EVE New Citizens Q&A

I hope I used the term correctly, I kinda just want to put my guard up, walk at the enemy and then punch them in the face until they're dead.

from what I understand this is the specialty of the amarr?

Gallente, generally. Blasters have the highest DPS and shortest effective range of all the turret platforms, so you usually ram the enemy and have at it.

Amarr do have some of the best buffer tanks in the game, but lasers trade some of their damage for range projection.

every race has some kind of brawly ship, several in fact.

medium projectiles suck a whole load of ass these days yes. Other 2 sizes are okish

Not so much, and it is true the current meta favors kiting. I thik it's due to all the abilities that are granted by kiting which are not made up for in brawling. Last night I tried a brawl fit and lost an amarr ship to a slasher, even with gatling pulse I did zero damage. The low tracking can really put the hurt on, and its at a time like that I wish I had more midslots to either have a tracking computer or add on a tracking disruptor, in order to make it an even fight. There's also the issue of damage types and DPS. Lasers actually dont have that great DPS, and are focused on two types of damage. You can download some EFT and see that lasers are actually one or two points above the other weapons, comparing a light dual pulse to a 150mm ac and ion blasters, however, then run a rifter vs a torm and mess with their speed and angle for a while.

You can quite literally go from 150 DPS in a torm to 3 DPS at 8km away, actually outside faction multifrequency optimal+falloff, and that's still the best point of DPS for the torm vs slasher if high angular velocity is being maintained. On the other side, the slasher loses about 40 DPS to end up still with 100 or so. Tracking enhancers and tracking computers with tracking scripts dont even seem to help that much.

The only thing I can think of in this instance is webbing, but thats a midslot item, so you can forget disrupt+web for punisher and slicer. 2 midslots effectively kills them being brawling ships solo, and you still need web backup or for someone else to cause a distraction where you can move parallel to your target and get reasonable hits in.

Kiting removes a lot of this difficulty to hit, allows the range control to keep your range where you want it, and allows you to pick your fights more easily.

These reasons are why the slicer is always kite fit. The slot layout for mids cant brawl. Same thing with punisher, only fewer people kite with it.

This experiment also says that the Slasher is a prime brawler frigate, as it can get under guns of other frigs and still apply nearly all of its damage.

Incursus seems to make the best brawler ship for obvious slot layout, drone usage, and blaster reasons.




I assume newbies are flying frigates and maybe destroyers. Thats what newbie typically means.

I took a look at your killboard. Your problem here was using conflagration. It has the shortest range and a tracking penalty to boot, which is compounded by the fact that close targets are already difficult to track. If you're being kited, use scorch for extra range. If it's a close range fight, use faction multifrequency which has better tracking than conflag.

Against another frigate, conflag is almost always the suboptimal choice. You want to save that for webbed targets or things that are larger than you. As you've discovered, paper DPS doesn't mean anything if you can't apply it.

Scorch is probably the biggest strength of pulse lasers (excellent range). You should always carry at least scorch and multifrequency for the sake of flexibility.


Edit: Looking at the killboard of the guy who won the engagement, it seems likely he was packing a tracking disruptor, which would make him even harder to track. Fitting and flying ships is a lot like rock-paper-scissors. It's all about making the right choices for the situation. Doesn't mean a certain ship is good or bad, just that you need to make different choices to succeed.

key word there

Kinda. Gallente have blaster-tilted bonuses on their hulls, and blasters have always kind of been the "I have you now" close-in ticket puncher.

The guy up-thread that mentioned rockets as a great brawling weapon is not wrong, though. Back in the day the Tristan (now a Gallente drone-focused ship) actually had a straight-up split between turret (blaster) slots and missile (rocket) slots just in case you couldn't decide, and if you dropped right on top of someone or managed to catch up with them that was about as much pain as could be brought in frig combat.

Drones are also a bit part of stand-and-punch at the frigate level now, for most people, since they have good damage and are difficult to shake when you're tackled.

So... really you can build a brawler with any race you like. Gallente historically are best at it (though not overwhelmingly anymore) and have higher damage, but Amarr have equally solid advantage on tank. Minmatar tends to have the best flexibility, and Caldari have a lot of missile-focused boats which makes them easiest to use. And all of those things are additionally going to vary hugely with your fit.

enyo, jaguar, blaster harpy, vengeance are pretty good brawling ships, as said though any ship can brawl if you fit it to brawl, harpy for instance works good as a blaster brawler with good dps and also as railgun kiter with dual webs its pretty awesome.

I honestly dont think multifreq would have mattered because EFT says that my DPS would've been crap either way. I don't recall seeing a TD, but I cant be sure. On the other hand slashers have 7.5% bonus to tracking speed per level on small projectile turrets, which already have good tracking speed. Lasers don't have good tracking speed. He had web and neut, I had MWD and scram. A web for me would've changed things, but punishers and slicers and dragoons and coercers don't have the slot layout.