Ships & Modules

Missiles vs. Hybrids (or any turret really) for missions is about the tradeoffs:

Missile damage gets reduced by NPC Defender missiles, but you can select your damage type. If you're not running missions primarily against Guristas/Serpentis, missiles will have the advantage.

Blasters do great damage but have horrible range; your effective DPS gets dropped by spending time moving from target to target, or engaging far in falloff. Same applies for torpedoes, but to a lesser extent.

Rails have great range, but not the best damage; you'll spend almost no time moving around, but more time shooting at each target. Here, rails have the advantage of instant damage application over long range.


Given your situation, I'd say it's more worth it to let the implants go unused than it would be to try to fit a hybrid ship just to take advantage of them.

too much tank, too much bling, no mjd, rails instead of blasters.

oh right and no bastion pahahaha.

the fit would suggest you are trying to fly it like an arty Machariel and wondering why it wont work.

the old marauders are dead, just let it go, like in that song.

once you've learned to let it go get acquainted with the new sexy marauder. treat her right and buy her the right shoes and she will never let you go. heck they dont even have to be fancy shoes, just nice T2 ones will do wonders.

No, both ships did perform very different, while the artillery mach has to watch range and transversal a lot to score good hits, the Kronos could cover all ranges effective, including close range(covered with the 90% web, what included sentry drone damage and was a massive difference to the artillery mach that is next to useless at sub 30km ranges) with a far more linear damage evolve(less damage loss by to much alpha application, higher tracking, little to no falloff dps loss with good positioning/ammo switching) and performed just as excellent as my navy apoc as a very mobile and flexible medium range dps platform. A lot of people where telling me to use it like a ac mach with blasters, and I told them there is no reason for it when you have a Mach right next to it in the hangar and the mach is plain better at this, by more range, more speed, quite similar damage output in practice and selectable damage types.

It also was a excellent multi boxing platform, given the huge range it could cover and the effectiveness at all ranges, the ability to omni tank everything with ease and the 90% web that you could apply against frigs to one volley them with another fast tracking hull on grid(like a puls navy Apoc).



The old marauders did need a helping hand, removing nonsense handicaps like sensor strength(that was applied when NPC ECM worked different) and stupid low scan resolution. However for the most they did need a real solution to individual problems, like the lack of DPS on the Kronos compared to the other marauders by giving it the 125/275m³ and a sentry drone optimal/racking bonus, the Golem by giving it proper speed and cap and another torp damage application bonus to make it a more effective torp platform, the Vargur a higher speed, buffing the tracking up to 10% per level and a bigger drone bay to become a better artillery alternative to the Mach. The only Marauder that was ok before the changes was the Paladin(because it was different to the NM, had different uses and was a brilliant ship on its own). Also stuff like a mwd cap use bonus(because that is far more useful to people that used the ship in a efficient way) and fitting + cap use bonus to remote reps and remote shield transfers, since they are fantastic spider tanking ships in Incs and WH for armor and the Vargur/Golem where a lot worse by not having this kind of options by the to high fitting cost of remote shield transfers.

However what they did get was crap(bastion) a fail save for people that are bad at pve and a massive nerf in other areas that made them plain worse compared to pirate BS.

The reason I used the Kronos both in L4 and Incs was because it was a fairly effective ship on its own when you did look with what hull you could archive the overall best result, the reason why I dropped it was that it wasn't any more after the changes.

the bastion is an amazingly fun piece of kit. just the posibilities alone makes me all hot and bothered. I guess im lucky in that I didnt fly the marauders much before the change. I think I had my vargur for only a little while and was so utterly disappointed and frustrated with it in sansha space that I nearly quit the game. I didnt have standings for angel space. I got into whs at least and when the bastion changes/mjd came on the test server it utterly blew my mind, especially on the paladin and vargur is just sooo good and fun now compared to how it was. the salvaging, the ecm immunity, the range, the mjd. the kronos seemed the most controversial but also has some of the most potential.

I was lucky, I didnt get stuck in a rut with marauders, relying so heavily on things like broken 90% web. I could look past the removal of things like that and see their true potential and adapt where others just could not.

I could let it go.

you should too, just let go of the 90% web.
just let it go. let it go.

ps. its even worse that you are taking a ship that changed so radically and fit it exactly the same way as before and for some inane reason think it will perform the same way as before. that is just plain dumb. like can you see how stupid that is? the problem is not the ship, its the sod piloting it and yet the poor kronos gets all the blame.

That is strange because I always face rolled Sansha and Blood Raider L4s in my armor Mach or 2-3 slot tanked pre bastion Vargur, can it be that the issue that you lack the movement, L4 knowledge about spawn triggers, npc dps ranges and how to cancel out TD effects? While the performance was nowhere close to my Pala or navy Apoc, it was still very good compared to what other hulls could do and somebody with a good knowledge about what the different hulls could do should know that.

There is actually great irony in that statement that you where frustrated without a ship that lets you ignore any kind of mechanic in L4 missions and removes every kind of punishment to players that do it wrong while you take great pleasure in them now because this makes L4s more interesting to you and to suit your play style, what is apparently being bad at L4s.



I love it when people call 90% webs broken, thinking they know what they speak off(hint back in the days every ship had 90% webs and a large amount of L4 content was designed under this conditions). Actually marauders started out with 99% webs, for the simile reason to speed frig shooting up with long range guns, never resorting to light drones. The reason why you can look past of the removal of things is because you don't understand how it was used, how it improved the hull and what great of a deal it actually is removing key features of hulls that made them interesting alternatives to others and improved her performance immensely in proper game play.

There is no "true potential" behind overtaking everything to the max and removing any other source of interaction(like EW effects) the player has to deal with till even the worst player can do stuff without any knowledge about game mechanics or paying attention. It is not that you did "adopt" you just did get handed out a ship that lets you get away with being bad at the game and you like that, even when in the greater picture the hulls took a big hit in her usability for others and the devs ignored all the input about the actual design flaws some players pointed out(beside super low scan resolution and the PG of the Vargur). However this is something you don't know, because you never utilized the old marauders properly and don't understand why and how people used them.

Sure I could still fly all my marauders with marauder 5 and all other stuff at 5. The difference is that they are now worse for the most part, compared of what they where before and I have zero use for uber bastion tanks(because the incoming dps in missions in fairly negotiable for the most part, if you use repositioning and knowledge about spawn triggers and what kind of dps NPCs can do at what ranges), mjd to compensate with huge range for the lack of understanding of tracking and dps mechanics actually work under the hood or EW immunity(outside of ECM, but mostly because it is broken itself and a awful mechanic, because it gives the player not options to negate the effect with actions on grid).

It is like the back in the days, when people called passive tanked Drakes and Rattlesnakes or Tengus with massive active tanks effective for L4s, not because the hulls where so much, but because there was zero chance of failure with something like this and they could ignore most of the mechanics that they didn't understand.

Mind you that for Kronos this "close up" means 50km engagement range, give or take. And honestly I don't get what's sucky about 900+ DPS at 39+95km, before TC/bastion are applied. Other than that, I totally agree.

From what I gathered flying it, blasters should be weapon of choice for serious grinding but rails allow for still effective yet quite relaxed mission mode. There is slight difference in performance but it's not as big as paper stats suggest.

Well, I tend to forget I fly with some chips inside my skull... I'm using generic +5% DPS implant. Stuffing my fit into PYFA for unimplanted-all-V pilot I get following gun stats:
- Antimatter, vanilla: 789 @39+54 (apologies for this stat in previous post, it was readout from game, another thing I forgot about)
- Antimatter, blessed: 907 @ditto
- Javelin: 921 @19+54

Stats are from following bare bone fit:
4 guns
1 bastion (switched off for stats above)
3 utility

2 TC (switched off for stats above)
2 utility

4 magstabs (3 faction, 1 tech II)
1 TE
1 repper
1 token hardener (mostly reactive because I grew to be lazy)

Large Burst Aerator II
utility rig

I'd also like to dispel this "ammo expensiveness" myth. I did some testing, it was a while ago but weapons' balance didn't change much since then, and it turned out that it is less profitable to shoot ordinary antimatter. And it was assuming you buy both from market. Let me reiterate it: when flying Kronos, for most of missions (with exception of low value crap you don't want to do anyway), the total profit was bigger when shooting faction ammo. I don't have my notes at hand but if you don't believe me and ask nicely I may try to find and retrieve them.

To come back to the original topic of this thread, I have gone for the new Clone with Missile implants and continue to fly the Scorpion Navy Issue. I lack the skills too fly a Kronos and having to buy a Hybrid ship is not such a good idea, since it can't get, in any way, better than the ship I am flying now.

Since every gunnery class needs tracking and can't hit everything within every range of a 110km (only with different kinds of ammo), I will stay with my SNI.

Thanks for the imput everyone, I will certainly take it all into account.

My paladin's tachs with 3TCs can hit everything within 110km. Granted they start missing a bit past 80km if you're too stubborn to just spend 2s swapping crystals.

Huh? You don't target paint with gun ships. Not that they dont benefit but its just pointless in solo PVE

Anyway, I'm putting together a skill plan for the rattlesnake as well. Its nice having such a high DPS ceiling while also getting a sizeable tank for low-stress mission running. Also its a cheap hull for the extreme performance you get.