Admittedly, battleships aren't the biggest ships around. I know some of you are thinking 'Only a battleship? Man up and get a titan' but I've owned a titan, I've had a few supers, and I've flown numerous dreads and carriers. The thing with capitals though, is that you can hardly take them out on a solo roam - if you do, you're gonna get dropped and die very, very quickly. Battleships, on the other hand, manage to balance the scales - sure, you might get blobbed by a big fleet and that's the end. On the other hand, however, people won't go far out of their way just for a simple battleship killmail - often those who do are smaller gangs that often are a fairly close match for a battleship.
Yeah, maybe I do fancy myself as a bit of a Mr Hyde, and I know there are many out there who think that compared to kiting there's no skill in brawling in big ships. Thing is, when you're up against a 10-man gang, you've got so much to consider - cap management, maintaining your tank without over or under-repping (especially armour tanks, timing is key to survival), target management... You have to figure out, on the spot, the balance between the most important and most viable kill possible - sure, there might be a curse neuting you from 25km off or something, but if you can't catch him to shoot him, what's the point wasting time trying? And that thrasher orbiting at 500 - he'd be easy to kill (especially with these new grappler webs) but he only does a couple hundred DPS and isn't hurting you with EWAR or Capacitor Warfare. So sure, you aren't manually piloting and doing all the fancy range control stuff; I'm no good at that and I don't really want to try learn it, but for me, not much gets the blood pumping like taking out a hyperion and seeing how many people you can kill before you go down.
I'll try to document how my adventures 'bringing out the big guns' progress on this blog - don't expect much though, I'm still utterly terrible at EVE!
