Incursions – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

So I just took place in the destruction of the Mom in Amarr space. While I am hardly an Incursion Vet of the standing of Mike Azariah or Ripard Teg I do feel that I should talk a bit about what seems to work, and what doesn’t so far.

Things that I like:

Fleets that move fast
Fleets that transfer DPS well
Fleets that communicate efficiently and have the discipline to chat on comms, without losing important info
Seeing shiny ships fly in dangerous situations
Meeting a new challenge
Pro logis.

Now to break it down a little.

Moving fast is KEY. Good FC’s keep the fleet moving, and aren’t afraid to wait list people for 3 or so sites if they know there will be an opening. I’ll wait for a good fleet running VGs in 7-8 minutes.

Transferring DPS well. Watching 40 missiles fly off into the black = not cool.

Good commo discipline. Chatting is fine, missing my cap partner telling me he’s jammed and primaried is uncool.

Shiny ships. Machs, Nightmares, Vindis, all sick fitted.

New challenges rock. All I need to say there.

Pro Logis. I’m not bad at logistics ships. So far no fleet I’ve been in has lost a ship and while I’ve contributed to that, it says a LOT that the logis operate at the level they do as consistently as they do.

The Bad.

Some FCs are ditherers. They would rather sit at a planet for 20 minutes deciding which guy to invite for the fleets 11th man (unnecessary a lot of the time) and all of a sudden they need to find 2 MORE guys because people got bored and left fleet / went afk / died of old age. So…. PSA Time:

I DIDN’T JOIN FLEET TO STARE AT 3 ROKHS WITH THEIR HARDENERS ON WHILE YOU DEBATE THE MERITS OF A RAVEN AND A MEGATHRON FFS

There. You can quote me on that.

Fit a proper buffer please, and broadcast early. I *HATE* having a guy in a 2+ billion isk ship get locked up and find out he’s at 1/4 shields.

Do it early or end up worse than this guy!

Broadcast

This guy almost won an egg. I almost burned out some reppers trying to get him back up.

The Ugly.

Good FCs keep fleets moving, Bad FCs waste time, then take too long to run sites because their compositions SUCK.

Imagine all the missiles flying off into nowhere.

Lookit all the missiles.

This is… a mess. CNR, Loki, Nightmare, Mael, Mega, Golem, Nightmare, Tengu, Logis.

Wonder how fast we transferred DPS from target to target.

Wow. Just Wow.

That is at least 2/3 cycles of missiles PER SHIP being wasted. Half our DPS just venting into empty space.

I like to fly with fleets that look like this:

Ahhhhhh

Vindi, CNR (yuck) Mach, Vindi, Vindi, Scimi, Vindi, Huginn, Mach, Basi.

Think they dumped a ton of DPS into empty space?

I actually was hoping for a nightmare instead of the CNR, but the CNR won out over a faction-laser nightmare.

Which brings me to the other ugly:

IF YOU WANT TO USE LASERS TRAIN FOR T2. YOU NEED SCORCH. YOU NEED IT LIKE YOU NEED A TANK. A BIG part of the time you will be out of Multifreq range. Scorch will be a BIG DPS boost over any other ammo type. Yes faction lasers are pretty. They even work better if you are using Tachyons. Using pulse? Use scorch.