Missions & Complexes

You aren't taking a whole lot of things into account, which is why you seem surprised.

1st of all, NPCs in anoms aren't bags of hit points. NPCs rep themselves (ie add more hit points to replace the ones you destroy) and that throws off any attempt to gauge actual damage done per second.

2, you are using weapons that have a travel time. "DPS" numbers assume you are always shooting at and hitting the target, so if you have 2300 dps and are shooting a big un-moving structure, you are doing 2300 dps minus resists. Not so with moving NPCs. Drones and missiles NEVER do paper dps to a moving target because they have to get to the target 1st.

3. Overkill ie lost dps. You are using Torps, torps (like arty and cruise missiles and any high alpha weapon) do more damage than what is called for at times. Say you have an npc in hull and it has 5 hit points left. Your Trops do 3000 points of damage per group hit. it only takes 5 to kill that npc, the other 2995 points of damage from that strike simply disappear. Overkill.

Weapons that fire faster but do less alpha damage (like autocannons) lose less damage to overkill.

4. Damage application. Even with a TP or 2, torps from a rattlesnake aren't going to apply well to anything smaller than a BS, and using another ship to kill small ships turns into a juggling act that can become distracting which could cost you dps as well.



I use an Autocannon fit Machariel supported by an FoF missile Tengu to do forsaken hubs. The fof missile tengu acts as point defense for the mach and kills everything close to it (which means the tengu automatically kills the small ships), the Mach starts with the furthest away target and works backwards (the further a npc gets from the mach the less dps it does so i kill them 1st, close stuff last).

A Forsaken hub of any race takes me 6.5-7 minutes. You can get Rattelsnake + ishtar times down some by switching to Rapid Heavies and Sentry Drones on the Snake (use rapid heavies to kil small stuff, let drones from Snake and Ishtar fly free to kill battleships) and making sure you have 1 or 2 drone nav mods (for speed) on your Ishtar.

Hello again,

thank you for your replies.

Since you said that you are also dualboxing to farm. could you pls tell me what your average bounty-ticks are?
Also I'd like to know what kind of tengu fitting you are using. I really like the Idea about using FOF missiles therefore I want to give it a try.

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

thanks again for your reply. I need to point out something. Even if my calculation might be wrong. The ticks I get with the setup above are constantly in the 25mio region so combined 50 per tick.

Since you wrote that you are having slightly lower ticks or basically the same I don't think that changing to the FOF fitting will help me in further increasing my ticks.

So I tried a different approach. Since you told me that flight times might be an issue. I hopped into a vindicator. (don't have access to T2 autocannons.) and tried to blaster those rats. In forsaken hubs my fitting performs much weaker then the rattlesnake. I think its manly because of the gap I have to overcome between warpin and spawn point of the rats. So I switched sites to the havens. I knew from tests before that the RS+ishtar setup makes also 50/2mio ticks there. Vindicator and Ishtar also generate 50/2mio ticks.

Then I saw a guy using smartbombs on twitch. I thought maybe I can adapt to him. So I used a vindicator+blaster+webs and a machariel for smartbombing. This generates 60/2mio ticks. I still have to figure out what the best place is to place my smartbombing ship.

Rock Havens don't seem to be ideal for smartbombing. Even while the rats are spawing in close proximity to one point in space they are bouncing off these getting out of smarbombing range. I also found a video where a guy simply massed smartbombing battleships in Havens I think that he had like 6 of them. He was able to finish those sites in less then 4 minutes claming making hundrets of millions per hour. Anyway I tried bombing this with 2 bs but it's not viable (range and stuff).

Ill keep you updated if I find a way to get even higher ticks.

Size of target can throw off your numbers as well if you haven't considered it. Raw DPS doesn't take this into account, no more so than it does application or projection. You have to think of DPS as merely a single component in a much larger equation. While it is a crucial part of the equation and, more importantly, what will be the solution, it's not the only component.

For example, while it takes a Golem loaded with Fury missiles one cruise missile salvo to swat a frig, 2 for an elite most of the time, you're not applying the full numerical amount of damage to that target. I still pick up the kill in one to two salvos, but only doing a fraction of the damage compared to that against a battleship. For the amount of damage I could apply to a battleship rat, I could, in theory, hit and kill the mathematical hitpoint equivalent of nearly a dozen normal frigs or several elite frigs all in one shot according to just DPS. I'm not actually ever going to do that in practice since the damage scales as it does when larger weapons are used against targets smaller than intended for that weapon.

FoF missiles haven't worked like that for 4 years now. They only attack NPC ships and guns, nothing else.

As for what they are shooting, this is why you orbit a drone at 500 meters if your ship can use drones (Gila with FoF missiles and an afterburner, orbitting one of it's own medium drones, turns the Gila into a 3rd super heavy drone attacking a singular target). if it can't use drones (such as my Tengu, then a wide orbit on a station target does the trick (by constantly forcing the npcs to break orbit, you can line them up for fof missle destruction).


The purpose of FoF missiles in PVE is to make multi boxing easy. People who multibox ships that need constant manual input (like what the OP suggests he does with the Rattlesnake and Ishtar) can eventually burn out with all the micro managing. I use a combination of one manually controlled ship (Mach, Rattlesnake, Vindicators, whatever) and 1 FoF or Drone assisted (or both) ship for ease of use. Yes, it might indeed make slightly less isk per hour than manually controlling two ships, but I can keep going for hours without wanting to pull my hair out lol.