This article was written in two parts. The first is prior to most of the combat and the second is a battle report covering some of the major fights
Turns out that, once again, Foxholers are the target of an eviction. It’s happening right now, in fact, as I write and post this article. Hole Control are currently busy keeping hole control so I’ve got bugger all else to do but sit here, play WoW, and shitpost on my own blog. Let’s talk about what happened here.
I should mention that I typically don’t like to post such topical pieces since it tends to lead to the post being completely irrelevant after a couple of weeks. This, however, is such a large event in my corp’s history that I might as well say a few words and share a bit of a story. Really, I’ll just be happy to see the explosion at the end of it all no matter who wins. I hate evictions.
Part 1 – Hole Control Takes Hole Control
Sounds pessimistic, doesn’t it? A group shows up on our doorstep and I’ve already accepted defeat. I think I’d be stupid not to. They have almost a 1:1 ratio of logi to Leshak DPS and the fleet in my home is bigger than my biggest ever Foxholer fleet. I have no doubt that they’ll be throwing another dozen logi and DPS on the pile, too. It’s not a fight, it’s (another) seal clubbing, unfortunately.
We’ll be fine, though. There’s nothing left in this hole for them to take and really nothing to lose beyond what is literally planned to be lost during the fight. We moved our assets out weeks ago after finding out about the eviction in advance. I’m not going to out my informant here but they know who they are and they have a very special place in my heart. <3
It’s kind of funny, actually. During the whole buildup to this eviction for the past few weeks we’ve been batphoning friends and getting them in the hole to defend a day early for each attempt. Hole Control found out about that every time and every time they chickened out of it. Like I say, seal clubbing and not a fight. I suppose paying a corp 50B ISK to run an eviction for you gets you that.
But no, I’m not taking this personally. Shit like this happens in wormhole space and I’m pretty sure I know who the contractor is and why. You’ve just got to take evictions as they come and find some way to deal with them. People in my corp won’t lose assets, but the game time loss and resultant anxiety isn’t nice. Regardless, the main armour timer is coming up in 45 minutes as I write this post so I think I’ll stop here and continue with updates after that’s over. It’s where the meat of the conflict will happen and if we lose it badly then there will be no hull timer fight. o/
Note for non-wormholers: Evictions are all about keeping control of wormholes and podding people out. As defenders, if we lose pods then that person is not coming back to the fight unless we win or take hole control in some way. I have an article that details this.
Part 2 – Shiny and Chrome
Oh my. Oh my indeed. It would appear that my doctrine actually worked. This is way better that the 4b ISK Rattles we originally wanted to buy. You can click the image below to see the ZKill battle report but I’m going to be going through a full AAR here complete with memes and Praxis dreams.
So the doctrine that I ran with was the damn Praxis. The battleship that literally everyone in EVE can fly without training anything. We fitted them up with cruise missiles, some armour buffer, application mods, and – most importantly – a Target Spectrum Breaker. We undocked with approximately 30-35 DPS Praxes and just 2 Nestors for logi. Our opponents came at us with approximately 20 Leshaks, 4-5 Drekavacs, 11 Guardians, 2 Nestors, various Bhaalgorns/Armageddons, and ECM support by way of Tengu and Falcon.
Video, image gallery, and memes at the bottom!
Knowing their fit ahead of time to have an explosive hole if we neuted them and an EM hole if we didn’t, I split our damage between those types and my fiancé Teddy Gbyc started calling targets. At first it seemed a bit sketchy and our first target took five volleys to kill – that pile of logi really put in work for them. Teddy was headshot while we tried to kill Julian and they then proceeded to headshot me on both of my main characters. Using our escape bays we reshipped and came back out to keep calling.
What proceeded was a bloodbath. Each side lost a little over 30 ships each. Every 30-60 seconds we lost a 300m ISK Praxis and they lost a nearly 1b ISK Leshak despite their insane amount of logi on-grid. This worked in our favour because we continually reshipped. Our citadel gunner Xaoxinn handed out over 30 new ships to people as they kept trading him.
There was something a little magical which happened though. Remember the two Nestors we had? Yeah some of our Praxes managed to tank without them at all thanks to the Spectrum Breaker. We hit that button and the damage would just stop as the hostile locks dropped. A few of my guys were even able to pause the incoming damage long enough to dock up, repair, and come back 10 seconds later.
This went on until we took a look at the grid and realised that nearly every single hostile DPS ship was dead, having been trapped by their own bubbles. We followed up by taking hole control ourselves and setting up our own doorstops while the hostile fleet repaired in the staging Astrahus. We then bashed their POS and settled in for the long-haul. The rest of the story isn’t so interesting. I think I spent at least 20 hours over two days leading the fleet, coordinating, and watching wormholes. It was hell, but worth it to get through this.
As it stands right now, Hole Control needlejack’d most of their forces out of our wormhole. This leaves us with a few slightly damaged structures and a few hostiles remaining. As I’ve said before though, there is every chance that they come back. That isn’t a HC thing, that’s simply the nature of wormhole evictions. You can’t lock down your wormhole forever and nobody is truly safe.
Good job my Foxholers, you did great.
And obviously thank you so much for the groups that turned up to help! I treasure you all.
Note to future readers: This patch changes the TSB, it no longer breaks locks and instead provides signature reduction effects.
Congrats Foxholers and allies! Well done!
Nice concise article!
Great post and funny memes! Too bad I couldn’t be there to shoot at you, the fight seemed very fun even with so many lock breakers.
Gj on the defence!
I really enjoyed that. I particularly liked the fact that one of the first Leshaks to die was called ‘Eviction Time’ . Hubris… bad for your health.