EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'd use a set of medium drones too.

EDIT: But, heavy drones can hit medium targets quite well, if:

- you train all the drone upgrade skills to 4-5
- your ship has drone upgrade modules (esp. drone tracking enhancers)
- the target ship has an increased signature radius (for example, from using a large shield extender for its shield tank, which can be a popular fitting on Vexors).

If you're in a gang or hitting a BS or BC solo then the mixed approach is undoubtedly better. Naturally you don't want to be using Ogres against frigates or anything that's likely to outrun them or have a small sig radius.

Mixed flights are absolutely the best approach for the Vexor against most targets.

If heavies can hit (and in practice they can hit cruisers pretty well - their tracking is excellent for a battleship weapon) then it's a choice between 5 mediums (0/5/0), 3 heavies (3/0/0) and a 2/2/1 setup.

The 2/2/1 setup does more damage than the 3/0/0 and applies it better so you can immediately rule out 3/0/0 as ever being a consideration (except in weird situations - opposing smartbombs mainly).

2/2/1 also does 30% more damage on paper than the 0/5/0 setup. As long as the heavy drones are losing at most 30% of their damage to misses this is the best option.

I recommend a Vexor hold a 2/2/1 flight, plus a flight of 5 Warrior IIs (the fastest moving drone, which gives you an answer to interceptors), plus a flight of 5 utility drones, usually ECM ones.

drones move independently so their tracking is weird, you can't always say immediately that you will get good/bad hits. Sure launching ogres vs a 5km/s interceptor is a waste but a webbed frigate going 300m/s? well that matches an ogre's orbit velocity that could result in a lot of good hits. Or maybe that frigate slows down even more and the ogre starts out tracking itself, or perhaps it changes direction and then the ogre has no chance at hitting.

2/2/1 has been around long enough that it can't just be an eft dps fluke

You can get dps graphs for 1 ship vs another. However they don't account for the effective tracking of the drones on their target. They either apply all of the theoretical max dps, or none when the frigate is flying faster than the drones mwd speed.

The problem I find with people saying web and scram eliminate the problem, is that drones also move. Drones have a set orbit distance and speed which they try to maintain. Even if the target is 100% stationary they will still have tracking issues due to their own speed. I don't believe CCP would put medium drones into the game with the intention of "these are for when you can't field 5 heavies".

The 2/2/1 mixed flight argument isn't something I can get my head around for this reason. Most of the dps on paper comes from those two heavies, but if they are only applying 50% due to effective tracking issues, then you are hamstringing yourself. Bringing two mediums not only gives you better application, but also means you can field a 5th medium rather than the light.

I noticed when ratting in my VNI that a full flight of heavies wasn't projecting even half of their dps onto almost stationary cruiser.

But the point I would make is that the heavy drones don't actually give an advantage against PvE. Regardless of skills, they are never going to apply their full DPS against medium sized targets.

You are wrong, the numbers are earlier in this thread.

There are no reasons to ever consider using three heavy drones in a Vexor unless you are expecting your drones to be smartbombed.

2 heavy, 2 medium 1 light is strictly superior to 3 heavy. No matter what the opponent's sigrad or speed, 2/2/1 does more damage than 3/0/0.


As for 5 medium or 5 light versus 2/2/1 - that's target dependent. It is possible to fit 2 heavy, 5 medium and 5 light in the bay.

Drones are very strange, in that heavies have signature resolution on par with large weapons, but significantly better tracking speed on par with small weapons. So basically they will track cruisers pretty well in any situation where they are fast enough to keep up with them.

It also suggests that a TD with tracking speed script would be quite effective against, say a gecko shooting your frigate. I haven't tried it though.

Drones are notorious for having all kinds of silly tracking issues. For example during some testing I found that a flight of hammerheads actually applied more DPS to an AB bomber when it was moving full speed and they were chasing it. When I put a web on the bomber they started to hit it a little less, and with two webs they could barely hit it at all because they were orbiting it and ruining their own tracking!

The is the problem.
Heavy drones have a much better tracking than large turrets, but they orbit very closely to their target and at relatively high speeds, so the angular velocities are much much higher. As you pointed out, scramming/webbing doesn't help, because it's the drones actually orbiting too quickly on small targets that causes the issue. It's for this reason I use 5 mediums on targets smaller than Battleships.



Apologies. I meant to say 2 light flights and a flight of mediums.

Mixing drone sizes in PVP is relatively common. A Mixed flight of 2/2/1 on the vexor is one of, if not the best use cases for it.

Having said that, if you are fighting a low base sig cruiser, with a full set of links, who is AB'n around at max speed, then 5 mediums are better (but even those are heavily impacted in that scenario).