EVE New Citizens Q&A

Eh, kinda. Generally speaking I tend to think of turrets in terms of application ranges. Lasers have some of the best variation of application ranges in the game, with some setups you can hit everything from a couple km away to like 45 km out without even swapping ammo. Dynamic ammo swapping adds similarly.

The tracking is a bit mediocre, though, with both subtypes it's a bit slower than AC/Blaster and faster than Arty/Snipe, so there's some give and take. You will want to think about tracking boosters, though.



This is your big primary difference, and the major cost of awesomeness. The way it actually mostly manifests isn't changing layouts so much as really needing you to get a bunch of skills all the way to V. Once ship skills, efficiency skills, and gun skills are all V your T2 weaponry is as good or better as anyone's without loading down your ship with superfluous fitting crap, before then it's a bit of a mess. I mean, not crippling, but a lot more in the way of trade-offs and annoyance.

One of the bigger annoyances is active rep not being very convenient until everything's trained up, you initially are going to be losing slots to fitting and cap crap that you'd rather be going into more pew pew.



Again, you have a big range variation where you can viably hit things, and your ships are innately slow, but have the best raw armor numbers in the game (usually). So sitting there and just beating the everloving crap out of people while you take everything they can dish out with a polite but condescending smile is basically the most natural way possible to play Amarr. Not the only way, but a good way.



If things are engaging you closer in mostly, make sure you're using pulses and a tracking enhancer, possibly a scripted one. If you have an absurdly high optimal you don't need, again, pulse lasers are your friend. Your weapons aren't as exciting as other races but they can keep slugging forever, make sure you can actually hit things to take advantage of that.

EDIT: You also have a high optimal so that you can sacrifice it to Multifrequency and hit close-in things obscenely hard, similar to antimatter for Gallente.

Actually I've used both and compared them to the other weapon systems and noticed massive losses in tracking when compared to other races weapon systems.

For example with Amarr pulse I have around .3 or .4 with Gallente Blasters I get around .6 or .7 so to me I see about a 50% difference.

Yes Amarr ships are Armor tanks this is definitely something I've noticed and enjoy about them.

But I can see why they don't have such high tracking and how they could still be good enough.

Amarr = Awesome Optimals but lower tracking

Gallente = Awesome Tracking to compensate for low optimal

You're right, the Gallente need the better tracking on their weapons because the blasters are limited to touchy-feely range. Amarr pulse lasers have a better range, so they don't need to get so close, and thus they have worse tracking.

The game mechanics turn everything into lowered damage. If your guns don't track, if the target is too small, if you're outside of optimal, you get slightly more "miss" messages, but the main thing you get is lowered damage on the hits.

It would have been terribly unfair to give the Gallente a weapon (blasters) that has such crippling limitation (must bump the target to be in range) and then have it NOT deliver the listed damage when you finally get in-range, because it just can't track the target. Actually it was terribly unfair, blasters were the worst for a long time before they fixed it, when was it, last year? It's not fully fixed, either, as the "getting in range" part is still a problem, but one that's related to ship speeds and afterburners/MWDs.

In any case, the difference with Amarr is that you have almost medium range on pulses, and (player) enemies theoretically have either short range or long range guns, so if you make an effort to keep them at medium, you solve 2 birds with one tactic: your tracking problem, and neutralizing how much damage the enemy is doing to you. Versus NPCs, webifier in a mid slot is pretty awesome in some cases, not to keep them close, but to keep them at distance and still.

EDIT: Minmatar autocannons are operating in the exact scenario described above, btw. They actually can't track at optimal, and their best damage is slightly outside of optimal. Thus, they operate in their falloff range, and so the "best" damage is less than the listed damage, unless everyone is standing still.