Ships & Modules

I know that BS's are the best bang for your buck for running missions, but I really like the idea of flying a more nimble ship, and I also hear HAC's and T3's are more versatile if I ever branch out from running missions. I can't PVP as I need to be able to dock up fairly quick for surprise IRL disruptions. Going to college and living with the parents until I'm out in 2 more years. I have to stop and do stuff for them often enough to make PVP a bad idea. Due to this I will also not be doing incursions either. Once I am done with college and move out then PVP and incursions will be feasible, but that's not for 2 years yet.


Anyway...................... I have been debating what cruiser sized hull to go for. I have all racial cruisers to 3, fairly even missile and turret support skills in the 3's and 4's with more 4's than 3's, 5's for all my core skills, all core armor and shield tanking skills to 5, and all medium sized missile and turret skills to 3 besides a 5 for projectile turrets (Flew an Arty cane for a long time). I also have pretty good drone skills (including drone interfacing 5) and can fly T2 lights, mediums, and sentries, but my heavy drones skill at 1 LOL!

One thing I would like to add is that I will not be using an Ishtar because I HATE sentry sniping. I have a sentry sniping domi and it is very boring, but I fly it anyway to make isk while I figure out a new ship to fly.

I should also add that while cruiser sized hulls may not have the highest isk/ hour potential they will probably increase my actual isk/ hour because I will spend more time flying and less time in chat because I am bored or meta gaming like mad trying to find something better LOL! I would enjoy a cruiser sized hull better. I used to have an awesome time flying my Enyo in L3's, but for L4's it takes too long to kill a BS to be fun, and spider drones are a death sentence.

I have been thinking about using a Gila after the next expansion as it will be great for mobile drone combat (and have a nice new model), but I still want to explore other options as well.

One of the things I need to decide on is what race's ships of this size I want to fly. I'm not settled on a weapon system, but I do prefer shield tanking over armor tanking. I'm also not a big fan of lasers as they are so limited in their damage types. At least hybrids have a damage type combo that covers a wide range of rats. I think I am leaning towards either projectile turrets or missiles unless someone can make a good case for hybrid turrets

I also need to decide between a HAC or a T3. I think a T3 might be out of my price range right now. How much does a T3 hull plus subsystems average these days? A while ago I looked into a tengu and it came to about 1 billion isk.

Hello,
If you have heavy drones, consider a " brawling" ishtar. I fly with 2 geckos, and 5 sentries. If the mission is lots of smaller ships, I will set up sentries to snipe. When I get down to bs/bc, tight orbit and geckos. Works well, and still fairly quick mission times.
Just a thought.
And slightly off topic, I havent noticed geckos drawing a lot of agro, even from smaller npcs.

Ishtar is pretty good for L4 missions, I used to run an Ishtar with nothing but a MAR II and some rigs for tank for Serpentis missions in highsec, it put out 800 dps from Gardes at like 80km (this may be lower now with the nerf) and it was almost as good as some BS. The problem is you'll have to deal with alot of drone aggro and babysit your drones.

I've been out of the "Cattle Pen" I have a jump clone at a null sec station I've used for some fleet runs with my corp. I don't want to find a new corp. CAS is unique among NPC starter corps. I have a lot of good friends here and it's a good community. We even have our own website LOL! We organize events and various sub-groups within the corp as well. If I leave I can never come back with this character. Don't tell me to start a new corp with all my friends because they like it here too and many are core to our little community and also stay to help usher in new players.

I think I would go for a Gila over an Ishtar post-expansion. The gila can put out great DPS and apply it better than an Ishtar using heavy drones



As far as HAC's that are not the ishtar, what ones shine as L4 runners. I had been looking into flying a Cerberus with HAM launchers a while ago.

As far as T3's is the Tengu still king? Would a tengu be better than a Cerberus with HAM launchers or a Gila post expansion?

One ship that I use occasionally for L4s is a Sacrilege, sure it's a short range brawling missile boat, but it's a great deal of fun to fly and very nimble. It also tanks like nothing else at that size, it's a very tough ship.

Probably the toughest HAC as these things go, and a lot of fun in missions.

Even with ridiculous dps, combat drones just lose too much dps from travel time in missions, mission rats tend to be spread out and far away, this means in the end your actual dps numbers are almost half of what it actually is. Not to mention having to pull your drones in when they get aggressed, as well as the risk of losing them when frig webs them etc. Sentry drones are really the only way to go in most kinds of PvE, you can still do them with combat drones, but they will be terribly inefficient in comparison.

That might be a fun ship for me. I loved my hurricane and that's a T2 version. I was looking at this fit versus an Arty fit in EFT and found that unless I am within 10 KM I will get better DPS from artillery versus even a large target like a scorpion I used for the DPS graph in EFT. I know EFT doesn't = real EVE, but the comparison of falloff curves is accurate and shows just how fast the accuracy drops on the autocannons. I think an Artillery fit would be better. With max skills I could still squeeze out almost 800 DPS (using only T2 Gyros) with either faction close range ammo or quake ammo combined with T2 RLML with furies (DPS calculated including reloads) and T2 hob drones. The DPS isn't as high as some battleships can dish out, but better than quite a few of them, and with better application. Also the RLML could be handy for any pesky fast frigs.

I only have to train the specialization skill to get into either medium T2 artillery or autocannons where it would take 12 days to get into any other medium T2 turrets or missiles. The big downside is that it will take 60 days of training all those dang warfare link skills to 5 to get in the sleipnir (I have all BS at 5 from when I got ready for the skill split a while back). It would take 20 days to get into any race's HAC for me.

So, to get into a Sleipnir with T2 artillery would take twice as long as getting into a HAC with matching T2 weapons. On the upside, if I train for the Sleipnir I will actually be gaining access to all race's T2 BC's because I have all racials at 5. To get into all race's HAC's would be 80 days total in comparison. I think this would be a good long term goal for me. It could also prove useful if I end up flying in any sort of fleet once I've got my own place in a couple years and don't have all the sudden interruptions

Well, I played with EVEMON and found that if I remap and get a +4 charisma implant I can drop the train time to around 38-40 days instead of 60! I have 2 remaps available so I'm fine with using one now and then going back to primary perception secondary willpower focus that works for the majority of skills I train.

I used to fly regular L4's in a Vagabond BEFORE the shield boost buff. 220's and a ham on highs, ab, cap booster, invul, large shield booster meds, 2 gyro 2 TE 1 DC lows 2 dmg rigs. It was quite fun. Make sure you keep your transversal high vs battleships and you'll do even the toughest missions.

If you want something both mobile and effective at L4s, Mach is definitely the way to go. However going for a Cerberus then a Tengu is a much better training plan for future PvP use while still being decent L4 mission runners, Battleships see far less use in PvP unless you're part of a large null alliance that uses BS as part of their doctrines. The Mordus BS really shouldn't be used for missions, the point bonus is completely wasted and it's not really doing anything that the other missile BS can't do either better or for cheaper.