New Home, New Plans

Just joined the Insurgency alliance and moved to Branch within the last week or so. At the risk of sounding like a Drone Regions bumpkin, all I can say is Wow!! It’s like moving from Springfield to Chicago. You can buy stuff from people around the corner, there are specialty shops set up by master carebears (alts I say…), and you get shot by random, angry people. Local and alliance chat are always buzzing with drunken humor. The entire place is filled with highly talented FCs and pvpers. Sure, there's your share of assholes, but I'm amazed by how helpful people were (being a girl helps). Did I already mention my fantastic shopping experience? It’s an awesome feeling despite knowing only a few in the alliance thus far – maybe I’m a city gal after all!

The only problem is that I can’t fly a proper fleet BS. Fo’ shizzle. I can fit a sniper Raven with cruise launchers and T2 armor tank, and I have a 80% success rate of running away from POS fire, but I get laughed at. I’d be lucky if I could target the primaries and secondaries in time, fire off a volley, and watch as 30 seconds later the missiles hit space dust. That, and I’ve been working on my support and leadership skills, so I haven’t had time to look into buffing my main for better ships. My belief is that if you can’t fit a ship properly with T2 mods, then it’s really not worth flying them.

I foresee staying in 0.0 pvp alliances for a long time to come (just my playing style), so I’m starting training for a full T2 fit battleship. The problem is, my main is Caldari and you know the saying for Caldari pvp success rates. The only viable Caldari BS platform for pvp is the Rokh. Scorpions get primaried so fast that it’s not even funny, especially in a laggy battle. Ravens… well… I personally hate flying them for fleet ops, but that’s all I can fly properly at the moment.

The problem is that Rokhs must have been designed by a male engineer who was half-Caldari and half-Gallente. First of all, it’s actually symmetrical in shape (and phallic-shaped as usual. Gawd CCP needs to incorporate some women into their ship design team!) Secondly, it’s built on a hybrid turret weapon system. I have a decent amount of skillpoints in missile launcher systems, but my gunnery absolutely stinks. Someone tell me if I’m missing anything in my planned training tree for a sniper Rokh:

- Gunnery V
- Large Hybrid Turret V (and all prerequisites)
- Large Railgun Specialization III/IV
- Trajectory Analysis IV
- Motion Prediction IV
- Caldari Battleship IV
- Blaster specialization for later

Total training time: 90 days

It would take me a good 3 months just to train up the T2 large railguns and basic gunnery support skills. Then I’d need to train up Caldari Battleship V, which takes another month or so. I could just train the gunnery skills first and slap on T1 best named guns for the time being...

Sigh… In comparison, I could get a Rorqual in 66 days. Or a badass T2 fit Apocalypse in 130 days. That, and I wanted to train up for the Nighthawk/Falcon, which follows a completely different training path. I could pimp my main for industry and my alt as a pure pvp character, but I am greedy and want all the killmails on my main…

What to do? Choices, choices…

Edit: OMG I just got publicly flamed on Vent for flying the only raven in fleet. TWICE! x_x That's worse than flying a drake. Guess Rokh is the way to go!