Ships & Modules

i made two pve fits in pyfa, a drake with t4 launchers, caldari navy missiles, and a ferox with t4 hybrid guns, caldari navy AM charge.
http://1drv.ms/1zzVUmi

there is a 15-20 percent dps gap in favour for the hybrid fit (267 missile vs 321 gun), even though, i have around 1M sp in missiles, and 150K only in gunnery. so i suppose with the same skill points, the gap would be around 35-40% for the hybrid ferox fit.

why is the gap so big? or why does the missile fit's dps is so small?
does the fact that i have better range with missiles and i can choose damage type worth the dps loss?

Guns take more manual piloting, but can apply damage much better than missiles in certain situations. Especially against smaller ships that are far enough away for tracking not to matter too much, but still within optimal range.

Missiles always hit, but they suck at applying their damage against smaller, faster ships. The paper DPS in EFT/Pyfa only shows the damage you'd deal if every shot applied full damage.

There are a lot of differences between guns and missiles, and you're comparing the DPS for the shortest range ammo type for hybrids (antimatter) with missiles, that don't have the same type of range selection in their ammo types.

indeed, i didn't take into account the range modifiers for the gun charges. using lead (about the same range as missiles), the dps of ferox declines significantly

One factor to consider is that with missiles you can select your damage type. This is huge. If you have hybrid weapons you have no choice but to shoot into kinetic and thermal. Whereas with missiles you can apply more DPS by not splitting your damage type and only shooting into someone's resistance hole. This is where the main skill of using missiles while piloting is involved. With guns you have to spend some time how manually pilot in order to better apply your DPS, while with missiles it's more about understanding the enemy ship and what damage type is best to use against it.

I offer an example. If you are fighting a Tech1 ship that is lets say kite fit with a shield buffer, what missiles would you use? Most people would say Mjolnr missiles to take advantage of 0% tech 1 resist to EM in shields. That is a good assumption but experience will tell a different story. In most cases, using thermal missiles will be far better. Why is that true if thermal has a 20% base resist while EM has a 0% base resist? Because most people will fit an ant-em rig which will increase their EM resist to 30%, now making thermal their lowest resists in shield. So you have to weigh the options, you can shoot thermal where you know you will lose 20% of your damage, or gamble and shoot EM where you MIGHT lose 30% of your damage. An experienced PVPer will look at the killboard of the enemy ship and find a lossmail of theirs in the ship they are currently in to help better your chances of what the best missile to shoot is.

There is a reason the golem was banned out of alot of alliance tournament matches. I feel that missiles are underappreciated due to EFT warriors everywhere. As was said before DPS on paper (eft) is not how you should base your fits, applied DPS is what is more important. You can much more reliably apply DPS in a fight without too much maneuvering using missiles than you can using turrets. This frees up all your piloting to be focused on surviving rather than applying damage.

In theory, yes. In practice, CCP insist on putting damage-type-specific bonuses on missile ships, largely wiping out any benefit to being able to select damage type and making it usually better to shoot the bonused damage type unless you know your opponent has a very large hole.

Caldari Mjolnir seems low damage, is the same as Caldari scourge damage? Cause Drake has bonus dmg on kinetic missiles.

Check and list the DPS calculation for the hybrids with ALL the charges