Ships & Modules

tl;dr Moved from the Machariel and a Noctis to the Vargur. Love it, despite the Mach being a little better. Have some hopes for it being buffed in tiericide.

Greetings fellow pilots. Ever since I saw the Machariel gliding out of a station over the top of my puny Thrasher, I wanted one. Getting my Mael's ass kicked the first few times by flights of them in Angel missions only exacerbated that. Last year I was finally able to afford one, after years of play. It was beautiful, fast, and murderous.

But after a year of go to mission, melt face, back to station, pick up Noctis, go to bookmarks, vacuum wrecks... it got stale. I still love the ship, but it doesn't have the versatility I am looking for. I'll be the first to admit my 'ooo shiny' had worn down a bit. I'm also guessing that the Mach's reign is going to come to a Dramiel end in whichever round of tiericide it falls into. It's been king of the hill for so long.

So I started looking around for other battleship hulls. I'd done the Maelstrom, and found it to be a lumbering, if hardy beast. Having had the Mach I couldn't lose all that speed. So I landed on the Vargur. When it was remodeled, it became one of the sexiest ships in the game. I've put it through the ringer, and it's come out the other side in fine shape. I was able to port basically the entire fit over from the Mach, minus 3 guns, a TEII and a DCUII. Plus two Tractors, a salvager, and a flight of salvaging drones. Suddenly my missions have become twice as interactive. Target prioritization is still key, but now I have a whole new list of targets and distances to keep track of: the wrecks. I can have the field cleared by the time the last ship pops, or on the way to the acceleration gate. I love the huge cargohold (would be crazy good if I used an ASB or cap booster). And my kill speed is close to the same, using far less ammo. The shield performance is monstrous as well, hooray for boost amps.

The drawbacks: Well, I lost over 150 m/s, which hurts at first, but is still way faster than the Mael. And locking. Gods the locking. The low scan resolution jumped my lock on frigates from say 10 seconds (which I thought was long) to 20+ seconds (I was completely spoiled by the Mach's crazy good scan res). I'm having trouble locking and killing web/scram frigates before they close inside my guns. It had me seriously considering a field extender and a targeting subsystem, even though the latter decreases the former, just to shave a couple seconds off those times. And with the new AI, my drones get shot down almost as soon as they surround a target. So I've started thinking about carrying a smartbomb, just in case I can't outrun them with the AB. Luckily, no handful of scramming frigates could ever break the tank, so I'd really just have to ride it out. But that's lame.

Things I'd hope to see in tiericide to bring this ship up to fighting trim, given the many changes that have come about in game since it was built.

• A bigger drone bay. The ship bills itself as going on "prolonged deployment in hostile environments", but 75 m3 doesn't reflect that. With the advent of salvage drones, this is a ship that can take great advantage of them. Add to that the AI changes targeting drones, and it's going to lose combat drones more often, necessitating replacement mid fight. 100 m3, please.
• A higher scan resolution. Pretty pretty please. Mael is a 90, Varg is 85, but supposedly more advanced. 95? 100?
• Powergrid boost. The poor thing can't even fit 1200mm artillery without tank/gank-hosing grid module investment. It doesn't even need to be enough for 1400's, but 1200's at least. I'd really love to play with one that has an MJD and arties.
• And I'd never argue with a higher base speed

Now. What to do with an empty Machariel...

Between locking speed, sensor strength, and grid, what CCP did to nerf Marauders in pvp is making them sucking hard in pve. It's about time they realized that for a lumbering BS, the price tag alone is more than enough to kill off their pvp usage in anything other than Alliance Tournaments.

And Vargur is the least broken of the 4, btw.

Give it to me.

I remember being excited about my first kronos.

Then i got one.

Sell your Mach, it's going to get nerfed. Sell it while the price is still good.

See, I hadn't twigged to that. I send out the drones, one gets damaged or popped, and I call them back in. I sit there and focus on the bigger threats thinking '****, I don't want to send them out there if they're not going to do any good.' So I leave them in hangar until I pop all the bigger fish, then try and sortie them out again. Then they get auto targeted again and wrecked. These intervals are more than 2 minutes, I'm sure.

So you're saying if I bring them right back, let the frigates target switch, and immediately launch them again, they'll be ignored? Because that's great news.

Honestly I'ld just go back to the Mach. While you may be able to salvage as you go using the varg the best ISK in L4s comes from blitzing the mission getting mass amounts of LP really fast and selling the LP.

I know you probably want to use the Varg because you trained for it but meh, with the mach you can actually do more DPS than the varg using 1400s with sentries if you want to just shoot everything.

I can agree with 'space camo is ridiculous.' More the form factor. Like two circular saw blades welded to the front.

Three tractors might be better, now that you put it in my head. I only just picked up salvage drones on the last mission I ran, so I hadn't worked out those logistics fully.

I'm hoping Eyana's advice upthread about fooling the NPCs by popping the drones in and out will help me with that.