Missions & Complexes

Drone boats, warp both characters in assist drones with alt and trigger them with the main.

Vexor Myrmidon Dominix take your pick. Rattlesnakes work well for this too since you can passive tank them so you don't have to worry about reps.

Yeah drones are pretty much out for AFK mission running. They require more attention than guns or missiles.

I heard FOF missiles can be used but never tried it. Does anyone know if this works?

Dont forget to buy a permit if yr thinking of afking in highsec www.minerbumping.com

FoF Missile changed to Auto-targeting, and only focus on target that is already attacking you (red box).

if there are 2 group in room, and one group attack you. Auto-targeting will hit them until all of those die. But Auto-targeting won't target second group that just park idle away from you.

That is not true. Once you have an agression of mission rats (one of them shot you or you activated aggressive module on one of them) the FoF keeps spamming until there is no more red crosses present on field within missile flight range (they do attack rats even outside your locking range as long as missiles can reach them theoretically). Ofc launchers run dry every few minutes so you would have to reactivate them when they have reloaded.

Depends what you are trying to achieve.

A 120-150km range sniping MJD Domi comes close to AFK. However aggro can still be an issue and the odd webbing/scramming frigate can sneak under your sentries which will keep shooting and missing it as it orbits you at 1000m. Going AFK and getting scrammed and then disconnected will cost you a ship.

Marauders can also be semi AFK with FoF but as far as I know a disconnect shuts down the Bastion Module, also bad for your ship.

A passive tanked rattler will be safe in a disconnect but lacks punch.

I have used Tengu swarm and while nice, it is not the best. Tengu's are also a bit thin for "semiafk" stuff if you are putting anything remotely pimp on them (like, say 4x navy bcu's which is pretty reasonable).

For similar price I would go with navy typhoons. You can use T1 sentries. if worried about losing drones. It is not real "AFK" anyway because you need to reactivate launchers every few minutes. Much better buffer on these.

You are getting ~500 on tengu vs ~750 from fof cruise on typhoon (4x bcu's). With typhoon you add easily at least 250 dps from sentries (do carry also some lights for spider drones, they are very slow to kill with cruise missiles).

Do note that you run into diminishing returns when increasing the number of fof missile spammers in a mission as after 2-3 guys you start just increasing the number of wasted volleys basically - especially for more distant targets. While typhoons lack the missile speed bonus the sentries are nice for popping frigs at distance.

I like to run missle boats with fof missles for afk missions or ratting. Its not optimal by any means, but it worked for me.

I would still use drones tbh. Domis, MJDs, Sentires, perhaps little shield xfers or something?

Drones need a bit more babysitting than FoF missiles as they have few peculiarities. Like not shooting on rats that have not agressed on you (say a far away group which you have not agressed yet causing them to take note of you). FoF just works until there is no more red crosses within your max missile flight range. But ofc have other issues like switching targets and sometimes shooting very inconvenient things. There also some oddities present related to FoF missiles and NPC agro (under certain circumstances you can shoot at rats without them taking note of you doing so, for example).

I bug-reported the most dire exploits a while ago so at least you can no longer pvp with FoF without getting the red timer as it was fixed pretty fast ;)

Anyway - I would suggest anyone looking into "semiafk missionrunning" start cheap as you will lose some ships learning the ropes. Some missions have tripwires in them in the sense that they can react substantially differently than "usual" iof you have mupltiple pilots present or are using automatic weapon system unwatched for a bit.

Things like, for example, buddy agro in WC second stage hitting you with approx 3000 dps if any entity other than the one they are shooting at agresses spy frigates or wonderous experience of triggering every possible spawn at once in Damsel or that drone mission with 4 triggers. And ofc do not get overconfident . the myth of empire missions being "risk free" is not quite true. If you get cocky you will lose even pretty pimp stuff - I have my share of navy battleship and Tengu losses to rats and few very close escapes with pirate BS's as embarrassing as these are. Hell when I started out as a noob I even managed to lose a Brutix to an asteroid!