Ships & Modules

As someone who’s been running L4’s for a couple years (I know that makes me a total loser):

Tengu & Legion – Doable, but requires much more effort than battleships. You’ll actually have to fly around and manage range, etc.

Golem – Ideal mission runner, selectable damage types without damage penalty (many Caldari ships only have kinetic/thermal damage buffs, but the golem does even damage with all 4 types), but not the best unless you want to be micro-ing target painters and missile flight times to avoid wasting volleys.

Paladin – My choice for empire missioning. Great damage at low, mid, and long ranges with pulse lasers. I just go in, sit still and kill everything quickly, and move on. Bastion isn’t even necessary most of the time. Makes missioning a breeze. Being restricted to EM/Thermal damage was never a problem for me in empire missioning.

Nightmare – A great, fun ship, but in L4 missions you won’t really have to fly around much, so the Afterburner bonus isn’t really important. Also, you’ll most likely be forced to use Tachyons (less tracking) instead of pulse lasers on this ship, so while it’s a fun ship to fly, I recommend the Paladin.

I've used

T3 Crusier
Pirate Faction Cruiser
Heavy Assault Cruiser
Battleship

Anything with 2 of the below
- enough DPS
- enough physical tank
- enough speed to mitigate incoming DPS
will get the job done, some better than others.

losing volley's on a Golem is a non issue, and only occurs when the target is well over 100km away, due to the velocity bonus on cruise missiles that the Golem has.

in my opinion it's the most useful of the ships in that list, not very cheap and you need to have the propitiate skills to 4 at least.


but it always hit's the targets in their low resistance.

Drones then. Dominix is good but since you don't have gallente ships listed I say rattlesnake. Level 1 gallante bs rattlesnake = level 5 gallente bs dominix since the drone dmg bonus is a hull bonus. That's not to say the gallente bonus isn't worth it. Just the quickest way to lazymode.

Start training towards a Rattlesnake. Gallente BS and Heavy Drones to IV each should get you started.

Rattler. The massive drone tank buff means you don't have to worry about your drones getting roflstompt by rats due to messy rat aggro mechanics and the generous missile dps threshold means you'll be able to push solid 1000dps+ without needing to be in a 1Bil+ boat to do it -- and the Rattler can still take hits like a champ at that. Main downside is you have to spec into 2, not 1, battleship skills and also 2, not 1, main weapons skill sets to make it worth it. I don't honestly remember, but that may still be less training time than what you would do to max out a Marauder of your choosing (though I seem to recall they were a close neck-and-neck to each other).

If you have the money, a Marauder (Golem or Paladin) is a good choice. Cruise or Polarized Torp Golem (best part is no range nerf like the Polarized Guns get and torps got a recent volume reduction), or in the case of a Paladin, Pulses that can reach or Tachs that can reach on just Imperial Navy crystals and nothing else (60Km+ optimal typically). Both tank like gods even with 2-3 slot tanks and have plenty of utility to fit what ever else you need. Bastion when needed, a fairly recent patch finally fixed the missile glitch with the bastion module on the Golem which prevented missile damage when entering or exiting bastion while missiles were in flight. Complete and binary Ewar immunity may by going away in time (they'll eventually do the same thing they are doing to caps in Citadel), but they will likely still be very heavily resistant to Ewar anyways. Downside is, again, they are rather on the expensive side and all that tank matters not if someone wants to pick a fit with you.