Ships & Modules

We think you should get a Dominix

Thanks for the reply, so I should go Megathron -> Vindicator? I'm biased towards the Hyperion, simply because of the tank bonus, but is that pointless?

There's no need for the tank bonus in missions. Battleships tank just fine without it.

Er ... I don't think it can match the Vindicator in the damage arena. However, it doesn't suffer from a crippled lock range (Vindi: 50km without skills).

Navy Mega is awesome correctly fitted and top skills but 425's, blasters you can do it too but completion time will be longer because travel time.
Hyperion is the worst blaster ship you can think of after Brutix, leave it at the hangar or market, nothing to see there.

Rokh is nice because of op range bonus but again, with rails, with blasters a +optimal on the shortest range weapon it's not something to fap on.
If only blaster ships had a decent speed and no speed drawbacks from armor mods/rigs, they could become something interesting to use but well.. just use missiles or arty.

Use the Hyperion with a three hardener plus rep setup as a rail platform over Mega. Navy Mega is cheap and perhaps next step before Kronos. Vindi has more DPS but Kronos is a solid ship.

Regarding the kronos, I'm not sure its better than the vindicator. They are pretty equal.

True you can fit the kronos for bit better tank with its bonus, but the vindicator can also shield tank quite well and get a bigger punch to compensate if you don't need the extra high slots.

As an occasional Blaster Kronos pilot I would have to suggest that you look at railguns.

There are very few missions in which a Blaster ship will perform better than the alternatives because even with the increased damage you will be spending most of your time travelling between targets.
Even if you load Null most NPCs want to orbit at ranges where your damage is so weakened by falloff that you might as well be using civilian gear.

This means that you have to travel and this means that you have to soak up the punishment while you burn cap for your microwarpdrive. Perihelion Olenard's suggestion that tank bonuses are wasted on PvE does not (in my experience) apply to blaster ships - you will, in most missions, be running a knife-edge between your rep and your MWD while you close and the cap situation doesn't get better when you turn on your webs and guns. You will probably also be running on a knife edge with heat in some missions, boosting web range to catch up to stuff quicker or hold things down longer while remembering that if you burn your web out you'll be completely screwed.

And that's not even considering missions with spider drones (in particular) or a combination of tackle and ewar.

If you have other pilots around with a little more "reach out and touch somebody" who can save you travelling and share agro then things are a lot better and you can concentrate on being a sheer damage plough - a task for which you're emminently suited but solo and in the vast majority of cases you're far better off sacrificing a little damage for a little more ability to project that damage.

I ran a Megathron with low skills and found it suitable for soloing / farming PvE lvl 4 security missions. Being essentially cowardly I have put most of my gunnery training into hybrid turret railguns to shoot the bad guys at as long a range as possible. The Megathron has a higher basic target range than a Hyperion and also benefits from an extra 7.5% tracking speed improvement per Gallante Battleship skill level. I'd usually not bother with an active tank of any sort, figuring that for PvE I'd either not need it (shooting the bad guys from 60km plus) or that I'd use my capacitor to hit the mwd and get to 60Km range and then shoot the bad guys.

I always took the view that the greatest threat in a PvE mission came from becoming scrambled and sometimes there are missions where your drones get targetted, leaving you very vulnerable to frigates that can get close enough and are just too fast for large railguns to track. In a mission I'd have no worries about killing most of the bad guys though taking significant armour damage before warping back to station to fit a salvager, tractor beam and swap a couple of medium armour reps into low slots. Then go back with fresh shields, recharged capacitor and finish off the mission, repairing the armour damage whilst salvaging.

Several months later and still too horribly underskilled to really fly a battleship properly I have a Hyperion. I think this might of been a case of having more money than sense. I actually find it less capable for PvE than the Megathron. Sure it can tank more damage out of the box and deal more damage than the Megathron, but it is really incredibly vulnerable to fast frigates when fitted with large railguns. I run mine with multiple tracking computers, stabilisers, sensor booster, target painter, basically anything to improve tracking speed, but pretty much anything smaller than a cruiser within 25Km that isn't actually standing still is safe from being hit.



Maybe it would actually work better as a blaster boat with the intrinsic tracking speed of blasters, coupled with the significant bonuses to armour rep per BS skill level. Fitting webs is probably the best defence to tackle up close frigates and would suit a blaster setup but it feels like a waste of a slot on the long range railgun fitting.

For me I'd get a Megathron over a Hyperion given my current railgun centric skillset and the way I prefer to handle PvE engagements.



For the record, I'm completely sh*t at PvP and only do fleet stuff where someone who knows what they are doing decides strategy, tactics and calls primaries but again I'd go Megathron over Hyperion as I can warp in once the enemy are scrammed at a nice safe distance and shoot from long range whilst aligned to a convenient safe spot and then run away if it looks like I'm in danger of becoming scrammed myself. For this I'm not planning on taking damage, just to be there as a large weapon platform, so the Megathron's additional tracking speed over the Hyperion's armour repping bonus is more useful.



In summary I think the Megathron is probably a better all rounder, probably a bit more sympathetic on low skill levels and certainly cheaper to buy in the first place. Hyperion probably works better as part of a balanced team. Personally I'd take neither if solo PvP was probable as they are just too vulnerable to becoming entangled by small, fast moving adversaries. At least not without a fitting that sort of negates their use as a large weapon platform. Also, for me, they are still expensive enough to notice their loss.

HTH