EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello, I'm not 100% sure if this is the right spot, but hopefully you can help me out a bit. I have about 1.3 mill SP atm and have been working my way up to flying a raven for lvl 4 missions. ATM I'm using a drake for level 3s and having a lot of trouble on a couple missions. (Mainly "My Sweet Privateer" and "Eliminate the Pirate Campers") It's not so much I can't survive, it's just that it takes forever for these ships to die.


My main issue is that I'll encounter some cruisers or frigates that are armor tanks. Health wise I can survive fairly well due to the drake's passive shield tanking, but I often find myself using around +600 missiles on one target just trying to shave down their armor. (Oddly the battleships/battlecruisers often go down easier than the cruisers / certain frigates.)

From the fitting menu, it's saying I only do about 155.2 dps. 25.2 from drones and 130.0 from missiles. Is this low for dps?

Here's the fitting:

Drones:
Hobgoblins I w. Hammerhead I drones (Hammerheads normally get blown up fairly quickly though)

Rigs:

3x Medium Core Defense Field Purger I

Low:
2x Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I
2x Ballistic Control System I

Medium:
Experimental 10MN Afterburner I
2x Large Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I
Thermic Dissipation Field I
Limited "Anointed" EM Ward Field
Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron (Target Painter)

High:
1x Limited 'Limos' Rapid Light Missile Launcher
6x Advanced 'Limos' Heavy Missile Bay I (Normally use Scourge Heavy Missiles, due to the most damage)
1x Small Tractor Beam I

(Can't equip another heavy launcher due to a full powergrid/ insuffecient CPU)



Is there some major issue with this build that's causing a problem? Is it the low skills? Any help/recommendations would be appreciated. Regardless if I kite the ships or stay within 20 km or so... the armor repair rate just kills me.


Thank you.

It depends on the mission race type your going against, they may naturally have a high kinetic armor resistance.

Also 150dps on the drake is a bit low so I would work on your drone and missile skills, and on a ship like the drake you really dont want to sacrifice even one launcher bay so I would work your fit around 7 launchers.

You have the right idea with the target painter and if you notice they are in range of a web you may want to try one of those.

If you message me ingame I can give you some in depth help with your fit.

So it does sound like a skills issue more than anything? Most of the skills are around lvl 3 (some 4) within engineering/electronics/missile launcher operation/navigation/drones/mechanics, although I'm likely still missing a lot of skills. (Didn't know of Drone Interfacing, for example)



Well, if this is the case, I guess I'll keep doing lvl 1/2 missions and mining to pass the time and raise the skills.


Thanks for all your help everyone, really appreciate it. Still getting used to this game and hopefully (given a LOT of time) will get the skills up there to more properly fly these ships.

It is mostly a skills issue. As far as I can tell your actual fit makes sense. If you wanted something combat-oriented to do to make ISK without the drudgery that is level 1/2 missions (or any missions at all imo), look into exploration. It requires a bit of extra skill training time but it's far more interesting and dynamic than missions, and in hisec the sites can be done easily in frigates/cruisers which are far easier to train for. Faction Warfare also has some good money-making mechanisms if you wanted to get into PVP.

Here's what most skills are currently that were requested.

Untrained:
Warhead Upgrades (Req: Missile Launcher Operation 4)
Advanced Weapon Upgrades (Req: Weapon Upgrade 5)

LVL 2:

Weapon Upgrades


LVL 3:

Drones
Engineering
Electronics
Heavy Missiles
Light Missiles
Missile Bombardment
Missile Launcher Operation
Missile Projection
Navigation
Rapid Launch
Target Navigation Prediction



I'll double check on the 7th heavy launcher, but I don't believe it fit, which is why I then included a light missile launcher and a tractor beam. The salvager ship sounds interesting and I'll look into one for doing that, would save a lot of time running around at least.

Training Missile Launcher Operation (2% DPS) and Rapid Launch to 4 (3% DPS) will provide you with the largest skill-based DPS gains soonest. After that, train Heavy Missiles to 5 (another 10% DPS). With those skills trained you will see a significant reduction in mission completion times. The skills will add about 15% DPS over what you have now, but as I pointed out earlier you have to subtract the NPC's tanking ability from your DPS to find the effective DPS (there's more to look at here, including explosion radius, explosion velocity, target signature radius, target velocity, resistances, etc, but we're just looking at altering DPS with all other factors remaining the same).

Swapping out one of those Shield Power Relays for a third Ballistic Control System I will improve your DPS by about 7% instantly. Upgrading your existing BCS I modules to BCS II will have a similar impact. So take into consideration the fact that training Weapon Upgrades (a rank 2 skill) to 4, upgrading the BCS I to BCS II modules, and swapping an SPR for a BCS II will earn you a 15% DPS increase, from training a single rank 2 skill to level 4.

Remembering that Weapon Upgrades modifies CPU requirements for your launchers, Advanced Weapon Upgrades modifies PG requirements for your launchers, Electronics modifies your total CPU and Engineering modifies your total PG, pick the skills to train that will let you fit a full rack of heavy missile launchers. Note that the Drake's bonuses to kinetic damage only apply to heavy missiles (and heavy assault missiles), so switching out that light missile launcher is a high priority (it will give you somewhere around 5% more DPS).

As a general rule, if a skill is worth training at all, it's worth training to 4. The flip side of the coin is that training any skill to level N takes about the same time as training 4 other same-rank skills to N-1. This is why I recommend training Missile Launcher Operation (a Rank 1 skill) and Rapid Launch (a Rank 2 skill) to 4 before training Heavy Missiles (a Rank 3 skill) to 4 or 5.

Using a tool such as EVEMon will help you plan this training more efficiently. The emphasis is on getting the effective DPS of your ship as high as possible as soon as possible. I don't have EVEMon in front of me right now, but here's my suggested training plan, in order:

1. Weapon Upgrades to 4 (+ change fitting to 3 x Ballistic Control System II)
2. Rapid Launch to 4
3. Missile Launcher Operation to 4
4. Engineering, Electronics, Weapon Upgrades and Advanced Weapon Upgrades to 4 or 5 as required to swap the light missile launcher and utility module for an HML
5. Heavy Missiles to 5

Then when you are running missions, make sure you take out the targets with the lowest "time to kill" versus "DPS" ratio (i.e.: get rid of incoming DPS as quickly as possible). Typically this will involve killing battle cruisers, then battleships, then elite battlecruisers, then cruisers, then elite cruisers and frigates. Identification of "elite" versions of NPCs is discussed in the Evelopedia. I leave the elite versions till after the regular versions simply because the regular versions are softer, so their DPS is more easily removed from the battle.

Using 4 Ballistic Control System II modules will give you some DPS gain over using 3 BCS modules, but that gain will only be about 6% due to "stacking penalties". For a low-DPS ship like the Drake, that 6% extra DPS will translate to a more significant reduction in mission completion times than the same 6% gain for a higher-DPS ship, simply because you are operating closer to the NPC's native tank, making the 6% extra DPS a much higher proportion of the effective DPS.

You don't really need a raven to do level 4s and if you aren't skilled well, you're going to have a very difficult time. You can do level 4s with a drake pretty easily but it'll take a bit of time until you can get your missile skills out of the way. Getting the missile support skills to 3 or higher will help a lot and taking missile launcher op to 5 should be priority.

So skills like:

Guided Missile precision - Explosion radius
Heavy missiles/Heavy assault Missiles - Damage
Missile bombardment - range/missile flight time
Missile Projection - range/missile velocity
Rapid Launch - Rate of fire
Target navigation prediction - Explosion velocity
Warhead upgrades - Damage

I recommend skilling up so you can fly a drake well and work your way towards a Tengu eventually. Battleships seem to need good drone skills for solo L4s in my experience because you'll be dealing with a lot of cruisers and frigates.

Of course as the poster above said, you should work on getting core skills out of the way asap.

Ways to improve DPS with a Drake:

1. Install Heavy Assault Missiles; they take up less power grid than Heavy, do more damage, hit smaller targets, and have shorter range (but you have that afterburner for getting into range). 15 km range is more than sufficient for mission purposes.

2. Replace some of the tank with damage mods: 1 or 2 Ballistic Control System modules in the low slots. You lose some shield recharge, but you have the rigs for that.

3. All missile support skills, and engineering skills trained higher.

Target Painter should help against the small targets, increasing their sig radius so your large missiles can hit them. Won't do all that much against cruiser or bigger. Personally I just send drones to kill frigates and destroyers, and use HAMs on cruisers and bigger.

I'd also suggest fitting passive Shield Resistance Amplifiers instead of active Shield Hardeners - they don't suck up capacitor juice. Of course your resists will be lowered.

My Fitting:
7x Experimental XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher with Scourge HAMs.

Experimental 10mn AB
2 Thermic Dissipation Amplifier
1 Kinetic Dissipation Amplifier
2 Large Azeotropics

2 Mark I Generator Refitting: Shield Power Relays
2 Ballistic Control System

Rigs: the ones you have

Reduces your tank quite a bit, but increases your DPS some, and you hit smaller targets slightly better.

EDIT: Also, carry a few Navy or Guristas Scourges for extra DPS on the elite high-resist NPCs. And/or figure out if it would be better to use Thermal, EM, or Explosive missiles to hit their resist holes (sometimes they have different resist holes than the regular NPCs in their race, unbonused missiles that fit the hole may be better than bonused Scourges that get resisted 80%).

The afterburner should let him reach 300+ m/s, and the large ships that have the 40+ km range shouldn't be moving that fast.

how do you do less damage than my catalyst in a drake

no really