Ships & Modules

There is no flaw, other people flown Paladins for years in Incs and know very well what the hulls can do on grid and can compare it on a fair level herself(what does include marauder 5) to the performance of the Vindicator, NM or Mach that they also do fly quite a bit.



Well it doesn't, that was tested a long time ago by people that flown fully maxed out paladins before the changes every day. The reason for this is that anti frig performance is not sufficient in active tank a marauder fleet, if you want to utilize hulls that produce better results against frigs(Vindis, Puls NMs and AC Machs do) you need logis. While the range of the paladin is absolutely sufficient for VGs without Bastion the tracking is the main bottleneck for damage application and it performs a lot worse without a faction tracking link on it from a Oneiros(that doesn't work on it with bastion).

My option is based on play testing the hulls in different fittings for a couple of hundred hours on grid since the bastion changes and I prefer the NM, because my overall conclusion is that the NM produces better hits, faster sites and got more utility, while even with marauder 5(what most people will not have) the Paladin has less tracking, less dps and issues in the anti frig performance. This also the case to a certain degree against cruisers, hitting them during her slow down at close range(when they deactivate the mwd, reducing her sig while they still move at over 400m/s) both with turrets and even more important with assisted sentry drones. It requires a lot of control over the targets and EW to produce feasible results, allows often to remove a extra romi before it gets in web range in NMCs/NCO, reducing the amount of targets that need to be tackled down at close, allows other ships to directly switch to the next romi that is already under the effect of multiple webs for 10-15 seconds and this is where the extra utility of the NM boosts site times a lot more than just the extra 100 dps or higher tracking would do on its own.

The way we use Paladins is already under the best conditions for the hull, utilizing more painters and webs and have a very effective tackle rotation, allowing for more applied dps on targets, especially on hulls that have issues in this regard, than in comparable shield fleets, where lesser amount of painters and webs would even increase the issues of the Paladin, similar as with active tanked fleets that can utilize less slots to fix that problems by increasing tracking or fielding more tackle.