Ships & Modules

I've been looking around trying to find information but anything I find seems very biased or from 2012.. which I'm not sure how reliable that is, or how much the game has changed since then. Alot of what I find is basically "Tengu is love, tengu is life."

I'm looking for the current pros/cons of the tech 3 cruisers. Also if you guys could tell me what they're most common uses are I would appreciate that as well.

I'm a new player, just being doing missions and dabbling in pvp when I get bored of missions. I'm very interested in getting into wormholes and messing around in there. Which of the cruisers do you guys think would be best for that?

Loki: webs webs webs, get's huge bonus to web range making it almost a huginn but with vastly better survivability.

Legion: DPS boat with great damage application using pulses, HAM legions also have their place but lasers are generally better. Can be fit to be a heavy neuting ship, a curse with more tank if you will.

Tengu: missiles n ****, PVEr's choice out of the T3s because of the excellent damage projection and ease of use. Occasionally used as an ECM platform and I've heard of rail tengu alpha fleets too. Mainly reserved for PvE though since missile are fairly low damage in those situations.

Proteus: If you want to get up in the face of your enemy this is your ship, increased point/scram range along with some heavy dps with blasters and some even heavier tank. One of the staple t3s in wormhole warfare because of its face meltability.

All of the above can also be fitted for two other things:

1. exploration, a subsystem grants the same bonuses to scanning and hacking as a covert ops frigate. Accompanied by bubble immunity subsystem can make for a very sneaky and hard to catch exploration ship.

2. Covert ops, each t3 has a subsystem that effectively turns it into a covert ops ship, allowing warping with a cloak on and black ops cyno drops.

yeah ive started to notice medium ACs are pretty poop, but i think theyve reverted the idea to give combat recons HAC resists so Lokis will still have their place.

Couple of things that I haven't seen mentioned here are that for many fits you don't need to have all subsystems to V if you expect to do a lot of pvp in your t3s. Most of the time you really only need to have offensive and defensive subs trained to V and the rest to IV, which gives you a 2/5 chance of losing substantial training time.

Neuting legions, AHAC style rail prots, brick tanked blaster prots, cloaky hunter prots, petes, armor webbing lokis, dissolution and emergent railgus are all very viable for pvp. Active tanked legions and tengus aren't that amazing with t2 modules, but if you're willing to use links and spend some isk on bling they're very powerful.

For PVE they're ok, but most of the time there are better, cheaper, and safer alternatives. I've on occasion used a t3 to scout, scan, boost, and cyno for a blops battleship for running DED sites in null, which is a remarkably safe and effective method for running them and getting the loot out safely.

T3s are very good combat boosters, especially if you're only interested in running 3-4 links, as they can be made to be very difficult to scan and make excellent scouts in nullsec.

Personally, I don't think losing SP is a terribly big drawback, mostly it's just the cost of losing them, though when buffer tanked and in fleets they're so tanky that the risk of being alphad off the field is much lower than using a HAC.

Know your enemy - T3 Edition:

Tengu:
Often used as ratting boat in nullsec or WH space, fit with HAMs or HMs there. Expect AB and heavy active tank.

For Solo or Small-Scale 100MN Tengu is still a thing, often fit with range rigged HAMs or even RLML. The faster it goes, the harder it is to kill.

Thundercats as in HM Tengus as a big fleet doctrine are not used anymore, most people use Rail Tengus, either the heavily tanked 300k EHP brick version, or the nullified unprobable "Slippery Pete".

Legion:
In PvE it's overshadowed by the mighty Tengu.

For Solo or Small-Scale Legion is a excellent ship, especially when fit similiar to a Nomen or Kiting Zealot. Some people also like to run heavily tanked HAM legions, sometimes combined with 100MN.

In bigger fleets HAM Legions (slightly better Sacris) or Beam Legions (better Zealots) are used most.
Sometimes, more often in WH space though, Legions are fitted with Neuts (neut subsystem).

Very occasionally you see rep legions.

Loki:
Loki is almost only used as a support webbing ship in small or big fleets. Expect huge armor buffer and one or two webs.
Other variations are not very common.

Proteus
Probably the best ship for cloaky shenanigans.

In Small-Scale a few people run kiting rail proteus, not as common as Deimoses though. Most other Proteus are brick-tanked blaster boats with long scrams.

Bigger fleets use Proteuses either for heavily tanked long range tackle or as the main DPS ship in the doctrine.
While blaster prots were very common in WH-Space, nearly everyone switched to Rail Prots by now. They have huge tanks and good projection, similar to Railgu (just in armor).

100mn neuty ham legion is a thing of beauty.

LOL I'm dumb.

Thx!