.  I'm not sure if the fact that we had an Archon to drop was intentionally leaked or not.

We didn't get too many gates out before we had word of a Shadow Cartel gang of Absolutions and Guardians.  Can you think of a tankier opponent composition?  We landed on a gate with them and bailed back to a FW plex for a moment while we got people together, then jumped right back into them.  As soon as we engaged the cyno went up and our Archon dropped in.  My memory gets fuzzy fast here, but I think we tried to break a Guardian and failed, switched to a Pilgrim and killed it, and then never killed anything else.  After our Archon came in an enemy cyno went up and Shadow Cartel dropped in two Moros.  The Moros as called primary and we piled it on.  We drove the Moros into structure before we had lost so many ships that it started coming back up through our dps.  The Archon went down and we scattered to the winds.  Fortunately I only was pointed at the end, so after some overheated MWDing I broke tackle and warped off.  Comms was a happy jumble at that point.  A lot of people were exicted about the whole thing - I think most of us hadn't been involved in even seriously trying to take down a dread before so just hearing "J-A-Y in the Moros is Primary" and "Overheat all guns on the Moros" was pretty cool. (Battle Report)

I headed back towards home station and heard there was a small flashy gang on the gate in Frerstorn.  I saw Rupture, Rupture, Crow, Comet and piled in to attack.  I thought there were other people coming down the way behind me, but mostly I was thinking that since I expected the Proteus to die about 5 minutes ago I was willing to engage anything for fun.  Turns out that the people behind me were much farther out than I thought and the Sentinel soon had my turrets ineffective and my cap draining fast.  On counsel of the nearest friendly guy I tried to deaggress to take the gate and get closer to reinforcements, but I didn't make it.  Sadly I also didn't get my shiny pod out either.  (Proteus, Pod)  Congrats to Blind Warp, and I'm glad to see that two of my shiny mid-slot modules dropped so they got a nice loot out of it.

After-Action

I thought it was fun, though I wish that we'd had a chance to kill some more before Shadow Cartel smacked into us.  I'm not surprised we got jumped so fast since this was done pretty much the opposite of opsec before the roam.  Though if I'd know that we were going to leak about it so much I probably would have let some of my non-alliance friends know so they could come join the fun.

True to the name of the op, my ISK Efficiency dropped by 5% or something.  But as everybody knows, killboards are nonsense anyway - mine is really only high because I'd gotten in on a supercarrier kill in a FrigFest sometime back, so by killboard logic that is as good as if I'd solo'd it personally.

Lessons Learned

• If I'd known that we were pretty much going to go straight to a gate and then brawl a logi-heavy fleet I probably wouldn't have bothered with the shiny scram and web, since they weren't relevant to my ship's contribution in the fight.  For the same money I could have contributed more by putting on another shiny magstab perhaps.
• Given how T3 cruisers can stand up to overheating, I probably should have been overheating my guns on the Moros long before the command went out on comms, and should have been overheating early on the later gang that killed me.  Once I was capped out of course there wasn't much to do.  Which is also a good reminder about the difference between a buffer-fleet ship and a roaming ship - if the Proteus had been meant to fight solo I probably would have gone with a configuration with the fourth mid slot, a cap booster, and a drone bay so I could have tried to get ECM drones on that Crucifier.
• Leroying my Proteus into the gang on the gate heading home afterwards is all on my own head.  I've noticed this before - I think that when I'm on an op when I expect to lose a ship, there is a mental coasting effect that makes me throw away the ship too easily.  That could have been a good ship to have a more fun shiny moment with than dying to a cruiser gang on a gate with no kills to show for it.
• This was a good reminder that one shiny ship can get taken down by a cheap gang when that gang can do things like apply scram, neut, and TD - and especially good lesson since usually I'm going to be on the cheap gang side of things.
• I found that losing the ISK value of the Proteus didn't affect me emotionally.  Losing the pod was annoying.  But having to queue up Gallente Propulsion Systems V at 3d 8h 44m is a real bummer.  I could have gotten my Medium Autocannon Specialization from 2 to 4 in that time.  This makes me more likely to want to fly HACs when doing something shiny, and saving my surviving Proteus for more PVEish things.

BTW, Point Blank Alliance went into AWOX event week as soon as the last shiny roam finished, so if you're looking at our killboards and wondering why there is suddenly so much blue on blue violence then that's why.