Missions & Complexes

How do you know you have decent enough skills to start safely running lvl 4s ?


heres my character sheet. Im wanting to fly either a rattlesnake or dominix

character

Thanks for the reply. Im fixing to start training my sentry drones to T2 to bring my dps up

Move gallente battleship to IV, and then you would be feasible in a dominix - imo the lack of drone hitpoints and damage without gallente battleship skill is troublesome. rest of your core and drone skills are probably bearable as is.

sentry iv, and drone interfacing iv, you have done already, but you should really get large hybrids to iv, and every gunnery support skill to III. Without much damage coming from your battleship, stuff will get interested in shooting your sentries pretty quick.

Rattlesnakes aren't so pricey that I would be afraid to use to learn missions in it these days, but a dominix is a lot cheaper to start with if you do screw up and lose one.

no point at all in fitting guns to your domi. T1 rails using something like iron ammo is just a waste of cap and fitting. Better off focusing on your drone and navigation skills and use the MJD to full effect. Put armour and shield remote reps in highs instead for better drone survivability.

in addition to this: if you have a tech 2 tank it's extremely difficult to lose your ship if you go into the mission prepared and know the spawns.

I don't think the OP means courier missions.

There again, I used to run lvl 4 combat missions in my Velator using two mining lasers, earning at least, - insert desired fantasy figure here - per hour.

and you're going to be able to hit with rails at warden range?

right.

350mm using plutonium barely gets to 59km with a whole falloff. Assuming you use 2 DLAs (which you should) it's 99 dps with faction ammo at 59km and that's with perfect skills: utterly pointless.

Remote repping your sentries if they do draw aggro has 2 advantages:

1. It keeps them from dying
2. It draws aggro back to you far more than 99 (or 86 using normal ammo) will ever do.

Not having to use mids for tracking computers means putting either:

A: more omnis, longer range meaning longer time to apply damage
B: painter to apply more damage to smaller ships.
C: better tracking meaning your minimum range is shorter giving you, again, longer time to apply damage.

Both are far more effective ways to increase your damage than fitting 4 very underpowered 350mm rails that can't even apply damage at the same range as half your drones.

MJD is the solution for low skilled sentry pilots. You get overwhelmed you just jump away and continue to dps. Obviously as your drone skills become better this needs to happen less.

Of course i'd sneeze at 99 dps, because with the OPs skills it's likely to be not even half of 99 dps. That figure I gave you was faction plutonium with all 5s.

And assuming OP has only around 74km drone control range with one DLA, that's going to be your maximum engagement range which is not optimal at all.

2 DLAs are minimum if you're sniping with wardens which means maximum of 4 guns unless you're planning on engaging at 74km or less constantly which is a huge waste of your drones' potential.

Even curators and bouncers will get longer optimals than 74km with half decent skills. I could understand if you had combat drone V and EW drone V but that's not the case (that would give you 84km control which is acceptable).

Now if we take your example of iridium ammo, 115 dps will only be out to 65km at perfect skills, more likely 50km with OPs skills. Once again extremely little dps for the effort involved.

If you have ships within 40km of you it's fairly moot whether or not you have guns or not since gardes will tear apart anything at that range and shooting things won't mean the gardes will need one less volley to pop the target making it a complete waste of time and cap.



It doesn't take that long to lock a sentry and ai is programmed to focus fire on one drone at a time (usually) so it's fairly simple to start locking the drone that is taking damage. Sentries are fairly sturdy and unless the rats are extremely close, they won't be taking that much DPS anyhow.



While I do mostly agree with this: can you kill everything on their approach before they get to you? If not then painting and gaining more tracking/range is good for your efficiency and it leaves your MJD to be used in emergencies only. It could even allow you to completely drop the DCU for another DDA since you blap everything before it gets close to being within turret range.

Plus there's not always the possibility of 0 transversal. NPC rats especially never sit still and they can only realistically get popped on approach with MWD on. It might not sound like much but painting them and popping a few before they even aggro saves time and potentially negates the need for you to MJD away at all.

While wardens are great, I actually tend to use damage specific drones (gardes for serpentis and guristas, curators for sansha etc). Their orbiting ranges are strangely convenient to the drones' optimals that they're weak against. Being able to have gardes that can hit a 40km orbiting serpentis battleship makes life SO much easier since wardens actually track like poo at 40km a lot of the time.



Without perfect drone range control skills you are not going to be able to use 5 guns and maintain a decent attack range. I'd prefer using my rigs on sentry damage augs instead of having to waste it on drone control range and attempt to increase largely irrelevant turret dps.

It's a get out of jail free card, I'm not expecting people to use it every time it's off cooldown but it basically makes missioning in a sentry boat extremely risk free. You can literally fit all gank and MJD and not get hit at all in most missions.

I explained earlier why paint is good and some rats can hit over 80km so RR is useful still

it most certainly is not programmed to shoot 1 drone at a time. Again you are talking about dedicating the most valuable type of slot on the ship, that could have been active finishing the mission 100% faster all the time, and putting into a rare case, that often doesn't happen at all, and which is almost totally negated as you say yourself by the MJD, or by investing a single damage salvo (4 seconds added to mission complete) in a bay/release.



I can - since my dominix currently does 1080 dps without implants, and it doesn't matter much anyway, you realistically just need to kill the frigates on approach, and the cruisers on approach that will approach to below 20km which is not all of them. None of them are giant hp stores, and the only race that gets under drones with battleships are angels, and I bring zerker/bouncer combo for angels anyway, since its seriously convenient that they'll come close enough to let me zerker/run and gun to the next gate with near full dps.



You are optimising 8 to 12 seconds of shooting instead of the next 10 minutes of shooting.. Once they fly at you (mwd or otherwise), you will hit them, and at that point the painter is superflous module. I shot all 4 spider drones down on approach in silence the informant with a pair of navy omnis. Painter doesn't help that much because it gets stuck after the first target dies on cooldown, so its only available for every third salvo in a droneboat blapping task. ie I just cannot rate a stuck module as valuable enough to fit.



agreed, but you are now not MJDing, and the battleships will go and take up those orbits even whilst you kill the frigates and cruisers that want to come closer.



Sentry damage augs are terrible. Expensive, massive fitting penalty that gimps a newbie players ship, and completely outclassed by DDAs, and DDAs help with light drones for trapped newbies and for heavies (vs angels). Note that a skilled player can get 3 DDAs and a magstab onto an armor dominix, and that there are simply better uses of rig slots. I flew with them for 3 years, best thing that ever happened to drone boats was no longer needing them.

The 2x nano pump/ 1x drone control range is best rigging for domi IMO. Frees up lows and highs for damage.

On a regular domi you have to go 3 resists if you want to MJD, and one of the rigs has to be a grid rig, 1 should be the drone control range rig, and the other should probably bake on which ever of the mids you intend dropping - I'd probably bake on the f-90s range boost with an ionic field projector to free up the midslot for the MJD, as thats an irrelevent penalty.

Dominix Navy Issue - blink to cake and eat it.

[hi slots]
5x 350mm Railgun II - navy antimatter charge L
1x drone link aug II

[mid slots]
2x federation navy omnidirectional tracking link II
1x f-90 positional subroutines (script targeting range)
1x tracking computer II (script optimal)
1x medium electrochemical capacitor booster (cap 800)
1x large micro jump drive.

[low]
1x core b-type large armor repairer
1x core b-type thermic hardener
1x core b-type kinetic hardener
3x Drone damage augmenter II
1x federation navy magnetic field stabilizer

[rigs]
2x large auxillary nanopump 1
1x drone control range augmenter 1

[drones]
5x garde II
5x warden II
5x hobgoblin II
5x ogre II

cargo - javelin, antimatter, thorium, spike, cap 800s.

99km drone control range, 420 rat specific tank,
1142 dps @ 14km - javelin/ogre II,
1095 dps @ 31km - antimatter/garde II,
763 dps @ 99km/drone control limit - spike/warden II