In the early morning of the 24th February 2015 the station timer for F4R2-Q came out of reinforced and Pandemic Legion, as with any timer they are determined to win, dropped their super-capital fleet to ensure the strategic victory.
In all Pandemic Legion dropped 10 of their super-carriers along with around 45 Archon carriers.
Brave Collective, who own the station and the rest of their HERO coalition friendlies, formed up around 250 pilots in a wide array of ship types, including a 50 man Tengu strategic cruiser fleet and a 30 man Eagle fleet.
The HERO forces did their best to contend with overwhelming firepower of Pandemic Legion, with a small 4 man contingent of smart bombing Scorpions managing to get a warp in on the drones of the Pandemic Legion forces and unleashing hell. Unfortunately this was just a drop in the bucket, and the brave Scorpion pilots were all destroyed. To more effectively counter the Pandemic Legions superior forces HERO also brought with them a large wing of dampening and tracking disruption fit frigates, this helped the HERO forces to win the strategic objective, negating the DPS that PL could apply and push the timer back into the favor of HERO.
In what was already turning out to be a bad night for Pandemic Legion it then got worse when, during the engagement a member of Hoover Inc. Kylara Aleiron initiated the self destruct on his Aeon super-capital, mistakenly believing he was activating the self destruct on his alt sub-cap account.
By the time that Kylara realized that the self destruct was on the wrong character, the count down was over and the Aeon exploded in a 32 billion ISK killmail and a smoking hulk.
Click for killmail
Speaking on Reddit, Eva Vesto, of Brave Collective corporation Bearded BattleBears had this to say about PL dropping super-capital ‘wrecking ball’ fleets on HERO timers;
This isn’t about content for PL, it’s a strategic objective in a larger war for them and the fact we’ve had any good fights at all is something to be noted. Yes, it’s a dickhead tactic, but Eve is mostly a game about varying degrees of being dickheaded
Eva then went on to say that holding Catch would not be the be all and end all for the HERO Coalition;
HERO isn’t Catch, and Catch isn’t HERO. Losing one (mostly irrelevant) system we would probably retake anyway means nothing, we could lose the entirety of Catch and generally give not a single fuck. Fuck the consequences, always undock.
In all HERO came away with 104 ships lost in the engagement amounting to 8.2 billion Isk lost and an Efficiency of 81.8%. Pandemic Legion on the other hand had just 14 ships destroyed but they amounted to a whopping loss of 36.88 billion Isk, most of that coming from the Aeon loss, giving them an efficiency figure of 18.2%. Pandemic legion also lost an Archon to HERO which had been separated from the rest of its fleet, possibly due to a disconnect from server issue.
Click for killmail
While this battle does not have a huge loss in terms of ISK compared with other battles, the way it was lost makes this a very ‘hands on head’ moment for Pandemic Legion.
The full battle report for the timer can be found here.
If you have anything that you think should be reported on EN24, please contact me at @mail_lite on Twitter, email at [email protected] or Eve Mail me in game.
