EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello,

I am thinking about getting my first cruiser and I'd like opinions on the merits and drawbacks of both ships.

I know the vex can hold more drones and the thorax is more of a gunship.

I'm not a huge fan of drones, and I'm not particularly interested in micromanaging a swarm of them.

In your opinion, which ship would you chose between those two?

Also, what is the best way to fit either ship?

Blasterboat....for my current destroyer and hopefully my future cruiser do I want to use short ranged blasters?

Currently, on my destroyer, I'm using 125mm rails with about a 17km range. I thought I would do the same on the cruiser. Is that a bad decision with Gallante ships?

It's hardly a swarm. All sub-capital ships can only use 5 drones at once maximum. You push F to have them attack the current target and Shift-R to have them return to your drone bay. Make sure to use drone groups in the drone bay, and everything becomes much easier.

That said, if a flight of drones (5) is too many for you, you're a bit SOL with bigger Gallente ships. All Gallente ships larger than a destroyer have the drone bay and bandwidth to field 5 drones, and usually depend on those drones to pack the most punch possible. While the Thorax is indeed more of a gunboat than the Vexor, it also has a 50m3 drone bay with 50 bandwidth, which means it is able to field a full flight of medium drones.

So far as blasters vs rails... they are both hybrid weapon systems. That means that whenever you look at a ship's description and you see something like "Gallente Cruiser Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to Medium Hybrid Turret damage per level", that means that both blasters and railguns get bonused.

However, Gallente ships tend to work best with blasters. This is because they receive damage, tracking, and falloff bonuses. Damage is useful to supplement the already high damage of blasters, tracking is useful for blasters to be effective at very short ranges, and falloff gives them much-needed range flexibility. In the meantime, the Caldari are better with railguns, as a lot of their ships get optimal range bonuses, and bonusing a 20 km railgun optimal range by 50% is much more useful than bonusing a 1 km blaster optimal range by 50%.

I can't really advise you to fly a Thorax over a Vexor or vice versa, as I don't have enough experience with both of them, but I can tell you that it is really fun to melt people's faces off in PvP with a Thorax.

It is also phallic, for what that counts.

If you're going to do level 2 missions the vexor is better. Lv2 has lots of frigates and not many cruisers so drones are going to work better than medium guns. For PvP I'd go with the thorax.

I used a Vexor on another character and found it a bit tedious.

You should be fine with Hobgoblins. They're small and agile and will eat through the frigates. You'll want to get T2 drones as soon as possible (it only takes about 10 days from scratch).

A vexor with small guns and a 1600mm rolled tungsten plate is a pretty serious business spaceship. Thoraxes are okay but they are kind of squishy.

As you can see, in EVE opinions are like spaceships. Everybody has one...

It depends, of course, on what you intend to do with it. But i always found a vexor to be a nice unexpectedly strong ship for pvp. Folks tend to understimate it and you can tank it quite well and do a fair bit of damage. One of the major strengths of Gallente is their drone usage so drone skills should be high on your list if you are flying gallente.

I have soloed poorly fit battleships and battle cruisers rather easily with a vexor. Realistically if you intend to do low sec or high sec pvp gallente ships in general are fine. If you intend to go to nullsec stop training gallente altogether and go minmatar or amarr depending upon who you choose to fly with and what they are calling for in defense fleets.

For PVP

Thorax....

That is all.

My mega calls your 757DPS and raises it to 1433 DPS.

And no... the Thorax is known as DPS hog for it's size. Even with a big tank I pop out 550dps with it. 200 less than what you call the highest DPS. And then it is not fitted for Gank, I could pop that up to 700 dps is not more.