Ships & Modules

no i like the kaalakiota shiny black and red. but on the Moa and the way the stripes were applied, I think the eagle edges out.

different opinion depending on hull. between ishukone/kaalakiota/gurista on the scorpion hull, the widow is my fav

You are missing the point. We're looking at the Eagle as a potential fleet ship, where boosts, logi, and ewar support are to be expected. In that situation, its excellent buffer and high resists means it has a much better capacity to survive under concentrated fire than most other HACs, and it has reasonably strong raw damage with solid projection to back it up.

It's not going to kite people like a Vagabond, but it's not trying to be that kind of ship.

my roommate had nerdgasms over his rail eagle while we were in a c5 magnetar, but it's hard not to love a flat 85% damage bonus on anything. he also has a main that is specialized in chimera/phoenix, and basically the poor guy is waiting for the caldari boat to sail... has been for 8, 9 years now

DON'T BE HIM

related: rail tengus video

BR

though I do resent being asked to pilot T3s, due to the SP loss.

Yet the price increase is a bargain for the gain in performance, when you go from Moa to Eagle it's a x17, when you go from eagle to tengu it's less than x2.
The skill penalty is indeed a big deterrent for young players, but a minor inconvenience to bitervets.

And all are indeed lackluster when compared to the mighty Ishtar.
When I was trying to find something to counter them I thought about something with good damage application and projection, the Apocalypse seemed nice until I realised it does much less damage, ridiculous. Looks like the only counter to Ishtar is more ishtars.
Maybe a faction 100mn Ab Phantasm fleet could do the trick but the price and skill requirements make it hard to field.

Ironically, the absolutely ridiculous SP requirement of the do-everything Ishtar is the only thing keeping it remotely balanced. There aren't any meta 4 drones that one can use as a cheap middle ground between crappy T1 and T2 drones other than expensive faction drones, so T2 are pretty mandatory. For comparison, to fly a reasonably effective fleet BS you just need Large Racial Turret V and Sharpshooting V. For an Ishtar, you need:

1. Cruiser V and Energy Grid Upgrades V to fly the ship.
2. HAC V to get drone control past 130km with two DLAs.
3. Drone Avionics V for T2 DLAs.
4. Light, Medium, Heavy, and Sentry Drone Operation V to use a full complement of T2 weapons.
5. Four different racial spec skills for your drones to train to at least IV.
6. Drone Sharpshooting V to use T2 drone range/tracking mods and to get that last few km of optimal out of your Wardens.
7. Drone Interfacing V for the huge 10%/level boost to damage.

That's about nine million SP just for one ship, and having them all to V is really relevant compared to how it is with most ships. Ishtars are weak to EM damage, and IV and V skills are the difference between a 115km Ishtar that's still within the optimal range of Heavy Beams with 3 range mods and thus gets slaughtered by EM damage, and a 130-135km Ishtar that's past optimal+falloff of these guns.

Kronos relaxed the still-absurd SP requirements for the uber-Ishtar quite a lot and as such I think we're going to see a lot more abuse of it. Drone Avionics (whatever it was called before) used to be a rank III skill, and Interfacing at 20%/level was even more mandatory to get to V.

[quote=Xequecal]1. Sniping past 150 km is not relevant because they can probe you down and warp to whatever range they want.

/quote]


Keep thinking this. I guess you never joined your goon buddies when you tried hellcamping us in x70. Guess what, your whole fleet was irrelevant. We still undocked and roasted billions of your stuff at ranges greater than 150. And I'm not just talking with the ol' slippery Pete fit, we got rid of the eccm and switched to tank because we were doing it RIGHT and it didn't even matter if you were probing us down.


Personally I'd be quite happy to give sniper eagles a go. They can certainly work wonders, even at extreme range.

Quick nitpick; Drone Avionics was scout drone op Pre-Kronos, which was only 1x IIRC.

Says who?

No, Sentries have 400 sig, which makes their DPS drop off to **** against small targets, will Eagle can hit perfectly well out to 180km, where tracking is a total non-issue.



Ishtar gets 5% bonus to tank per level like the Eagle? Really?



Makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.



Much better sniper.

Much better counter-sniper

Much better support-blapper .