Niko Mat
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Posted - 2008.03.07 14:02:00 -
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My gang has been troubled by Caldari recons of late. Specifically we have lost a few small gang engagements that on paper should have been fairly well-matched, simply because of an opposing Rook. Their Rook warps in at 100km (so far as I can tell) and starts with the jamming, breaking the locks of our generally cruiser/BC-sized ships fairly easily. Now I'm not complaining about this as this is entirely what the Caldari recons are meant to do - suffice to say, their Rook is doing it very well. 
However, I'm not content with sitting around managing 0 targets while being slowly killed, so I've been trying to think of some counter-strategies to nullify that blasted Rook. As yet we haven't tried anything specific, so I don't know how the Rook pilot will react when confronted with any particular threat. It's all theorycraft right now.
- I'm going to assume that the ship has no tank to speak of, so if we can get within damage range and pin him down, he's not going to last that long. Long-range ships seem to be a good way to go, then - a Caracal might be able to reach 100km with heavies, and of course if we can get drones on him then even better as they will still keep doing the damage if (when) the controlling ship is jammed. This would probably take multiple drone link augmentors to pull off though, which might prove to be a bit too much gimping of the setup for normal combat.
- And then once the Rook starts to take damage I'm pretty sure he'll just warp out - which is handy, but ideally we'd want to put him down for good else he'll be back 60 seconds later to start the jamming again (and during this time a fair bit of effort has been diverted to engaging him rather than the rest of his gang). I can definitely see some problems with tackling him - a ship will need to be fast to close the range, and if we send an interceptor it can probably be trivially jammed with a single racial, allowing the Rook to disengage at will again and thus accomplishing nothing. Perhaps a 3 mid-slot inty would do better here if it took an ECCM along...
- Of course, there's fighting fire with fire and jamming the Rook with another ECM ship. But this will possibly present problems of range, as if both ECM ships warp in at 100 from different directions, the resulting 200km separation between them will likely be too much, especially for T1 ECM ships. A sensor-dampening ship might do the trick too, shutting down the Rook's targeting range to something a little too close for comfort - and this ship can hopefully warp in with the rest of the forces as it is hopefully more durable than an ECM boat.
- My favourite so far is probably using a Curse - if the Curse can get within ~30km of the Rook, he should be able to instagib the other's cap (right?), which would prevent the Rook using his ECM to break the Curse's lock. This could in theory work with a large neut/neuts on any ship, but I don't fancy my chances of getting a battleship in range and getting a lock on the Rook without it getting spooked and warping out.
- Perhaps all the attempts to scram the Rook are doomed to failure and we need to be looking at alpha strikes - which to me says Muninn? If we can alpha all of his shield and some of his armour, he'll probably be a lot more timid about coming back in as well since he can only stand up to a few more volleys, even with a fully recharged shield.
Anyway, this is all a bit of public brainstorming (so I'm not accused of asking others to do all the work!). I've had a look through the archives with EVE Search too, and didn't find anything particularly helpful. So - what would you do against a Rook in this situation?
Thanks.
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