Region: Lonetrek
System: Saranen – Imperium Staging System
On April 21, just after 10:50 EVE time, a twenty-man dreadnought fleet belonging to Goonswarm Federation was completely wiped out by Pandemic Legion.
It all began as an attempt to bait ‘The Fastest Titan in the North’, a Ragnarok flown by Parti9999omega in the PL corp of North Eastern Swat. Before this massive dread wipe, Patri had single-handedly destroyed nearly a dozen capital ships in the Imperium’s staging system. As lone dreadnoughts, carriers, or even Rorquals jump into Saranen or they mistakenly engage someone on the undock, Parti is quick to jump in, activate his doomsday device, and moonwalk off grid.
This time would be no different than any other; however, instead of it being one or two kills, he got twenty. Goonswarm Federation decided to bait the ‘Swagnarok’, but several mistakes in timing and knowledge of mechanics allowed Pandemic Legion to drop the hammer on Goonswarm in their home system.
All of the dreads, except one from Amok., belonged to Gaara’s Sniper, a member of I’m Fine and You Aren’t in Goonswarm Federation. He is well-known throughout the Imperium and EVE Online as a multiboxer that uses nearly two dozen characters to solo gank industrial ships and miners in highsec, as well as mass rat in expensive Chimeras. This was not his first encounter with Pandemic Legion. Over three months ago, Gaara’s had this runin with PL and lost 110B ISK in ratting Chimera’s.
While this seemed like a great idea for Gaara, timing was not on his side, and multiboxing that many accounts at once can cause problems.
Gaara’s Sniper of GSF stated:
“We decided to catch that swagnarok. We baited with an archon, tackled the titan, lit the cyno and then came sets of failures. To jump to the beacon on my characters it took me 20 seconds, 5 more seconds passed while I waiting for them to drop out of tunnel. Then I realised five of my guys didn’t have an overview to show titans and decided to discard them for moment. I started locking the titan which took me 15 sec, then started pressing guns and siege.”
For readers who have not yet flown a dreadnought, when you go into siege mode, you lose lock on all targets. This means that Gaara wasted all that time locking the target for nothing, and to put this into perspective, he did this with nineteen accounts, one at a time. Gaara’s apparently had no idea about this mechanic before starting the dread bomb.
“Needless to say after I pressed the siege module, the lock broke and more failures came. It then took me another 80 seconds to relock each of the dreads on the Ragnarok and then another 20 seconds to active my guns.”
By the time Gaara had all of this Moroses ready to start shooting the titan, Pandemic Legion had already jumped in their supercap fleet and started killing dreads. Pandemic Legion cyno’d in at least twenty-one supercarriers and seventeen titans to dispose of the Moros fleet.
When asked if he regretted the decision, Gaara’s stated, “Well… it was now or on Friday. After that I won’t be able to play, so I decided to insurance fraud them. CCP is making dreads cost 600M ISK less and I’m not sure when they will implement it, so I decided to do it now. Needless to say, I was against time here, as dropping on the titan within range of PL’s staging system was suicide. I fucked the most important thing–time. Maybe I should go on a one month course to -LSH- so they can train me in titankilling-fu.”
Update: A video of the encounter has been made available:
Goonswarm Dreads DDed by Pandemic Legion Titans 4/21/16
