EVE New Citizens Q&A

So I was told that it's absolutely necessary to fly either a logistics ship or a pirate faction battleship in order to do Incursion content. Anything less is insufficient.

Is this true?
Is a pirate faction battleship esssential to do Incursion content?
What about navy issue BS's or marauders

I'd like to know now before dropping the money for an expensive ship that isn't truely necessary.
(I'm not going solo on this, we do have a team of players going at it).

Alright, the short answer is no - I see plenty of people flying Ravens, Maelstroms, shield-tanked Megas, etc... just make sure you're in a very-high-DPS boat with a good number of turrets or launchers on it.

Long answer: While not strictly neccesary, being in a faction BS vastly improves your incursion experience in two major ways. First, when a "pickup" fleet is looking to get people, they're going to pick that pirate BS over a standard T1 one (and if there are a lot of people wanting to get in that day, you may be at the back of a long line). Second, you'll simply run through incursion sites far faster, which aside from simply speeding up your moneymaking also also betters your chances of beating a fleet contesting your fleet on a site.


Lastly... as was said, there should be people who are able to answer this for you. If not, well... may want to hold off on that Mach or Vindicator for a bit?

Nah a Tier 3 BS will do fine

It might not punch out the same DPS or tank but it'll work

Really the best ships to use for Incursions aren't Battleships at all. It's better to use a T3 since they have a smaller sig radius and will take less damage than a BS. Plus can tanked to close to a BS in EHP. The Legion can be tanked to around 130k EHP and can do 600 DPS with a smaller sig radius than any BS. The Loki with the Immobility Drivers subs are very handy too. Everyone already knows about Tengus and how tanky they can be. But really I've seen all manner of ships used for Incursions including Recons and Command Ships.

It's indeed pretty hard to beat an Abaddon when it comes to hurt them Incursion Sanshas.

Whilst that is true for normal Sansha, Incursion Sansha have a uniform tank, just as they deal uniform damage...


Edit: too slow - damn slow ipad...

There are two basic types of ship you'll be flying in Incursions: DPS or Logistics. There are other specialised types ("anchor" in some fleets, off-grid boosters, fire support, etc), but the basics are either lots of DPS, or logistics.

The single concern of every ship on grid is to have enough buffer to allow logistics to repair you before you blow up. For cruisers, this will be about 30k EHP, for battleships you want 90k EHP, and for all ships you want high resistances across the board. After that you need to look at delivering effective DPS to the targets you will be facing.

Here's a Hurricane fit from the BTL Incursion site.

Here's a Nightmare fit from the same site.

Note that many fleets will end up with specialist ships such as a Vindicator, Huginn or Loki which has the job of webbing targets for the battleships to hit. There will be ships who target paint targets for the fleet, etc. All fittings need to take into account the abilities of the rest of the fleet, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to pick cookie-cutter fittings from these sites. That Nightmare won't need a webifier fitted if you have a specialist webber in the fleet - let the Loki do the webbing, which allows the Nightmare to fit more tank or DPS mods. The Nightmare pilot might feel the webber allows his drones to kill nearby frigates more easily. For every design choice there is an alternative choice that is just as valid.

The fascination with pirate faction ships seems to be due to the relative ease of fitting for a combination of "sufficient tank" and "lots of DPS" (with the Vindicator and Bhaalgorn being obvious standouts for their webifier bonuses). With sufficient DPS you can finish Vanguard sites in a few minutes (from the time you activate the acceleration gate to the time you're warping out: less than five minutes). With low DPS you will take tens of minutes to finish a Vanguard site, to the point that other fleets will enter and finish the site while you're still pecking away at one of the cruisers or battleships. Thus if you have low DPS you'll find that you "lose" sites and waste a lot of your time.

I'm only getting into incursions myself. I would recommend reading through incursion guides such as the BTL Incursions site.

Note that when I mention "DPS" in this post, what I really means is "DPS effectively delivered to a target". It's no use having an EFT DPS of 1050 when you can't get any shots to hit a target because it's moving too fast. Thus the number of tracking bonuses on that Nightmare, and the use of specialist webifying/target painting ships.

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