On The Grid (#1)

 

The Rifter is a very powerful combat frigate and can easily tackle the best frigates out there. It has gone through many radical design phases since its inauguration during the Minmatar Rebellion. The Rifter has a wide variety of offensive capabilities, making it an unpredictable and deadly adversary. 
~ Evelopedia

At the end of each week I'll review a recent fight, looking at what I did correctly and what I did wrong. It's only fitting that the first of these posts be about Bill's first 1v1 despite the fact that it was full of fail. Hey, that means there's more to learn from right?

I picked up another Rifter on the directional scanner (d-scan) while bouncing around in Heild. Based on local, which was mostly populated by my own corpies, I identified the pilot as a 2009 character. At first he seemed to be avoiding me, warping out as I landed. At one point he was within 20km of my ship before bugging out. When we finally engaged, I was surprised because I thought he was gonna bail again. We ended up fighting at a planet, which I prefer. There aren't any rats to fuck up the kill-mail.

It was a pretty straight forward fight but I came out in a pod.

THE GOOD

Base Rifter Shield Resists

Speed Control: I was flying a shield tanked Rifter, which is a rare setup. Most people rock an active armor tank with a 200mm armor plate. So I approached my opponent at about 3/4 speed, mimicking an armor tanked Rifter. Why do this? I'm hoping he will load fusion ammo, the best ammo to use against an armor Rifter. However, fusion ammo hits my shield-tank's highest resist (Explosive).

THE BAD

Base Rifter Armor Resists

Know Your Range: Oh the bad... This is basic stuff here. Usually when I fight a Rifter I load phased-plasma because you never know what kind of tank they're using. In this case, I needed all the help I could get with my low skills so I took a chance and loaded fusion ammo. When the fight got underway I was pretty disappointed with the damage output of my little Rifter. My shields were dropping like a rock but his were taking little damage. Was he shield tanked too? No I was webbed... (A web means armor tank because armor tank modules use low slots, shield tank modules use mids. I'll talk about this in a post about fitting theory.). So why the fuck am I not hitting this dude? I started to over-think the situation... Did he have anti-explosive rigs fit? So I changed ammo to phased plasma... It takes ten second to change ammo... ten long seconds of not shooting. Needless to say, I exploded and didn't even get through the shields on his armor tanked Rifter. I don't advise changing ammo mid fight (Sometimes you can get away with it but it's best to stay wrong unless you can pull range to reload). What does this have to do with range? My older character has maxed out gun skills and thus much better range than Bill. This combined with the fact that I haven't flow a Rifter in forever, flying the Wolf nearly exclusively for the past 6 months, lead me to expect more damage at 6k than I should've and thus I second guessed my ammo choice. Patience would have definitely been a virtue here. 

THE UGLY

Bill's Mom