Ships & Modules

I think it'd be faster to smash the mission with some other ship then clean it up with a noctis. While marauders can do both things at once, they do each thing much slower so... eh. Marauders are a crap ship class these days.

Macha + Noctis alt. Problem solved.

As they are now, marauders are redundant.

There was a rash of video's popping up of people flying the Eos and other command ships and absoutely TRASHING people (e.g. noobs who dont fit damage mods) - this leads to a lot of command ships being nerfed and CCP have a nervous breakdown when they realised T2 Battleships would have to 'one-up' the command ships in terms of combat capabilities if they where gonna be flown.

The decided to make them into useless niche ships, such as blops and marauders.

I'd like to see the tier 3 BS rival faction battleships for combat PVP purposes tbh. With proper t2 resists.

With a little practice a Vargur will kill and salvage in a fraction more of the time the Machariel takes to kill. If you are dual boxing with a Noctis alt its still wrong you should be dual boxing with 2 Marauders.

PvP wise in many / some situations the 4 utility slots and slightly better resists compensate easily for the sensor strngth disadvantage. Marauders are faction BSs with a twist (Vargur - Macha, Nightmare - Paly, Kronos - Vindicator, Golem - ugh now thats not qute half as good as a rattler :P) and that ho you treat them and price them.

You can cram enough neuts on a gank Kronos to make a Bhaalgorn jealous :P

Crellion is right, aside from the golem thing (golem is much, MUCH better than the rattler for missions).

If you're going back to salvage with a second ship, by the time you've warped back to the mission you've already lost the advantage you gained by that fraction more dps you did with the mach. By the time you've looted and salvaged the mission the guy in the vargur has now burned halfway through his next mission, and is now beating you in terms of isk/hour.

They won because they got lucky that the other team had no ECM. They were a bad choice considering how ECM heavy loadouts tend to be. Also, this thread is clearly about PVE.

Admitedly I've never tried to PvP in a Marauder.

That said, I can't imagine the low sensor strength being much of an issue generally. With the way ECM is currently implemented you're going to get jammed if a Falcon decloaks 100km from you whether you're in a regular BS or Marauder. ECM is broken.

Gives people more of a chance to get in the lucky jam with the obligatory flight of ECM drones I suppose.

What am I missing?

You're only getting 700 out of it? I'd recommend taking another look at your fitting.

Then again it's one of those ships where, if you don't like it, you're not likely to ever like it. At least that's my experience with rattlesnake fans and those unimpressed by it.

This doesn't apply to all the Marauders, but the big Falloff bonus on the Vargur clearly makes it lean towards Auto-Cannons. Personally I love Auto-Cannons, but they are hard to use effectively on most ships in PvE; Artillery can start applying damage as soon as you enter the mission area. Auto-Cannons most often can't. But the Vargur looks like it can get some nice range out of Auto-Cannons.

The Marauders as ships are most defintly viable, the vagaur is behind the Mach in DPS, but it is not that enormous of a differnce, but it is significantly less ammo hungry than the Mach (the machs 7 rof bonused guns vs the vaguar's 4 double damaged bonused guns), THe paladin is in the general range of the nightmare, the golem is better/equal to the CNR. THe upside of cherry picked salavage vs no PVP due to crappy sensor.

BUT, the maurauder skill is definitly obsolete:

It is a dead end (it not a prerequisite for anything), it is a skill training pain (a 10x, Willpower/Perception, with high pre reqs), it is also not a cheap skill book. Basically if you could add the train the second race BS (to allow the pirate ship you want) to 5 for the same cost as maruder 5 and get a lot more out of it.