Ships & Modules

For bait / tackler I'd try to get an assault ship - They seem to work great in empire...
If you need to pin down a target for your friends to arrive have you attempted an active shield booster setup with one of these new ancillary shield boosters on perhaps a Hawk? Doesn't matter that much to fly with arbalest rocket launchers or similar.

That said don't worry too much about skills - the plated light blaster vexor works nice btw so you have plenty options...
The rest you can easily train into

Pinky

The kitsune is awesome. The sentinel is good against frigates IF you are an experienced pilot.

The minmatar/gallente frigs though are basically not worth flying over a regular interceptor though.

@OP

The retribution is an excellent ship for DPS, baiting and can tackle reasonably well.

Also, as far as skills go, get all gunnery skills to at least level 4 then learn to use t2 large guns of both short-range and long-range. These will give you support skills that are decent. Wont take 200 days either :)

Forget the 200day plan and look at it like this:

Support skills for gunnery have the same impact base support shield/armor skills have to other functions on your ship, once you have those you're free of some nasty crappy dirty tedious stuff.
Those support skills will improve overall your performances significantly once they're up to 5, then if you intend to mostly fly cruisers atm, just rush meds at 5 spec at 4, that's it and you just saved for about 45D training for a single race.

The day you have nothing else to train or because whatever reason, then train large guns. Those skills are a real pain to train so I'd actually advice you to train everything related to frigs/destroyers/cruisers/BCs T1/T2/T3.

There are so many roles in these categories you will never be bored to fly them at the point you feel the need to fly battleships.

They do and they don't short version.

Long version says only 2 of those 4 EAFs are useful because their racial EWAR is either STILL good, either don't because their EWAR got nerf to the point they're useless.

Usefull:
-Caldari = ECM ship, fast frigate but extremely fragile requires some attention on how to play it, however is a hell of an ECM boat

-Minmatar =+20% web range per level this talks by it self, decent tank and speed it's probably the best EAF imho

-Gallente = Uses Damps, and Damps are crap unless specific situations because you'll cut targeting range for sure but not significantly enough in most cases, ECM is better overall situations, result: don't fly it

-Amarr = Bonus to energy vampire and neutraliser, those were probably not that bad in frigate gangs vs frigate gangs but other than this it's just useless, add new battery changes and this ship is good for nothing.

This is just my personal feeling, my advice would be to tell you: fly the minnie and caldari ones (same base skills just a plus for the spec and oc 6D frigate 5)

Back to the original question: it really depends, if you do high sec wars then generally you'll fight on gates or stations and interceptors aren't really needed there but they can be quite handy when catching mission runners or grabbing miners in a belt so in a gang support role the Ares can make full sense as a dedicated tackler. Would you do solo roaming for targets then either a Taranis or Ishkur can work fine, both work but they do go for different targets and operate differently, so personal preference.

I'd shy away from using an Enyo (unless your reds are clueless) as it's a tad too easy to counter, you could also have a look at a Navy comet or Daredevil, the DD specifically is a frigate killer so it's great to roam around trying to catch folks zooming around in small ships.



Drake - unless idiots don't even try
Tornado - if you can get the drop on it and away from a station or gate he'll die to any dps frigate assuming you have a scram and he's solo
Dram - stay away unless idiots, if you have to use a DD.
DD - don't approach with a frig, unless he's an idiot he'll either win or get away
dominix - not likely to happen, in pvp fit don't even try, in pve fit one has to assume kin/thermal resists so you using hybrids will never break that

Thing is, it's more about how good those pilots are than what they fly. You don't fight a ship but you fight a pilot so if they're clueless (and there's many years old clueless pilots in EVE) you can win just fine. If they know wtf they're doing then neither of the possible targets you listed is a valid target for any type of frig.