Missions & Complexes

I have a reasonably well skilled mission runner, and another toon that I just finished training up to Core Competency Elite, who I am now looking to find an application for. I am leaning toward making the new toon a maxed out logi and booster alt, and training the logi skills up first. My first thought was it would be a good Incursion runner, but I also wonder if it's worth bringing a logi alt along for L4s.

It seems like with logi support you can forget active tanking on the combat ship and just fit for buffer and resists, leaving all those slots normally dedicated to cap and reps for utility, mobility, and damage instead.

My question to anyone who has done this is, does it actually work?

Can one logi cruiser provide enough reps to keep up with incoming DPS and keep itself alive? Is it possible to keep aggro on the combat hull, or do all the rats just shoot at the logi nonstop? Is it more trouble than it's worth managing two ships rather than one?

Not much use, but when I dual box, I just skimp tank on both and go max DPS. Works well.

Appreciate not exactly your question but perhaps useful data.

I found nurse domi with a full flight of sentries was easy for micromanagment, and then you could loose most of the tank slots on you main for DPS/utility.

It would probably not be much faster with a full blown logi alt.

With an AB, don't need much in the way of tank on the Logi, and running with tracking links on a bonused ship can boost your effective DPS and range a noticeable amount. It's certainly slower than two DPS ships, but much more relaxed - pretty much set the logi to orbit at 50 and forget about it until it's time to move to the next room.

Primary pro for me was in low/null sec mission running - logi lets your main run with a standard PvP fit, can net you some opportunity kills in system without refitting and kills on overconfident mission busters as well.

I've done a few missions with gank boat (nightmare, vindi, or mach so far) + domi (4 drone damage amps, 3 omnis, 3 drone scope rigs for 800dps 110km optimal on garde IIs, with 2 energy transfers) , just assign drones and gank gank gank! nearly all agro goes to the gank boat, some goes on the domi, but it usually switches off before it can even get through the shields. if not there is a wee bit of tank on the domi that seems to hold just fine.

using a logi that only does reps seems like a waste imo. I really can't add much more gank on my gank boats (one more mag stab on the vindi, or maybe some omnis in the mids) with two higher damage ships in the same mission you can mostly get away with 3 slot tanks.

I've been running a Gila+Osprey setup out of necessity for quite a while now (skills problem due to the necessity to react to first the AI patch and then the summer skill patch) and only recently switched to spider domis.

1:
Yes, provided the mission allows you to build up your speed+distance tank. My Osprey ran with about 120 hp/s@600m/s and was mostly fine. It provided about 1000 hp/s to the Gila while not targeted or 600 hp/s while self repping.

Webs are obviously a problem, it's pretty much Tengu light.

2:
Neither, nor. My logi sometimes pulled stage and also lost it, without me being able to reproduce a definite pattern (i.e. no clean rules as with WoW's sophisticated thread management).

If your DPS is not a drone boat you may even have less aggro switching to the logi.

3:
It's definitely worth it, if you can't run L4 solo otherwise ;).
It MAY be worth it, if your DPS increase significantly or it allows switching to a more agile ship.

The trouble is certainly overrated, in a lot of missions it's simply a matter of burning away from enemies, enter 50km orbit, run reps. I usually avoided WC, though ;).


That said, if your mission ship doesn't sacrifice a lot of DPS to tank, a salvage alt is probably better.

I dual box missions a lot, but not with logi, not needed,. I use a BC for the second ship set up to tkae out frigates and cruisers fast. If I need tank I often use a drake/raven or Drake/Phoon combo. Drake goes in first, starts with frigates and works its way up. Tank has never been an issue for the drake, Raven/typhoon goes in and starts hammering the BS's, rooms clear very fast, almost never even launch drones anymore. 3rd account follows in a Noctis, 4th account, when I bother to log it in is in a drone boat or HAC for a little extra DPS.

I make about the same isk/hr missioning as I do mining, about 100M. Much more if I get the right missions with large numbers of pirate BS's

This makes me wonder about another option: just bringing a second throwaway ship along to serve as a flying cap battery for the combat ship. Since you get more incoming that outgoing with the cap transfers, it seems like a cruiser hull that did nothing but run a mini-cap chain with your DPS ship could let you recover a lot of slots normally dedicated to cap management (or, if you run with boosters, get a longer run time without the boosting). Most projectile and missile fits don't have big cap issues anyway, but I wonder how much this might help the hulls that are usually short on cap, like laser and hybrid boats.

Do you pretty much need two battleship hulls to make the two-ship cap chain work out, or could one battleship with a smaller ship along just to serve as a battery also do?

Just to see whether it's viable or not I fit a remote repper and cap booster on a Noctis that I use for clean-up, and tried it on a per-room basis. I only really needed the remote repping for the DPS ship a couple times, so the salvaging speed reduction from my Noctis wasn't worth the repping changes. Just really haven't been in a "holy crap!" situation in L4's in a long time to warrant a dedicated logi, T2 or otherwise.

8 tractors on highs, and salvage drones.

prioritizing looting over salvaging always.

in a few minutes you can loot the room, and tab back to main to clean second room while drones chew trough wrecks.