Wormholes

I was playing with the idea of fitting light neutron blasters for the sole purpose of dealing with the close orbiting frigates.

With 3 DDA IIs and 2 Omnidirectional Tracking Link IIs my Garde IIs do 630dps with an optimal of 45km (falloff 12km) and a tracking speed of 0.055 which can probably deal with cruiser sized stuff.

If I switch to Curator IIs then the optimal increases to 80km (falloff 24km) and the tracking drops to 0.037 which would hopefully deal with the BSs and any frigs that start at long range.

Without additional sensor boosting I cant target beyond 90km anyway and I think that's where the Tengus start to struggle with missile range.

Thank you Jay

So presumably most battleships would simply slow down the group in the event of the rats being too far away. The rattlesnake could target and hit at over 130km but, since the tengus cannot and the rattler cannot survive outside of rep range this would not help much.

A Gila is an interesting idea. The only issue is that Sentry drones are static and so they would need to be scooped and redeployed each time the group decided to move position. This means I would not be able to shoot on-the-fly so to speak.

EDIT Hmm... looking at it, the Gila would struggle cap wise with the remote repping. A large shield transporter is capped out in less than 30 seconds so not much good there Ah well, I'll just have to keep working on those T3 ship skills...

It sounds like the issue is more about how cruiser size and BS sized ships mix together. A group of tengus works great and a group of Navy Domis could probably work great too but a domi trying to join a group of tengus... not so much.

Yeah, shame about the cap issues. The T3s have enormous cap reserves in comparison to the Gila. I wouldn't be able to offer much in the way of support to others with remote repping.

TBH (with lots of skills) a regular domi shield fit can out dps a nightmare for sleepers since drone damage mods, etc. were introduced (with the disadvantages of having to pull and deploy different types of sentries for different ranges instead of just swapping crystals and obviously having to deal with drones being shot at) rattlesnake needs cruise to reach similiar variation of ranges and torps are lol against sleepers.

If your purely after maxing out dps and using turrets + drones then tbh not much really replaces the standard domi IMO not sure its even worth going to the faction variant over it.

The rattlesnake has the advantages of a beast of a shield tank and being able to support your fleet via RR better than a domi can (for shield setusp) but without omni trackers and using just sentries for dps its only putting about 300dps effective against sleepers.

So, I went ahead and got a Navy Domi to see how well it works alongside spider tanking T3s and tried to keep all the useful comments in mind from this thread, thanks everyone.

I'm happy to report that it performs admirably. Tanks fine with 3 buddies and the rats did not target my sentry drones once.

In its current set up (includes 2 omnidirectionals) it hits out to about 90km and does around 550dps at that range. It can also hit cruisers inside of 20km reasonably well with Gardes. **

It's major problem when teamed up with T3s is that the T3s need to move around and the domi doesn't want to. This can cause a problem if rats spawn too far away, even though the domi itself can be set up to hit at 140km.

I have a modified fit that would allow for targeting and hitting at 140km which potentially would work great in a group of domis or if a few logi ships were on the field.

Overall I'm very happy with the Navy Domi as a stand in until my T3 skills are up, especially given its price. Also, I like the completely pointless camo paint job I would imagine that a Rattlesnake would do even better but at twice the price, I didn't feel it was worth it for me.

** note - this is very dependent on being able to use T2 Sentry Drones. T1s simply dont hit far enough or hard enough.

Let me also add to my Blackstar Peeps' comments, if you are worried about shooting things beyond your locking range as you fly a domi, don't forget the command "assist x [fleetmate]" or "guard x [fleetmate]. Even if you can't personally lock the target at 110 km, your long-range sentries will happily shoot at the distant sleepers if the sleepers are shooting at a fleet mate and you command the sentries to guard that fleet member. It's also great if you have a fast zippy pilot who speeds ahead of your fleet toward the sleepers and starts target painting them, as all your sentry drones will aggro whatever he target-paints.

Nothing like putting one guy in a HAC with speed boosts and target painters to fly up to the enemy, while two guys in domis sit back at range and assign their drones to shoot at whatever he targets. Pop! Pop! Pop!

The only drawback is your wrecks are scattered all over the place with this technique.

Sleepers tend to kill drones a lot in only 2 cases. You only have 1-2 ships or they grab agro on a new wave. In the later case just be sure to let your corpmates attack 1st and your be fine.