EVE New Citizens Q&A

Caracal:


Rapid Light Missile - very good DPS against small ships, but very long reload time. Good weapon for solo/small gang PvP, average for PvE with a lot of targets. Good range.
Heavy Missile - normal damage against medium and large targets (BC/cruisers/BS) without EWAR, if you if and use Traget painter and/or stasis webifier good against small targets. Very good range
Heavy Assault Missile - like a Heavy Missile, but give more damage and have close/medium fire range.

You can find Caracal fittings for PvE and PvP on Osmium

Running PvE is often done in shield ships, often using drones or missiles. Caldari ships are great because they're often made for shield fits and use missiles. Since you're applying to Eve University, I'll link you their excellent wiki that should help you with the problems you're encountering: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Caracal.

Missiles, like the guns, have short range and long range versions. The progression is as follows:

Frigate Sized (Destroyers too):
- Rockets - short range
- Light Missiles - long range

Cruiser Sized (Battlecruisers too):
- Heavy Assault Missiles - short range
- Heavy Missiles - long range

Battleship Sized:
- Torpedoes - short range
- Cruise Missiles - long range

In addition to the above, the heavier ships also have the option of installing "rapid" launchers for the smaller missiles, in case you need to hunt lots of frigates with a cruiser, or lots of cruisers with a battleship. The launchers require the power grid present on a cruiser or battleship (respectively) but fire the smaller missiles:

- Rapid Light Missile Launcher (RLML) - for cruisers / battlecruisers
- Rapid Heavy Missile Launcher (RHML) - for battleships

Level 2 PVE missions will send you to fight groups of frigates and destroyers, with a few cruiser-sized bosses now and then. As such you have to be able to project damage to frigates, and also be able to have high DPS for the boss. You will also get a variety of ranges for the NPCs; some of them appear 60km away in the mission, and prefer "long" ranges of 20-30km, others will get right in your face at 5km or less.

So your options are:

- (long range) Heavy Missiles + target painter (to better hit frigates)
- (short range) Heavy Assault Missiles + target painter (for frigates) + 10mn Afterburner (to get in range for far targets)
- (short range relative to Heavy missiles) RLML (hit frigates very well) + 10mn Afterburner (to get in range)

As with guns, the close range missiles do more DPS than the long range, and the larger missiles do more dps than the smaller (frigate) sized, on paper, but in practice the big missiles will only do about half the damage or less to frigates because they are so small. The Target Painter, thus, is pretty critical for the bigger missiles.

For defenses, you can either use the medium slots for shield resistances and the low slots for shield power relays, resulting in a passive shield tank, or you can use the medium slots for shield resistances and a shield booster (active shield tank). The active tank lets you use some of the low slots for Ballistic Control Systems (2 or more), to increase the damage of your missiles.

So:

Caracal

High Slots:
- 'Arbalest' Heavy Assault Missile * 5

Med Slots:
- 10mn Afterburner
- Target Painter (tech 2 if possible)
- 2 shield resistances (hardeners or shield resistance amplifiers)
- Large Ancillary Shield Booster - this will use cap charges, and is oversized - your shields are repaired very well until you run out of charges, then it's a 30 second reload time where you're SOL

Low Slots:
- Damage Control
- Ballistic Control System * 2
- Co-Processor or Reactor Control Unit to help fit that large shield booster - if not needed, fit another BCS

Thank y'all for your answers, be sure I'll make good use of them :)




Damn, I just wrote something, clicked on Post and it all disappeared.
Anyway, thank you for this elaborate reply. I have a question tho, if I'm going to be fighting mainly frigates and destroyers in L2 security missions, what launchers should I go for? Rapid Light ones if I'm not worng, but I'm far from sure, that got me a bit confused.

Thanks.

EDIT: Bonus question! lol. I've seen guides where it tells me to go for X Launcher and guides where it tells me to go for X Launcher II. Needless to say I know the II is better, but how much better? Level 1 are like 50k each, while level 2 are 850k, which is a lot for someone like me who just has 850k right now, lol. What should I go for first? Maybe get all the equipment at level one (including painters and etc) and then go for level 2 once I have enough money?

You may not have noticed, OP, but there are other options besides T1 and T2. If you click "show info" on a mod and go to the "variations" tab, you will see all the available "named' or "meta" versions. These are generally somewhere between T1 and T2 in effectiveness, but they only require the skills you need for T1. Clicking the "compare" button will let you see exactly how their attributes differ. They will vary in price. Sometimes a meta version is actually preferable to T2 in certain ways so they can be even pricier despite requiring less SP. However there's usually a decent meta version which is better than T1 but not too expensive and a good choice if you can't use T2.


Target painters are an example of where the meta version is strictly better than the T2. The Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron (meta 4) target painter uses less cap and less CPU than the T2 version. It also takes less heat damage when overheated. It's actually one of the last things that you should train to T2 because you don't gain any extra advantage in fitting it. Many experienced pilots never fit T2 target painters (even if they have trained the skill itself for the bonus it gives).

As a side note, check out the names of the meta target painters for a chuckle.

If you type out a post and lose it, the forum periodically saves your draft for you. Look at the bottom left of the text box. It should say draft. Click it and it will repopulate your post. If you are using quick reply then click reply and it will take you to the standard reply window, where you can click draft and refill the window.

Also, meta's might not be more expensive because they are "better" in performance, some are better in that they are easier to fit having slightly lower cpu or pg requirements.

As indicated above, it's simple:

Buy all 4 hardeners (one of each kind - EM, Thermal, Kinetic, Explosive).

Then go ask your agent for a mission. Agent will give you a mission, say The Hidden Stash. Look at the objective and the icon will say you're going to be facing Guristas pirates.

Open eve-survival.org in a web browser or even in the in-game web browser. Scroll down to the hiddenstash2gu item, and click on it. You will see:

That means, put in the Kin and the Therm hardener, and load up kinetic (scourge) or thermal (inferno) missiles.

This is why PVE is easy; you can pre-fit your ship for each mission, to have the "correct" resistances and also hit the targets with the "correct" type of damage to kill them fast. After 10 years of playing this game, we have all the info on the internet.

There's a "how good it is" number, it's called the "meta".

Look at the Variations tab on the Heavy Missile Launcher, and then for each one look at the Attributes tab.

Heavy Missile Launcher - T1, meta 0.

Malkuth - T1, meta 1
Limos - T1, meta 2
XR-3200 - T1, meta 3
Arbalest - T1, meta 4

Heavy Missile Launcher II - T2, meta 5

Undertaker - officer, meta 6

Domination - faction, meta 7
Republic - faction, meta 7
True Sansha - faction, meta 7

Dread Gurista - officer, meta 8

If you hold SHIFT when you press the show info i button, you can compare them side by side.

The higher meta missile launchers:

- have increased capacity to hold more missiles
- have a better rate of fire (lower number = shoots faster)
- may require less CPU to fit into the ship

T1 and T2 items (meta 0 and meta 5) are manufactured in huge numbers by players. The prices are determined by what mats they require to manufacture. Meta 1-4 and meta 6-8 are loot drops, their prices are based on how rare they are as drops, which may not reflect how good they are.

Otherwise "bay" or "launcher" is just flavor text. You have to look at the stats to see what the differences are.

I did a test with a basic caracal with both HML and RLML on a semi-low SP character doing lvl 2 missions.

Using RLML is really annoying because the reload is so fast it's easy to use too many volleys per target, making you lose a lot of potential damage. This will very much suck for any newbie who doesn't understand the concept of counting volleys based on target and takes a lot more effort and paying attention to make sure you don't suck out.

The only way to outperform HML is to really count volleys and, if you are lucky enough, to be able to reload while in transit/use an acceleration gate. If you can't/don't specifically make that happen then HML is not any slower at completing lvl 2 missions (or a 3/10) than RLML, while being MUCH less annoying and restrictive to use.


I know it seems to make sense to use rapids but unless you're good at this and can time it perfectly, the missions lends itself to it or you're just lucky, it's not the case.



- edit -

As a complete side note: Osmium has become the new Battleclinic, use with caution.