I Was Sucked Dry!

......and not in a good way.

It always used to be "T2 = Win" when dealing with a 1v1 with similar ship hulls. Yes there were always the exceptions, but as a rule of thumb, T2 was king of the class.

But then came Teiricide and so far frigates and cruisers are much better equipped to face their T2 counterparts, especially the more specialised ships.

I was capturing a medium plex in Hasama when I was warned in one of the intel channels that the lone squid (Caldari Militia pilot) in the system was in a Pilgrim. I thought about it and decided it was worth hanging in there. I generally hate fighting neuting ships and the Pilgrim is the Armarrian Force Recon hull with a bonus to energy drain amount and drone HPs/DPS. 

But I was bored and a potential fight is still a potential fight. My Vexor relied on drones for its DPS which obviously don't need capacitor  but the double stasis webifiers play an important role when using heavy drones on smaller ships so I needed to be careful there.

After a ten minute wait, the Pilgrim finally appeared on short-range scan and warped into my plex. I raced towards him to try and stop him cloaking. My worry was that he might cloak up, move to range and then engage from distance. If he was outside of my webs range then I was buggered*. But he didn't try to cloak, he simply proceeded to sit on top of me. Excellent! So my new plan was to try and take him down before he fully nueted me empty.

Not. Even. Close.

Damn those things suck you dry like ***insert inappropriate comparison of sucking thing here***

I was out of cap before I could say "Motherf......". I couldn't believe how fast my capacitor was drained by the Pilgrims neuts. Within a few seconds I couldn't have more than a single mod operating at any one time and even that needed me hovering over the module and reactivating it every cycle. I was actually spamming the point button to ensure it would reactivate as soon as I regained a tiny amount of cap. I would have been in trouble but for one thing. The guy wasn't moving.

My plan was same as always in the Vexor. Get on top of the target, scram and double web them and let the heavy and medium drones keel it. If he'd been burning I would assume the heavy drones wouldn't as been as effective without the dual webs running. But he didn't burn..... he didn't even smoulder  He sat there, still as a rock, neuting me dry and letting his T1 (yes T1) drones do the DPS for him. My T2 Ogres heavies and medium Hammerheads were tearing through his armour as my computer continued to bitch "The capacitor is empty". 

I was holding point but that was it for my active modules. I didn't have the capacitor to cycle my guns, run the damage control or activate the webs. However, there was little point in activating the webs, as this guy was still just sat still. I just wanted the point to stop him escaping!

I started to worry, not about losing, but about it being a draw. We were both at sat still and zero metres from each other not moving, but his armour was going down much faster than mine (I had 1600 plate plus passive hardeners). If I'd have been him I would have looked to get out, which should have been easy given that in capacitor terms I was drier than the desert where I live! No way I could even think about using my prop mod or webs to keep up. But he just sat there as he reached 33% armour. Neuting away merrily and probably swearing at his T1 drones to do MOAR DPS.

He popped as I hit about 80% armour. KABOOM!

The revamped T1 cruisers are definitely much better than they were. I'm not saying they are anywhere as good as all the T2, if that had been a Sacrilege rather than a Pilgrim it probably would have gone the other way. Also pilot skill and fit also play a massive part. But the T1 cruisers are much more a force to be reckoned with these days.

*Yes, I got my Pilgrim and Curse mixed up. I know the Pilgrim doesn't have the neut range bonus so would have had to get close to use his medium neuts so he couldn't have kited me anyway. I don't really fly much Amarr!