AT 8 - Day 2 Qualifiers: HUN Reloaded v TuskerBastards

We were super excited about the AT and we all assembled in station at Hevrice and waited impatiently. The team selection was posted up a couple of days ago and I was slotted into one of the two rooks. We had practised a few set-ups and I was quite happy with this one though I don't normally fly an ECM boats (despite being highly specialised due to my love of the lach and 'zu). So I was in hangar, the GM arrived and said hi, we tried to ransom him and all we got was a Haiku from CCP Claw and in a flash, I was whisked off to another part of the galaxy, called 'tournament arena'. Each team had to pick an assembly point and we chose '2C'. We all warped there and aligned to the tournament bunker.

The TuskerBastards fleet was as follows:

Bhaalgorn
Apocalypse
Apocalypse
Rook
Rook
Guardian
Daredevil

The youtube video tells it all - the scimitar was our primary but got out of range too quickly so we switched to the nearest hurricane. Both the scimitar and nearest hurricane were jammed by me while Kopecky had a drake, thrasher and one of the dramiels jammed. The HUN Reloaded thrasher was then webbed by our daredevil and the FC decided to switch from the hurricane and alpha the thrasher which promptly died. However, the HUN Reloaded team had too much DPS left over, jamming notwithstanding and they more or less alpha'ed my rook soon after the thrasher. I called for armour repair as soon as I was yellow-boxed and then was into hull a second later. I popped another second after that.

This freed up the scimitar and the first hurricane and adding to the HUN Reloaded considerable firepower, Kopecky lasted an even shorter period as he popped. Meanwhile, our apocs were now jammed by EC-drones and it was at this point I realised that we would lose and that we were deadmen walking. This was punctuated with MrFrog exploding as his guardian went down. Arrihidaues had our warrior II drones and I think went after the first HUN Reloaded Dramiel and killed it but he had suffered too much damage and with no rep available, he died. We had lost our support fleet. Having concentrated our DPS into our two APOCs, the bhaalgorn was our flagship but we were expecting our apocs to be dishing out the most DPS. With both Apocs jammed, even for a one cycle allowed the HUN Reloaded team to quickly recover. Afterall, the HUN Reloaded scimitar was still on the field and doing its job. The bhaalgorns' main use was its neutralisers but against a cap-less team - its utility was much reduced.

With frustration, I could hear the two APOC pilots stating that they were jammed. When one was unjammed he would target one of the hurricanes but it was nigh-on impossible to alpha anything.

Both Apocs died then the Bhaalgorn.

It was a very disappointing outing for the Alliance.

Very well played by HUN Reloaded: they had the DPS to knock out the support despite four or five of their ships being initially jammed. If our daredevil had survived, we should have got the 'devil to clear the ECM drones around the APOCs, since the APOCS had no smart bombs fitted and even with a ECCM - they were not un-jammable. It was imperative that both apocs had a clear field of fire throughout the match and this was not the case.

Could we have done things different? Hell yes.

We could have burned closer to the HUN Reloaded fleet and attempted to alpha the hurricane and/or scimitar and ignored the webbed HUN Reloaded thrasher or webbed dramiel. For the first minute, we had the HUN Reloaded scimitar, x1 hurricane, x1 drake, x1 thrasher and x1 dramiel all jammed. We should have capitalised on this but we got distracted and switched targets. Once we had lost the first rook (which was inevitable) and the HUN Reloaded team managed to get out their ECM drones; then we were finished. We didn't have enough DPS or ships and they chewed through us.

I was disappointed that we didn't even get a ransom - but we didn't have time did we?

However, my last words would be a hearty well done and good fight to HUN Reloaded. They had the superior tactics and team play and knew how to use their ships. We have no complaints about anything, can't be blaming EWAR when we rocked up with two rooks ourselves! They picked their targets correctly, applied overwhelming DPS and gave us a good spanking.

Good fight HUN Reloaded and our best wishes for your progress through the next rounds!