Ships & Modules

Alright, forumgoers, just looking for opinions on how the various smaller ships handle in pvp. I do have some experience of my own, but I still have fairly deficient skills for a combat pilot (the majority of my skills are in science, industry, PI, trade) which I know rather warps my perception of how different ships handle. This is what I know about the races' ship lines so far - I was hoping you all could jump in and correct any misconceptions or expand on anything I might be missing about these ships (especially if one of them is your pet ship :p), so I can maybe, FINALLY, decide what ship line to pursue instead of eternally screwing around with one ship, then another, etc...suffice it to say, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Frigates: Punishers are challenging due to low speed and only 2 mids, but a perennial favorite for strong tank and good close-range damage. Incursus is enjoying a popular period - it's fast and can hit hard, but really needs blasters to be worthwhile. Rifter is Rifter, fast and versatile, but not the best thing in space for slugfests. Merlin does quite well for itself - seems to handle kind of like a punisher with more mids.
Tristan and Kestral are sometimes seen on the casual pvp field, but tend to be largely ignored for reasons I haven't quite figured out.
Punisher and Incursus only seem to do decent damage with pulses/blasters, but in my experience using a short-range slugger frigate for anything but 1v1 = charge/die/reship/repeat. Any confirmations of that opinion, or suggestions on how to get around it?

Destroyers: Not much experience here. Seems like you never hear about, or see, anything but Catalysts and Thrashers, and most dessie pilots will say that the Thrasher is the superior ship - don't really know why. Destroyers do rather intrigue me (I kinda forgot about them in favor of frigs until recently) so any input appreciated here.

Cruisers: Everyone likes the rupture - good all around ship, if sometimes light on tank. Stabber is a novelty boat for bored pilots. Omen's basically a joke, too hard to fit. Vexor and Arbitrator are respectable, but being a drone boat is typically a serious liability in pvp greater than 1v1. Thorax is good, but being a blaster ship has similar charge-die-repeat issues to what I mentioned above. Caldari not as often seen in general - Caracal is thought of as quite good for pve but mediocre in pvp, and Moa not 'better' enough to justify going Caldari by itself.

Guess my big problem is seeing the weaknesses of different hulls, but having a hard time exploiting their strengths. As said, any help greatly appreciated.

How much ISK do you have?

If it's a fair amount then just buy some and get out there and fly it......... I'd highly suggest joining RvB!

However I appreciate that you are looking for a direction..... so the above might not be available at this stage.

It might help if you told us, even the limited ones, what skills you do have that are combat orientated.

If you don't want to go the missile route (and it's worth bearing in mind the blog about hte changes and that other than Caldari there are not an awful lot of ships that support missiles) then you need to look at what guns allow you to fly what ships.

Amarr require lasers and decent drone skills
Gallente require hybrids and good drone skills
Caldari require Hybrids
Minnies require projectiles.

Thus unless you plan on cross training at an early stage (not recommended if you already lack skills) then you kinda need to choose one of the above.

Personally I'd opt for hybrids. They will allow you to fly Gallente and Caldari and the drone skills that you attain for Gallente will serve you well else where.

Now, depending on what view you take, people suggest getting into cruisers first to learn PvP as you 'tend' to last longer. However, if you are ISK limited that can work out expensive. Thus I tend to suggest frigate PvP, however frigate combat does NOT last long and you need to pay attention. YOu run out of cap and range real quick.

With the Frigate balancing there are some real treasures there now. The Merlin, in my view, remains king of Frigs with some nice shield AND armour fits (my personal favourite).

Regards

Barrak

CCP is current in the process of rebalancing all t1 ships. Some have been done already...But the frigs/cruisers won't be done until winter.




Rail incursus can work pretty well, actually. The thing that makes Punishers stand out from other t1 frigs is range projection - pulse lasers with scorch can hit out to 10+km and still be just fine in a close up brawl (though I generally fit two tracking rigs just in case.

What do you mean that brawler frigates don't work in anything larger than a 1v1? If you mean you get shot down before you get in range, particularly against larger ships, don't fly directly at them. Fly at an oblique angle to get some angular velocity.

Tristan and Kestrel have not yet been rebalanced yet. Until that happens, they're terrible and not really good at much compared to other frigates. The Rifter technically was hit by the rebalancing pass, but it pretty much didn't change at all and is rather meh compared to the other rebalanced frigates.




The Coercer can be useful in a gang for epic range projection (beams allow it to hit anything from point blank to 50km), and Cormorant is a rather great frigate sniper...However, in general, yes..you pretty much just see thrashers and the occasional catalyst. The reason for this is that the thrasher pretty much has the best of everything. It's fast, tanky, does high damage, and has good range projection. It's good at everything; other dessies are slightly better at certain things at the expense of being far worse at everything else.

Destroyers have not been rebalanced yet.




You guessed it- Cruisers have not been rebalanced yet. Thorax and Vexor both have their uses..Drones can be destroyed, but are also far more projectable and reliable damage than most weapon systems, and Thorax just does silly amounts of damage. The Rupture is favored generally for the same reasons as the thrasher, though to a less extreme degree: It does everything pretty well.



To some degree. For the most part, t1 hulls are just terribly balanced, a problem that is currently being fixed (finally).

In the beginning, I'd suggest going more with Assault Frigs and/or Pirate frigs. They're still reasonably cheap and easy to fit, and more likely to get into a fight.

Every now and then, you'll find folks who don't recognize ship names as much as just the sizes. They say "Hey look, that guy is flying a frigate. I should shoot it and get another kill on my board."

And then they discover you have T2 resists, exceptional DPS, enough slots to actually use some of the fun PvP toys... oh, and a little more cargo space to carry home -their- mods when they explode.