Ships & Modules

When I was a young gallentean pilot flying my first incursions, I once asked: "How do rails perform on these Vanguards?" And the overall answer was: "They suck. Get a Mach."

Now, a few months later, I could get and fit effectively a Mach, but I won´t, because I like Hybrids. (Aesthetically, if you must) So I have been testing out different ships with both blasters and rails, and one of my conclusions is that Railguns work better in Vanguards than Blasters.

If you field a blaster boat, in one of these. You wont be able to put out anything but minimal dps while that Tama is at around 20km. (Anything further will most likely result in a miss) And by the time the Tama gets to around 15km, it will have at least its shields down and that blaster boat will have been basically idle for about 1/3rd of the encounter. Any closer and the Tama should be webbed, rendering those 0.7rads/sec you´ve got in your blasters effectively wasted and you will still be not even close to your projected dps due to falloff.

Assuming that shansha does manage to get to around 10km, leaving aside the inefficency of your fleet, it will usually have only a couple of volleys left in it. So, congratulations, your blaster pilot was pretty much afk most of the encounter.

Now a different thing happens with rails. Beggining by the fact that you are able to hit shanshas as soon as they spawn (50+ km); with the same two tracking computers II you had on your blaster boat, you would be able to hit them with a transversal of 200m/s at around 10km, with decent webbers in the fleet, their transversall tends to go much lower. And the time it takes the webs to go in full effect, is much lower than the time it takes blasters to put out any dps at all.

This all means that: even if on paper rails have lower dps output than blasters, in the field, blasters will be rendered pretty much usless unless the whole fleet is lacking in dps; while railguns will result in a much more constant damage though the whole encounter.

The question is then: Why are rail fittings (Mega for armor, and Rokh for shield) regarded as fail fits at their best? Am I missing something here? Is it a matter of ignorance and EFT warrioring? Racism?

TL&DR: My tests have shown that rails work better for vanguards than blasters. Why do we see so many blaster fits then?

Inb4: "Get a Mach and stfu."

P.S. Also, onsidering drones are the real heroes in Vanguards, why dont we see more Navy Dominixes on the field?

There's no easy way to check skills, so people go off of the fits, and assume skills are equal. I would imagine, that if they were to be told that your skills in a pirate faction ship are really bad, you would also not get fleet invites. Also a vindi with neutrons/null is still pumping out about 800 DPS at 30km, and under 20km you can use void, and have 1400 DPS (not counting drones). Vindi (the main incursion blaster ship) can also hit frigates no problem due to its 90% webs.

It's also worth noting that if you're in a vanguard fleet that accepts t1 battleships, the rats are going to spend most of their time up close anyway. You're not exactly in a high end fleet.

EDIT: As for that drones comment:
My vindi can hit a tama cerebellum for 5k damage. Drones really aren't that great.

Because of contests. Your failfleet with rails won't get paid.

Speaking of "Pirate BS or GTFO" attitude huh?

Another reason for which I avoid getting a Mach or Vindi for myself is that I´m not a really "Harcore" incursion runner. Its not like i run them for more than a couple of weeks before going back to my usualt trading/pvp affairs; so getting a ship that costs around 1bill in hull alone, seems to be sort of a waste.

But i do think that if i get into a fleet, I am supposed to be as efficient a I can, and same applies to newer players who can´t really get a Vindi or anything past a t1 BS due to skill/ISK limitations.

I've said it before....

Because incursion people have the mentality of wow raiders...and most are uber carebears. Which means they're hugely anal, narrow minded, and nervous. If the wind blows in a wrong direction they get upset blame someone else and run. They dont like change because it could disrupt the natural order... Or their spread sheet of maximizing time v. DPS efficiency.

When you think about it Incursions are raiding content... So remember back to any other MMO with pve raids and how those people acted... and there's your answer on why they can't seem to like anything that's different.

Only one ship orbits outside 18km(15km even), and that ship is in mining sites, the least run site of the three. And there are only five of them, the rest are frigates. And at 23km, if the cruisers are webbed down to 100km, the blasters are still doing the same damage against those. If they aren't webbed, the blasters do about 300dps more. You're trying to tell me that the rails doing AT BEST the same dps against five of the rats in a mining site is preferable to doing hundreds more dps against battleships and an entire order of magnitude more against frigates?


Would you mind explaining to me how webbing ships makes them orbit farther? They still get into their normal orbit range. With webs you get a few more seconds of them being farther out, that's all....you can't web the whole spawn, much less keep them from getting in range.

Also, armor ships and Tier 3's are the only hybrid ships that will have tracking computers fitted, and the tier 3's lack the tracking bonus of megathron hulls.

One of the reasons I don't want to bother with Incursions. EVE is the last MMORPG where I'd want to get involved in pug groups.