Astero vs Astero was a very hard fight

PvP Gameplay Center PvP Ships & Modules
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I had one of the hardest and most intense fights I’ve ever had in EVE yesterday. I decided to go hunting the Winter Nexus explorers in a PVP fit Astero.

I was camping a data site and a buzzard came in, as I was about to decloak and engage it another Astero Decloaked and went after the Buzzard. So while he was attacking the Buzzard I decloaked and attacked the Astero.

I figured I had the advantage as I had Augmented Hobs, Duel armour reps, cap booster and a drone damage amplifier. It turned out that the other Astero was also duel rep, cap booster PVP fitted.

As you can imagine this quickly turned into an absolute nightmare of an engagement, he could tank my drones and I could tank his so it turned into a race between who could kill each others drones first and who would run out of cap boosters first. In the end neither one of us could win, I just kept pulling and re-deploying my drones and he did the same. This went on for a good 10 to 15 mins. Eventually I stopped scramming him but he wouldn’t give up but eventually he stopped scramming me and we both warped off.

Basically we had to butt out and call it even.

I am wandering if there is anything I could have done to turn this to my advantage? I think I had more dps but he had more tank. The only thing I can really think of to win such an engagement would be to swap the prob launcher out for a small Neut and then this would cap him out faster, but then id need to carry around a mobile depot which means less room for cap booster charges.

This was not an experience i hope to repeat, probably wont engage in another Astero vs Astero fit if I think its PVP fited.

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Did the buzzard survive ?

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nope!

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Depends on the details. Since you engaged in a site with a covops cyno capabale ship (the buzzard), I take it you were microwarp + long point fit, rather then scram + web + ab?

Warrior Drones manouver faster and track better then hobgoblins, including augmented ones. I don’t fly droneboats, so I can’t tell whether the difference is good enough.

If you have a Web on the long range fit, you can grab a hobgoblin at far orbit, set your own astero to follow the drone to make sure it stays webbed, which increases damage on it by a bit, but more importantly prolongs the time it’s going to take the opposing Astero to get it scooped. Even with low damage platforms like a condor or slasher the gained time is good enough to wreck a hobgoblin, though the turret and missile damages scale much better with webs then drones do (unless you have double web, which isn’t possible while cap booster fitted).

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If you swap your Core Probe Launcher for a small neut, you should drain his cap-charges faster than he drains yours.
Then you ‘just’ have to win the game of drones and hope no one else on the hunt finds you in the meantime.

On the issue with mobile depot and cap charges: Do it in lowsec where there are stations.

Or try a different ship.
I don’t know how hard the event sites are to scan down, and how good your scanning skills are, but you may find some usable utility highslots in destroyers or other frigates.