Lone Drake versus Sleepers
11th November 2009 – 5.43 pmThe w-space system connecting to our own holds a pulsar. The blue spatial phenomenon pulses with energy that affects a ship's shields, significantly boosting their strength. The pulsar is not terribly exciting for the non-Caldari pilots, but luckily none of them are around. Unluckily, there are few capsuleers in the wormhole engineers who have the superior skills to pilot Caldari ships anyway, but I am around along with a Minmatar pilot who wisely is training towards Caldari ships.
My ferret-loving colleague taunts me in to attempting to battle Sleepers by myself in the Drake. As much as I know he is goading me more than being supportive, I still have great confidence in my Drake's ability to passively shield-tank through heavy damage. Even if I didn't have little else to do, I would still be enthusiastic about taking down some Sleepers single-handedly. Docking my Damnation and boarding Non-sentient Ship, my w-space Drake, I warp to the wormhole and pass through to the pulsar system.
The Drake's systems get a noticable boost when I reorientate myself on the other side of the wormhole. My monitors show the shields are six thousand points stronger, and regenerating almost 170 hp/s with only two core defence field purgers fitted. My colleague's prowess with Caldari ships, whilst an admirable direction to follow, is limited to ECM ships currently, so he sits back at the wormhole as I surge towards the first anomaly on my own. Two Sleeper frigates and two cruisers greet me as I drop out of warp, which lets me catch up on some technical reading, shields not dropping below 90% strength for this first encounter. One of the Sleepers must send out a distress call, though, as reinforcements soon turn up.
Four cruisers and two frigates hitting my pulsar-boosted shield still doesn't cause me much concern, although I concentrate my fire on the frigates just in case they try to scramble my warp drives. Even if I could tank the Sleeper damage I am still in a neighbouring w-space system to our tower and don't want the occupant capsuleers to find me alone and unable to warp away. My Drake's shields are managing to withstand the Sleeper fire easily enough, and my missiles destroy the hostile ships without too much effort, but I find I cannot rely on my drones for any DPS. Sleepers are keen in detecting multiple threats, and my missile fire is not quick or strong enough to continually deflect attention away from the drones. After losing three drones to Sleeper fire I leave the remaining two in the bay for the rest of the encounter.
It is not long before I am facing six cruisers and a Sleeper battleship. My colleague asks if I am okay, wondering if he should fit an Amarr armour-tanking Harbinger with an experimental shield-tank to provide assistance. 
I reply that if the battleship stops 'lightly hitting' me I could be in trouble, after which the battleship does indeed stop lightly hitting me. I am in trouble. Thankfully, I am not being scrambled, affording me the opportunity to warp out when needed to let my shields regenerate, which I end up doing several times, using the wormhole to our tower to double as a potential escape route. Even so, I lose a bit of armour here and there, overestimating my shield's defences and underestimating the time to align and warp out once or twice, but I am okay. I could use a bit more DPS on the battleship, though.
The Harbinger flies in and together we finish off the Sleeper threat in the anomaly, my colleague understandably nervous about buffer tanking in his ship with no support for repairs. But with his big boost to our DPS we are easily successful! As he salvages and loots the wrecks he points my way to a second anomaly, which runs much the same as the first. It is quite exciting and certainly somewhat challenging to face Sleepers mostly solo, even with the help of a pulsar, and the added damage output of the Harbinger is a blessing against the battleships.
Once the second anomaly is clear, we notice the capsuleer occupants of the system are starting to wake up, with various ships appearing and disappearing on the directional scanner. It's a huge w-space system, and the traffic pattern looks like the other capsuleers are mining instead of preparing for combat. Even so, we don't want to be caught unawares, so call an end to the operation for now. We still return to our tower with an excellent haul of loot for only the two of us.
3 Responses to “Lone Drake versus Sleepers”
What type of system were you in? My Myrmidon can tank a sleeper BS with several cruisers and frigs in a C2, but I think the BS are tougher in harder systems...
Losing the drones was so annoying that I am on High Sec break while I train up shields/missiles/caldari cruisers for a Drake!
Just from the screen shot, I'm going to guess it was a class 3 w-space system.
Yes. I understand our C4 w-space home has a static entrance to an arbitrary C3 system, which was where all this took place.