The Defias Blog

So, being a noob sucks, right? And sucking pretty much sucks, y’know? Well, it’s why there haven’t been a lot of fun-to-read battle reports about skirmishes or me hunting in the red like the way I used to write about hunting lowsec in a Wolf (BEFORE the speed nerf/AF buff patch, aka Quantum Rise!). I know that I have the equipment to go out and do it, but I haven’t got the player experience to go with the equipment.

I’m like the noob who buys an account that can fly motherships and buys enough ISK to get an officer-fitted mothership and does not understand, for the life of him, how the hell he STILL got ganked in Amamake. Except I didn’t buy gold (or an account) and I’m not trying to sail the PotBS equivalent of an Aeon, I’m sailing what I suppose could be compared to a Vagabond (fast, maneuverable, doesn’t hit very hard but gets the job done… in the right hands). But there are two primary differences…

1. A Vagabond is a spaceship, my ‘Raa’ Sleek Frigate is a sailboat.
2. I knew very well how to fly a Vagabond.

At least, I used to know how to fly a Vagabond; after the speed nerf, I’d be afraid to take a Vagabond or a Rapier out of the hangar (though I expect that this patch has made the previously-neglected Muninn a more popular “light sniper” platform? still not as good as a Zealot or Eagle, I bet). Not that fear ever stopped me (you might remember the time when I ran in against an Omen-class cruiser and Typhoon-class Battleship with just my little Wolf AF, or the time I went after the Apocalypse BS with the same odds and was actually winning - very, very slowly winning with Hail S ammo - until 3 or 4 of his corpmates appeared in Local).

Trial and Error and Error

So, at L36 I captured a ‘Raa’ Sleek Frigate from some random NPC near Matthew Town, took it in to outfit for speed and range, loaded up on Bar Shot and Bronze Shot and took it out on the Open Sea. I’d read a bit and asked around a bit, and had come to the conclusion that a ship this size can take on a large, less nimble ship if the captain manages to out-maneuver his target, dismast ‘em and pump shot through their stern. “Okay, then,” I thought to myself, “let’s go find something big and slow-ish.” When I saw a L50‘Trinidad’ Frigate I got a little carried away. Not knowing that the Trinnie is a modified ‘Conquistador’ (I thought it was something else) I maneuvered for wind and attacked. Imagine my surprise when I found myself having a very hard time trying to out-sail him! At least the ‘Raa’ didn’t cost me anything (though I did lose 20,000 doubloons or so on the outfitting).

And then, a few days later some of the other captains in Nine Winds were grinding OS fleets for cash and asked if I wanted to join them for a bit of power levelling. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for missions at the time and my ‘Stralsund’ MC “The Shameless Hussy” was nearby, so I said sure and sailed out to meet them at Irish Point. We were all quite aware that our activities were creating unrest and would produce a pvp circle in short order but we were fine with that. When the bubble popped, I took the Hussy in to Tortuga and brought out the ‘Algiers’ Refit Polacre that I’d recently been awarded from a mission chain. While she’s not very tough, the “Breath of Freedom” is fast and arguably the best tackling ship of her size (and overall) in Pirates of the Burning Sea… in the right hands. My hands, however, are all wrong.

One of our number was AFK (unfortunately, the AFK one was the most experienced of our small group in matters PvP) and as we came out of a battle instance with some NPCs we were greeted by three British ships who’d decided to wait for us. There was a bit of discussion and as they had us surrounded it was decided that our best bet would be to let them drag us into a battle instance and try to get out of it that way. Unfortunately, this plan changed twice.

They had two Privateers in their group and the Privateer has a lot of good speed buffs so they had no trouble getting hold of one of us so that he wouldn’t be able to escape. Forced to commit, we turned back to fight but our mate was taking quite a bit of damage and quite quickly so told us to let ‘em have him - save our ships. So, we turned to observe that most honorable pirate tradition. Then the AFK veteran returned and wanted to make a go of it, so we turned back again. Unfortunately, the vet had apparently underestimated how much damage our man had taken and when she found that his firepower had been removed from the fight, the order was once again ‘retreat’. I got out of it okay, as did the fourth member of our group. The first man’s ship and the vet’s, however, were both lost.

Now, they all know I’m ‘the new guy’. I was the only captain in that small flotilla below L50, so I’m sure that none of the responsibility for that poor showing rests on my head… still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d had a better idea of what was going on in all of that chaos I might’ve been able to take charge of the situation in the vet’s absence and things could’ve turned out differently.

It made me miss EVE, a lot. In New Eden, I knew exactly what ships could do and whether or not to engage and exactly how to engage if that was what we decided to do (at least, in small gang, sub-BS PvP) and if I didn’t, we never went out without a clearly defined fleet commander so I knew that one of those voices on Ventrilo knew wtf we were supposed to be doing and would make sure we knew when we needed to. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a PvP situation that could be described as ‘chaotic’.

Training Materials

So, I went to the PotBS forums in search of training materials to help improve my game. Just like any forum, to find useful information you generally have to dig through a pile of flaming and trolling to pick out a gem of helpful advice. This is how I stumbled over someone’s link to a video they’d made of one of their own solo failures.

In EVE, there are so many players and so many great fansites (like Chribba’s OMG Labs projects, for example). Being so new and with such a small community by comparison, PotBS just doesn’t have any of that stuff yet, so I had no potbs-files.com to go looking for videos on. I didn’t even think to try typing pirates of the burning sea into YouTube!

I was amazed at how much stuff I found - not as much as if you type in Warcraft or EVE, sure, but still a ton of stuff. One in particular that I found interesting was a 3-part video of two lowbies taking out a L50 in identical ships so I thought I’d share. Here’s the first one, it’ll be easy enough for you to find the second and third from there, if you’re so inclined. Enjoy!

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