Ships & Modules

With the up coming changes to Recons the Curse, Hug, Lach, and Rook are not going to show up on d-scan. As several of us know, having a Curse on the field can be a major game changer during a fight. Therefore, I am going to have to say the Curse. Being able to hide your neuting power is just going to be way to valuable for small scale PvP.

Discuss.

I think the Lachesis and Huginn will vie for the top spot and the Curse will come up shortly after them. Those ships are in a good to decent position now and will only get better.

If the currently announced changes go through the Rook will get left behind quite a bit...it's in the worse spot of all the Combat Recons and the changes aren't getting after the real issues. The thin tank, kinetic only damage bonus, and not well matched ECM bonus will make it tough to come up to par with the Lach and Huginn in particular.

because as soon as you see a curse on d-scan you run away

I'm a wee bit worried about the rook, but I feel like the falcon already does that anyways.

webs and painters are dangerous for sure, but you can still at least fight in some ways.

long range point/scram and damps from the gallente recons is pretty strong, but depends a bit on gang size and how they are used.

I think rapier will be favored more than the huginn. Huginn bonuses dont work with its limited PG. Barely has enough grid for 3 720's, let alone 4. Even if you could get 4 720s on it, the PG left over would only be good enough for a single LSE tank (maybe). And its stupid to use acs. Lets get in brawl range with long webs. 650s may work, but the alpha and dps is just not worth imo.

Rapier on the other hand has the same ewar bonuses, but gets a missile damage buff. Meaning i can do a 400dps, double web 30-50kEHP frig destroyer. Plus cloak and warp, immune to combat probes, can avoid all the spooky dscan immune stuff, and cant be td'd by the curse.

Think we will be seeing more rooks, at least initially.

Gallente first- long range tackle is critical, especially in kiting fleets. Damping is arguably better than ECM at this point as well.
Minmatar second- long range webs are extremely useful.
Caldari third- ECM is still very strong, especially given the reliance on logi for most fleets today.
Amarr last- cap warfare is handy, but remains difficult to employ at will, and cap-chain logi makes damping or jamming them easier than trying to overcome their cap.

If you look at it from an FC perspective...."I have xxx number of bodies in fleet, what is the best composition I can squeeze out of that?" Then tackle (point or web) is likely to be the highest priority, to the point of not caring much about their DPS contribution. With ECM and cap warfare coming in as 'nice to have along' if it doesn't hurt your damage potential too much.

Now I'm imagining a fleet of Rooks.

Hundreds of Rooks

It depends on the scale of engagements you want to commit in. For non blob warfare you shouldn't shrug the curse off that easily. Neuts offer a wide range of utility when used correctly. First of all, they counter logis as you somewhat mentioned. While guardians have cap transfers they are less threatened, but still vulnerable to neuts. Scimitars on the other hand stand little chance against neuts. Secondly, your neuts can switch off the hardeners and propmod of the primary target putting even more stress on them. Neuts also play a defensive role as you can use them to prevent fast targets with mwd to catch your friends. On top of that you can easily squeeze one or two TDs on each curse which gives each curse the option to render one or two enemy turret ships useless. Unlike ECM or damps, then you only need 1 bonused TD pr. ship you counter. So all this together makes the curse a very powerful ship and if it had kept the full t2 resist it would be a capaple fleet ship. As it can bring a decent amount of dps and bring bonused neuts and counter 1-2 turret boat each.

And for longrange sniping the heavy neut curse can cap out cruiser targets at 90km range in one cycle.

The new d-scan gimmick will probably cause some more of these ships to be used in small gang or camping. I doubt we'll be seeing them show up on big fleets, with the exception of lachesis/hugin (these are probably the two most heavily used and its not going to change). Given how not-tanky these ships are they just get blapped off the field too quickly. You could argue huginn/lachesis being a necessity, but the others are not and just serve to add to your lossboard.

Average life expectancy of recons in a big fleet battle is usually one second.

What are recons?

Those things that still get instapopped whenever someone shoots them?

Curses hard counter basically everything. In a small gang they can be devastating.

Huginn will probably see more use though, simply because it's an actual Combat ship, unlike the other 3 which are slightly tankier T2 versions of the T1 ships with no major combat advantages to boast.