The Maiden Voyage of Sacrilicious

"Stay calm. This is your fight. You got this."

I took a deep breath to calm myself and collect my thoughts. Moments earlier, Ackil Gedian's Golem had painted and shot at my looting Heron. Baiting a battleship in a frigate is a good way to get the adrenaline flowing. Now, warping back in my shiny new Sacrilege, I loaded the EM HAMs and checked D-scan... yup, there he was... only seconds until I landed....

Some history: I had lost plenty of cheap T1 ships and interceptors to low/nullsec fleet roams, but that was over a year ago, and this was the first time I was bringing something expensive to the fight. It was also my first time PVPing in a Heavy Assault Cruiser, and my first time flying with an active armor tank. When I bought "Sacrilicious" a couple weeks ago, I ran it through some PVE shakedown cruises to get the feel of things. This ship was the culmination of my earlier experiences fighting mission runners. I knew that on paper, at least, I had a ship with a small sig radius, considerable DPS, and a mean tank. But did I have the piloting skills to fly it? Would I be able to remember the lessons I'd learned in previous fights?

I pushed aside any doubts as I landed on grid. Ackil Gedian's Golem was quickly locked and pointed, followed by a torrent of HAMs and a medium neut. I settled into a close orbit at full speed and watched as I slowly chipped away at his shields. He was shooting Exp cruise missiles at me, which an Amarr HAC can shrug off easily, so I set my drones on his Hammerhead IIs. Due to my long Caldari history, the low shield klaxon typically gets my heart racing; this time I simply flipped on the armor repper with a close eye on capacitor level. In less than two minutes, the fight was over. There was no discussion of ransom. There was only Ackil Gedian in his pod beside the wreckage of his Golem, demonstrating proof of concept for the Sacrilege.

There are a couple things to note about this fight. First, this fight demonstrates the advantages of shooting the correct damage type. To recap, I shot him with EM, he shot me with explosive. Because he was tanked against Angel NPCs, his explosive resistance was three times stronger than his EM resistance. On the other hand, my explosive resistance was over three times stronger than thermal, my weakest. In simple terms: I correctly guessed his weakest resist, while he blindly shot against my highest resist. It may not have affected the ultimate outcome of the fight, but he could have tripled(!) his missile DPS just by changing to thermal missiles. (Also check out Wensley's blog for an excellent look at projectile damage types versus resists.)

The second thing to note has to do with the medium neut in the Sac's 6th high slot. Some post-fight EFT number crunching says that his active shield tank could run cap-stable with all level V skills. Applying the medium neut reduces his cap to less than 5 minutes. That means that for this fight, he probably still had half his cap when he died. His cap-stable tank simply couldn't keep up with the damage. So while the neut did nothing for this fight, it definitely has merit in longer fights.