Ships & Modules

I'm asking because I built a sig troll fit from inertia stabs, MSEs, and shield resist rigs on a kestrel for lols, and it still seemed to tank with mwd/kite like a beast vs tristan with T2 drones.

It leaves me wondering whether sig plays an inflated or deflated role in the game. Its obviously important, lock speeds and all that, but in terms of damage, how effective is it really? How can we weight the value of signature radius compared to tracking speed from an attacker's guns?

Is a T1 hull set up as a cheap interceptor with warp speed rigs less useful with the bloated sig penalty from the rigs compared to before when it was just a CPU nerf? Do people prefer nanofiber hulls over inertia stabilizers for getting non-sig penalties with some agility bonus, despite it being less than the agility bonus of inert stab? When do people use inert stab for combat compared to nanofiber? (I don't know how valuable maximized acceleration is, although inert stabs provide a bigger bonus to standard flight accel and warp accel).

In a way, I disagree with the change from CPU penalty to sig radius because no rigs or modules lower sig radius, while you could counter the CPU penalty with a CPU rig, so you minimize the bad effects. You can't do anything about the sig penalty other than possibly fit nanofibers, because fitting inertia stabilizers to compensate for sig penalty by getting into warp faster among other things, that just compounds sig penalty on top.

This change is why I question whether it has much value or not. I would think it wouldn't be that problematic given that, if it was, caldari ships are always perma-nerfed from the sig penalty of their shield extenders.


New thought: Something else agility mods, do they improve the speed your ship orbits something at close range?

A lower sig mitigates turret damage (provided you have angular velocity) and missile damage (in any case, but it's usually better if you're moving, doesn't matter the direction).

In practice, Aria's correct that it's hard to mitigate small turret damage. Though it's easier to mitigate rocket/light missile damage, especially if you're moving fast.

I don't have as much experience in cruisers, but the figures would suggest that sig tanking in a cruiser against medium turret damage is quite feasible.


As a general rule, though, activating an MWD will almost always make you EASIER to hit, compared to just slowboating with MWD off. That's because the sig bloom is fixed (+500%), while the speed boost is +500% to your MAX SPEED. Often you'll NOT be going at your max speed, so as far as mitigating incoming dmg is concerened, you get the full penalty (sig-wise) but not the full benefit (speed-wise).


Regarding drones, there was a great article by Azual Skoll on his blog that showed that drones tend to out-track themselves by orbiting! And that the best way to mess up drone tracking was to sit still (so they can orbit you faster). In this case, a lower sig further decreases incoming drone dmg (they stupidly take care of the angular velocity part themselves).

Regarding MWD, I was under the impression that the sig radius penalty exists so that MWD doesn't make a person unhittable, that it is supposed to nullify the extra speed's increased loss of chance for attacker to hit, in a manner of speaking, to zero out the evasion bonuses that all that speed gives.

Which effectively makes you roughly 13% slower if you had perfect transversal, against turrets of the same size.
Which is trivial considering you won't ever be at perfect transversal 100% of the time, and all it takes for someone to screw up your sig tanking is to move away from you.

Which prolly doesn't matter goes of the drone meta, unless you are a frigate that is standing still, patiently waiting to get blapped by bigger guns.

I don't see where it would matter.

If you are in a Harpy with two extenders and shield rigs, you get roughly 60m sig. Against frigate turrets, you won't sig tank ever. With 50% more sig above the size of frigate guns you are essentially 30% slower even without MWD. But against cruiser guns you still have a huge margin, cos their gun size is 125 (the harpy being roughly twice as fast in angular terms)

If you switch an MWD on the Harpy gets ~200m sig. You weren't avoiding frigate fire before (bar being out of range) and you still aren't. And against cruisers you are almost 40% slower (125/200), or twice as slow.

So, in either case, what's another 15% sig or -13% effective speed? Your raw speed stays the same, and there is too much black and white when considering sig bloom. You avoid fire from larger guns, and get hit by small guns in any case, 15% or no 15% more sig. With and MWD, one gun size larger hits you.

Subject to extremely niche cases like the dramiel,slasher and panther. In all of which you still need raw speed more, because someone will simply move in a straight line.

Sig matters for smaller ships vs. bigger guns.

Sig tanking really has an impact when dealing with larger vessels as the above posters have stated.
With links, halo implants and combat boosters you can get the signature radius of some frigates to being smaller than that of a light drone. This really can have a significant impact on your ability to tank against just about anything bigger than a dessie.
I know of several pilots that have pulled of some severely ridiculous kills in this manner.

Even with just a set of halo implants you can make a sizeable difference in the amount of incoming damage you're forced to handle. The better the grade, the better the results, but you know... what you can afford to lose and stuff