Warfare & Tactics

Merlin or incursus are slower. Any little bit of speed is not really expandable when you want to get a tackle on something, and with 2M sp, you are prone to die anyway, be it in a merlin, incursus or rifter. Speed and sig is the minmatar thing with versatility, not pure firepower or amazing resilience, but they seem to had forgotten this too.

Been having this discussion extensively with the guys I fly with, and have tested many of the setups listed here and many more.

Love the Rifter, can it win against the new Merlin, Incursus, Punisher - yes. Can you do it from 500m, no. Against a well fit Merlin and a good pilot it has little chance. As said before, its tough to neut out a Merlin, and with a MSE and 2 webs speed becomes a nonexistant argument. You cant pull range in a Rifter now.

Does the Incursus provide a more than viable replacement for the Rifter. Yep. Many of your tried and true Rifter style fits work on it quite well. Some of the adapted fits that really utilize its bonuses are tough as nails, put out good dps and can take on any frig, dessy's and many cruisers (kinda like the Rifter usta could).

I flew the Rifter solo for a long time and really prefer it to all other frigs, but there is a point that you have to face the fact that a well fit Incursus or Merlin (well flown) will burn it down pretty fast.

Is the Rifter still viable. Sure, you just hafta pick your prey and fly your butt off - as many have said its no longer a "set range at 500, press F1, F1, F3, F4 win" ship. Flown well, it still does pretty good 75% of the time. The other 25% of pilots were going to probably kill you regardless what you fly (that is where your skill - and mine - still suck).

I would like to see a slight alignment to pull it a bit more in line. Not sure where that would be TBH, but it needs a bit of something to get it that probably 2-5% better to make it a real daily challenger to (all things equal) a Merlin or Incursus.

I think the AF's are the same speed as before. Jaguar is pretty fast still at 2.9km/s without any speed mods. I think the jag just seems weak after the harpy/enyo/ishkur/hawk etc got buffed repeatedly.

The DPS difference between a rifter and merlin/incursus is pretty big now, even when those ships fit rails or use null. I think the problem is that a rifter just doesn't have the gank and tank to keep up. Even with double gyros on a rifter you're still only getting 155dps and only 6km of falloff, whereas a neutron merlin has better range, better dps and much better tank.

This leads into another point worth mentioning - You cannot just balance ships based on 1v1s against other ships in the same class. A Merlin will have a gigantic sig radius and slow speed which makes it easy to hit by larger ships .The Incursus is better off, but is cap-reliant and has a larger sig. The rifter is not cap reliant and can reasonably fit a nos.

Also, damage type flexibility.

Having flown the prepatch Merlin pretty extensively I'm slightly surprised that Null S/kite is still being touted as a supercounter to Barrage S/kite. With the loss of the optimal range bonus and, yes, the rocket hardpoints it seems like Merlins would be now weaker at 7.5km kiting than they were before. Does the damage bonus/magstab make up for it?

Note that I flew MWD merlins with neutrons for this very reason, but neutrons are harder to fit with an MWD and tank with 3 blaster hardpoints without dropping the extender to F-S9. I realize this is not an issue with an AB merlin.

I misspoke - was considering some fights I have had with either armor Merlins or with short range kiting Merlins that are running AB/Scram/Web/Web and CDFE rigs - the armor Merlin especially has a good chance with this setup and either Neutrons or Rails.



This is probably the best summation of the issue so far and gives a good basis for a bit of balance.

Essentially, CCP is not going to be changing the Rifter any time soon (if at all). It can still be a solid tackler and with arties (if you like a slow kill) can kite out quite well.