Warfare & Tactics

Executioner, Condor are also pretty solid ships. If we were Amarr, all you'd hear about over the past two years would have been "Derpsecutioner!"

Heron is an under rated solo beast with 5 midslots.

Only ship I don't really see out in the field are the Rifter, and Vigil (apart from the exploration oriented Imicus, Magnate, Probe lineup)

Wrong about the neuts. I engage in frig vs frig fights all the time and neuts are incredibly powerful against a ship with SAAR. One neut will reduce the number of cycles the opponent gets substantially, maybe down to only 3-4. Two neuts completely shuts down a frigate with active tank / weapons. Try a dual or triple neut tristan, you can kill damn near anything (including AF's) that use cap consuming weapons or an active tank. You can also escape at will.

OP: Blasters are incredibly powerful (overpowered relative to projectiles, IMO) but there are a lot of factors. You can scram kite blaster ships with barrage all day long in a Rifter or Slasher, provided you keep 5km+ between you and the target. I have killed a lot of blaster frigs with a Rifter. That said, if an Atron overheats his AB and you don't and he gets on you, you die very, very quickly. The falloff bonus makes them nasty with null as well. Merlins you just kite because they are slow as ****.

Lasers are crap, outside of scorch, which makes them excellent for scram kiting even with relatively low DPS. You can fly in such a way with overheating that keeps enemy transversal low enough to track with Multifrequency, it's just tricky. Executioner is a mediocre fast tackle ship, not good for much else aside from niche fits; Punisher is absolute crap for solo.

Breachers are incredibly tough scram kiting ships. Slashers are decent too, with a TD and their small sig + speed. Rifters project quite well with barrage.

Drones, on the other hand, are broken as ****. Tristans are king of T1 frigates. They are killable 1v1 only if your fit / situation directly counters theirs, which does happen sometimes.

and selectable damage type (good for going against T2 resists), immunity to nuets, long falloff on generally faster hulls.

get neut tristan.

Tristans are damn slow, range dictation really shouldn't be an issue. Since you can pop his drones, you just got to watch out wether he's blaster/rail/neutfit and choose orbit accordingly.
From the POV of flying one (rails+aar, neuter with plate, blaster+2rep), you have a hard time killing anyone who is focusing your drones. And then you can also hard-counter a tristan with a breacher...

Neut tristan damage is nothing crazy, between 100 and 120 depending on DDA or slightly more tank (most go for the latter, with less dps), and has no web. You can tank those drones no problem in any ship, believe me, but most importantly once you stay out the 6.5 Kms mark you've won the fight, just shoot the guy, he'll have less applied dps than you, and less or comparable tank, and staying out of that range is no problem at all because the tristan is one slow mofo. When you engage a tristan, basically be super wary of neut icons, if you see one pop up, overheat prop mod and keep at range 7.5 and you're golden.

"Armed" tristans (rails and blasters) are a mixed bag. They're excellent against non faction scram kiters, but they are at a disadvantage against pure brawlers, way less dps and not excellent tank. Again, range dictation applies, if you're fast enough to get on top of him fast, you win, otherwise, you lose.
Kite tristans are dangerous, but to be honest, any combat frig can tank those drones long enough to kill them off and force the tristan off field, or it will be a very close call at least


Basically, as almost every frig, they have some targets against whom they do great, some that they get smashed by, and some that it's dicey