Ships & Modules

Nightmare has 10 effective turrets to the paladin's 9. The nightmare gets all its effective turrets from a role bonus, so if you can sit in it you get full dps. The Paladin starts at 8 with role bonus and gets to 9 after marauder 5 which is a long train.

Nightmare can suffer from cap issues with tachs, unless you get blingy. The Paladin does not.

Ugh. Tl:Dr go with nightmare and if you need more tank then consider a paladin.

If you can afford to buy and fit it properly, the nightmare is a great ship. As you say, you can be in it a lot quicker than you could a paladin, so consider it a stepping stone to a paladin. With 2 t2 em hardeners, a t2 thermal one and a thermal rig, plus a large or x-large pith booster (x-l might be tight if you're fitting tachs with lowish skills), using it in amarr space isn't a problem. I know a lot of people say tank rigs on a pve boat is bad, but a thermal one is useful against all rats except angels, and even then it can save your ass in ae bonus room.
Ab, cap booster, ds heatsinks, tc, dcu, and whatever else you feel like to fill slots.

The caldari skills won't take long to skill up, you certainly don't need cal bs to V.

By the time you can fly paladin, you might have moved on from missions, and a nightmare is useful everywhere.

PLD is better overall. The range bonus means your short range weapons are great and you can usually get away with conflagration or faction xray at the worst. Not to mention, short range means stuff dies in tractor range and you can pull the necessary tank only using 2 low slots (plus bastion occasionally).

NM is def good for the SP though. You don't really need to push the caldari bonus. Get into a NM first.

Train for the NM first (you won't be disappointed) and later train for the Paladins. I have alts that can fly both and the Paladins clearly outshines the NMs by a pretty good margin when you get Marauder V. But that is a very looooong training time so for now get Amar & Cal BS to IV and enjoy the NMs.

I've never understood why moving for the sake of moving is "fun" people kept saying they loved their tengus because they would go like 600m/s with an ab. woop de freaking doo! I think making ships explode is fun, and usually that means a bunch of moving around is doing it wrong. and anyways the paladin doesn't have to sit still, it just doesn't have to move most of the time. The apoc doesn't need to move, and the nightmare certainly doesn't need to move. All have very adequate tanks for lv4 missions. That said sometimes movement is good to match tracking or reduce incoming damage.

also the nightmare and paladin both have plenty of fitting left over in their usual pve fits.

And the nightmare is about a week out of the way due to shield skills, only really need the basics at 4 which is under 600k sp. base attributes and no skills it is 5d3h to train bs3. Less than 2 weeks of skills with +3s and starting attributes. and you pick up some skills that will be very useful just in general and elsewhere. Over all both styles of tanking are the same, see too much red hit the booster/rep. need more cap use a cap booster. the hard part is remembering which one you are doing. Seeing that your shields are down and going to activate your rep when you have a booster is probably the most obvious mistake. Most of the xl burst tank setups have enough tank that isn't really even a problem.

if you don't have a lot of isk or are new to missions then yes I suggest an apoc just to learn the basics about missions and build up some reserves. once you are used to lv4s and can afford a nightmare go for it!

ps: never group guns in a paladin/nightmare each gun does so much damage you are potentially wasting a ton of dps. at range frigs/destroyers usually die to one shot from one gun. cruisers/bcs can go down in 2 or 3 shots. and on a BS I expect 3 volleys or so, but on the last one only the guns that need to shoot activate so you can start shooting the next target immediately with the guns that didn't activate. On other bs I'll usually make 3-4 groups of 2-3 guns each depending on which guns and how many turrets I have.

As others said, it's all about personal preference. They're all good ships. When this topic came up weeks ago, I brought up the point about Bastion being EWAR immune, and that is useful for clearing some missions. Another person voiced that they simply cherry-pick missions that don't have EWAR elements.

*If you have those missions memorized, if you have enough characters with standing to keep rejecting missions, or have enough standing built up that you can take the standings hit from repeatedly rejecting missions, then you'd probably want a Nightmare. All things considered, you will have a shorter training time to maximize its potential, it will probably be quicker to clear missions, and it is cheaper.

*If you don't have the art of cherry-picking missions mastered, if you like to do all the missions or have a tendency to accidentally hit every trigger in a room, you'll want the superior tanking and EWAR immunity of bastion, so go Paladin. Marauders also get a bonus to tractor range, so the missions you have to retrieve something from a wreck, you're almost always within tractor range (especially when paired with a MJD).

On the flip side of training...yes training up marauders is a pain, but you don't really need level 5 to make any marauder an excellent ship. That bit of damage you'll lose out on the Paladin is probably nothing to worry about...I mean, 5% more damage? How often are you going to volley a ship and it have just a tiny sliver of health left? Probably next to never. Mission enough and it'll happen of course, but probably not often enough to get worked up over. And that bit of extra rep that is tied to the marauders skill? Again, between level 4 and level 5...you've already heard from people in this thread that they sometimes just use medium reppers because that's enough. And nothing says you can't creatively overtank yourself with a mix of reppers either (after all, people often speak of double or triple-repped ships if they have a rep bonus). Large reppers, medium reppers, ancillary reppers, there's a lot of potential if you spend the time to get creative with it.

Once you have marauders trained though, all you have to do is get another battleship skill up to 5 and you'll have access to another fantastic ship. All four marauders are excellent ships that have their uses, and all come highly recommended for one scenario or another.

When you start to pvp you learn very quickly that sitting still will get you killed in 90% of all cases. Taking new behaveriol habits into your pve is not a bad thing.

That is one of the reasons I love the True Sansha ships so much, you mitigate incoming damage by a ton by moving around with a low signature even with the Nightmare.

Concerning PLD movement in 4s:
There aren't too many missions where you just plant and forget. It ends up being a lot of MWD to a position where conflagration will be viable for at least the next 60 seconds, hit bastion, recover the HP you lost during the move while planning the next move. But there are missions like damsel in distress where you move once and plant for the entire mission.

Beams could make it more of a ship that barely moves, but you'd be missing out on a lot of potential in this hull.

I remember doing some graphs and numbers last year with bastion implementation and it was pretty interesting the interplay of pulse and tachs on a Paladin. Conflag would obviously do more damage close up than Tachs and with scorch doing more damage at range with scorch. tachs would be superior at 'mid range'. Now they've since toned scorch down a tiny bit BUT they added polarized weapons, specifically for close range weapons like pulse. This makes polarized pulse with conflag and scorch superior to Tachs at all ranges as far as I can tell. The tank is still perfectly fine for lv4s even considering 0% resists. You need to spend more time in bastion instead of moving around but you have increased damage with scorch to make it worth it and the tracking that comes with it. It's not something I'd advise for very new players but does need to be mentioned when the tach vs pulse debate comes up. Marauders are the best platforms for when it comes to using polarized weapons in Lv4s.

the nice thing with marauders is you have plenty of cargo space to bring a mobile depot and refit between pulse/tachs depending on what you need. the 40km bubble of 1300 dps is pretty sweet with conflag. although in general I do run tachs as I'm not waiting for npcs to showboat 30km or w/e into my sweet spot.


movement for tactical reasons is very different from movement for the sake of movement. In a paladin sometimes you want a little movement to track a cruiser orbiting at 10km for example. It is also easy to fit a MWD to burn to a gate.

and in burner missions I'm usually trying to minimize transversal for dank wrecking shots rather than mitigate damage. Although in the new gurista burner base movement is very important to reduce damage from the fighter bombers, lucky that movement can also minimize transversal