Posted - 2009.09.21 18:58:00 - [2]

 

MATCH 3 [COW]

Choosing a team for this one was really hard. COW had had two clean victories with a circlejerk megatank setup that really looked like a smurf setup to get through the qualifiers. We expected them to bring their best setup to beat us, so we decided to field our bomber team. However because we had fielded 2 rooks 2 kitsunes the match before, we expected cow to bring something strong against that. Now, a counter to that would also be a hard matchup for the bombers, and due to the roamy / small gang pvp nature of COW on tq it could have very easily been a rushy minmatar team, which the bombers cannot handle. There is two reasons we still went with bombers: one, since we never fielded the team before, there is a strong chance a rush team will warp at 0 to the arena allowing us to bomb them and win like that; two, we expected most of the other setups we had to lose to the 2 widow 2 golems megatank. On match day, we moved an alt to COW gather system Niyaben. Most of the pilots who had flown for them in the qualifiers were scattered across gallente space, in particular their vulture pilot Lazifax was missing, so we were sure they would bring something different. However as match time approached all the missing pilots arrived in Niyaben, including Lazifax in a Eos. We started thinking they might bring a very ecm heavy setup to “out ecm” us – so we fitted extra caldari jammers to our rooks. Finally the game starts and it turns out they brought the same megatank setup again. I still don’t understand why they did this, even if we had brought our same setup from match 2 it would have been easy to jam them all, then kill them one by one. Also funny that the extra caldari jammers proved usefull even tho we expected something else :)


MATCH 4 [C H]

This matchup was definitely the one that had us most worried in the whole tourney. Fielding bombers again looked risky, because CH are very good at adapting. CH so far had fielding a tengu nighthawk kite team and a BS team that lost. We actually first thought of bringing the minmatar rush team to fight CH, however we know how much CH loves their battleship setups. Given how paladins and kronos, make really quick work of the speedy minnie vessels, we went with the bombers instead. Bomber team is hard to counter and we thought one night wouldn’t be enough for cry havoc to come up with an answer – so we decided we’d field bombers. Again before the match, a cloaked alt outside Orvolle reported a drake called “tourney drake” undocking and then redocking, as if he was stacking guns and sorting mods. A ishtar called “GM Gusto ftw” (tourney sounding name) was also reported undocking and idling outside the station. Lawl obvious bait, we were sure CH were gonna field the tengu drakes again expecting their precision missiles to destroy bombers. So we removed some gallente jammers to go heavier on caldari jamming.
Finally match time we get moved to the arena, scan and what we see: ishtar, domi…

:V ****

I have to say, we did test a the bombers quite a bit against drone teams – especially in the last week before the finals. Although on paper drones seem awesome against the bomber setup, the truth is they don’t really work as a counter, because bombers can kite the drones over to smartbombing rooks and also the limit of 2 ships per type doesn’t allow you to field a really good drone team. Still though, it would have been a hard matchup.

We warp to the arena and to our relief the hostiles are in *perfect* bomb range, match starts, both assault frigs die to bomb, and I think that won us the game right there. Gallente ships are fat and slow: without those tacklers we were able to kite away and spam torps at mwding cruisers, making short work of the ishtars and then proceeding to the rest of the ships.

Posted - 2009.09.21 19:05:00 - [4]

 

Edited by: Goberth Ludwig on 21/09/2009 19:07:05


PLAYERS QUOTES:

Originally by: Shamis Orzoz

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It's worth mentioning that the team I fielded in match2, along with some variants was what I thought would be our strongest team in the tourney.

I expected people to favor bc's and command/t3. When most teams kept favoring bs's over everything else, I was forced to bring bombers, for obvious ****.

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Originally by: Creyn Hawk

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I really think straifes setup in the first match would have performed pretty well if we would have had more luck with the ecm drones i remember something like 380ss on the tengu, so the chance that they get so many jams on it was very low. To try to pop the scimmy for so long was probably a fault too but i think we just didnt test that part enough, so it was at least a good lesson. Yeah and the burned hardeners. Also i remeber straife to ask shamis before the match to fit a smartbomb on the vulture but shamis was stressed because at least one pilot was missing and so he didnt want any changes before the match.

I really cant understand why we were the only one fielding bombers, if you look back to what we tested, we had bombers in probably 40% of our setups and many agreed on the tourney forum that they are extremly good for the 6(5 at the start of testing)points.

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Originally by: BreAnna Calyanus

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Match 1: [V3]

Important note on this match. I don't think we would have lost this match if our Golem pilot would not have accidentally burned out his hardeners as you could certainly tell the Tengu couldn't keep up with the reps after the mods burned out. From that match forward in EVERY match Shamis made it a point to make sure people did not overheat their mods unless they were confident in using the overheat function going as far to say he would rather us not even use the overheat ability.

Match 2: [AWFUL]

Also note, this team easily beat the bomber team in testing. Later in the tourney the commentators were talking about counters and not finding one to the bomber team, about that time Shamis came on and laughed, said we had already shown them the counter in Match 2. Also, the all Minnie rush team was a counter to the bomber team.


MATCH 4 [C H]

This match was by far the linchpin match, IMHO. It might have even been the 'finals' in a way. We had many people debating bringing the bomber team mostly because of the fact that the bomber team loses against heavy ECM teams and dystopia fielded a heavy ECM team in round one. The bonus to fielding the bomber team was that after looking at potential teams for the next two rounds taking a risk to field the bomber team again would do a wonderful job at possibly setting up the teams for the next two rounds by forcing them to counter the bomber team. In the end the gambit worked and pretty much paved the way for smooth sailing into the finals.

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Originally by: Straife

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The "smurf" team Gobbin's is talking about that we fielded first was the perfect team for the match, as long as IcoraxI wasn't late and I got the chance to calm shamis down and fit the ****ing smartbomb on the vulture... But yea being jammed by 15 or so medium ecm drones with a 360 sig strength was a bit gay, as well as someone saying we've shot at the ishkurs when we never did during the match...

The bomber team pulled it off but as Shamis said we had at least 3-4 more teams that would have won any of those matches we just saw the ease in the bomber setup and went with it.

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Originally by: Rn Bonnet

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As an aside straife's work on drone teams probably won us the CH match. The Original bomber idea came from Creyn's Damp bomber setup and evolved from there. Really a nice job from everyone who posted there, lots of cross hybridization of ideas, ship fits, and overall strategies.

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Posted - 2009.09.21 19:50:00 - [6]

 

My personal writeup : Morkt didn't screw up this time. ( i don't think )

Posted - 2009.09.21 23:27:00 - [8]

 

Good job posting on all your alts gobbins.

It's a good write up, and if you want to do well in tourney, have a read, it only hints at the amount of effort and time that was involved.

The mind of gobbins is a scary thing, but that is what you are up against.

Posted - 2009.09.22 00:07:00 - [10]

 

Now, one day after our defeat in final fight, I'm sorry cause we didn't go out in HACs and RECONs and burn in glaze of glory. But, just as Goberius said, we had VERY little time or will to change something, we were exhausted (it was not easy, believe me, to fight whole day long) and frankly, we knew that we can expect anything from PL so we didn't bother to speculate much about their setup, so we just brought once more setup that was good for us in our previous matches.

Unfortunately for us, they had perfect counter to our setup, but even if I'm speaking about mighty PL team, I'm sure that any HAC/RECON combination, and ofc team which knows what to do, would decimate those damn bombers

I think I will go now and watch the film "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

Posted - 2009.09.22 00:45:00 - [12]

 

The time frame makes it REALLY hard.

Tyrrax's team - we lost first day. Maybe our setup wasn't as strong as we needed, but partly because some people drifted out of cap transfer range, or whatever. But we didn't really know what the other guys were bringing.

The next 2 fights, we had a week to prepare for each, and we won both decisively. Then against SOLAR, we at least had overnight to prepare. Anyway, all this gave me a healthy respect for Tyrrax's theorycrafting abilities, especially when bouncing ideas off of Cividari.

But, when we had to go up against PL, we only had 2 hours between when we were warped back out of the arena and when we had to be in gang, no session changes, waiting for Nova. It's genuinely not enough time to come up with a strategy based on new information. On top of that, we didn't get to see PL's previous match with the bombs, because it happened right as we were warping to the exit beacon and getting GM-moved back into playable space. It was over so fast that I think they were calling the winner before I'd even loaded in Jita.

To add to what Gob said about our last setup, the idea was to neut the rooks, use the rapier to keep the stealth bombers at bay, and jam them, while we work on taking out the scimitar. It just didn't work out.

I think that if people had only been fighting one fight a day - drawing semis and quarter finals out over a weekend / before moving into the final 4, someone probably would have figured out the counter to it. But even then, I wouldn't give good money on beating PL.

I was feeling pretty emo about losing yesterday, but I mentioned it to some bro's on IRC, and Raem Civrie and Tyrrax both said that it's pretty much usually like that - by the time you figure out the perfect counter, the tourney's over. But, we lost to the best, and that makes me happy.

Posted - 2009.09.22 01:13:00 - [14]

 

Originally by: Ohne

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Which is why you have people watching the other matches and documenting them while having at least 5-6 different setups ready to go at each time :)

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Yep. We had people watching. Kinda also wish they'd been posted to youtube quicker. Actually at this point, I hope they post the finals on youtube at all.

Posted - 2009.09.22 02:05:00 - [16]

 

We put too much faith in the ecm support, and needed the logi in first round, but we did do the stealth bomber, bomb drop in the beginning first :P

Posted - 2009.09.22 18:09:00 - [18]

 

Interesting write-up seeing how you prepared your ideas & strategies , very insightful - same with the other teams who have responded here.

Cheers to all :)

Posted - 2009.09.23 11:29:00 - [20]

 

Cloak alt spies win.. :(
little bit dissapointed.
but gratz anyway.

Posted - 2009.09.24 01:16:00 - [22]

 

Edited by: Kil2 on 24/09/2009 01:18:11
thanks a lot for this sir.

shows exactly how much you guys deserve the win. Also shows exactly how little we are able to understand and analyse as commentators. every chance to get some glimpse of what is really impacting your decisions and what "metagaming" is really taking place is hugely appreciated. also nice to see that luck can mean a lot =)

grats. will see you guys next year im sure.

Posted - 2009.09.24 23:41:00 - [24]

 

Originally by: Muad' Dib

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We saw the spy thing used on us as well - obviously not by PL, good thing the guys that sent him were noobish enough to send an in-corp alt. :)

Good write-up and too bad that the finals didn't end up as a slugfest. :(

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We actually contemplated selling out your setup in the semi's just for the isk after GM Horse screwed up and put you guys in system with us instead of CO2, lol.

Posted - 2009.09.25 02:22:00 - [26]

 

Originally by: Siramar Thi

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I keep hearing these cryptic references about these ships you won, what the heck are they exactly?

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Mimir

Special Ability: 25% bonus to max velocity, 50% bonus to medium projectile turret falloff and optimal range.

Minmatar Cruiser Skill Bonus: 20% bonus to medium projectile turret damage and 5% bonus to all armor resistances per level.

PS - Just check the latest version of EFT under Heavey Assault Ships.