Warfare & Tactics

I dig the VFI as a solo ship. I know it's not the most popular, but it's pretty fun. One thing that I've seen in multiple places is the assertion that, due to the explosive damage bonus, you should only ever load nova rockets/missiles. I've done a little math and I'm not so sure that's right.

One thing we need to clear up first is that the bonus to explosive damage is not 25% (with full skills) as I've read at least two places, but rather 12.5%. At Minmatar Frigate V, the VFI gets a 100% bonus to non-explosive damage and a 125% bonus to explosive damage. So, if your missile DPS were say 100 unbonused, then your fully bonused damage would be 200 with non-nova and 225 with nova. A 12.5% difference.

This makes the question of whether to run exclusively nova missiles much closer than with the Talwar which actually does get a 25% to explosive damage.

Let's look at a few examples of fighting ships with both shield and armor tanks. We'll also consider the possibility that, as is relatively common, they have plugged their biggest hole with a resist rig.

In the first example, our VFI is fighting an armour tanked Tormentor. The Tormentor, by default, has a 20% armour resistance to explosive damage, 25% to Kinetic, and then even higher to Thermal and EM. In this case, it's obvious best to shoot nova, since we get the highest base damage and also hit their most vulnerable resistance. We'll be expecting to do about 180 dps, using our earlier hypothetical of doing 100 dps unbonused, whereas we would only be doing 150dps if we were using Kinetic.

But what if they're running a Small Anti-Explosive Pump Rig? In this case, their explosive resist goes up to 44% and their biggest hole is now kinetic. So if we hit them with explosive we are doing 126 effective damage with explosive missiles and would be doing 150dps with kinetic.

Now, given that we generally don't know if they've patched their hole or not, the advantage of guessing right is about twice as big when we shoot explosive versus kinetic. If we have good intel (from killboards for example) that they're flying a Tormentor with an explosive resist rig, then we can do better by loading kinetic missiles, but we don't usually have that much info going into a fight. And, for that matter, there are popular T1 armour hulls like the Incursus that have an even bigger explosive resist hole such that, even when they fit an anti-explosive rig, their explosive resistance is barely higher than their kinetic and you still do more damage with novas.

So, when fighting armour-tanked ships, you can always be pretty comfortable shooting explosive damage and getting the max damage.

Shield-tanked ships are where it gets tricky.

Say your fighting a shield tanked frigate like a Breacher. The Breacher inherently has a ZERO percent shield EM resist, a 20% thermal resist, 40% kinetic, and a whopping 50% explosive. If they have no resist mods fit, you'll be doing 200 dps exactly with EM, 160 dps with Thermal, and 112.5 with Explosive.

That's a substantial difference. Of course, ships like the Breacher usually fit shield resist rigs.

With a single EM resist rig, the profile changes to doing 140 dps with EM, 160 with Thermal and 112.5 with Explosive.

With an EM and a Thermal resist rig it's: 140 EM, 132 Thermal, 112.5 Explosive

And with two EM rigs and a Thermal, it's: 103.4 EM, 132 Thermal, 112.5 Explosive

With two EM rigs, a Thermal rig, and an Invulnerability Field II, it looks like this: 85.8 EM, 82.8 Thermal, and 78.75 Explosive

It's worth noting that in every single one of these cases Thermal does more damage than explosive, and in a couple of them either Thermal or EM is the runaway leader.

Now, there are other shield ships with different resist profiles. Take the Merlin with it's shield resist bonus. It's usually flown either with no resist rigs/modules, with a single EM rig, or with one each of EM and Thermal. A quick rundown of these scenarios is below laying out how much damage we can do in our theoretical VFI with different missiles.

No rigs: 160 EM, 108 Therm, 90 Exp
1 EM rig: 112 EM, 108 Therm, 90 Exp
1 EM and 1 Therm: 112 EM, 85.6 Therm, 90 Exp
2EM and 1 Therm: 82.8 EM, 85.6 Therm, 90 Exp

Remember, all these numbers are AFTER the extra bonus to explosive damage has been applied. Only in the last (rarely seen) case do explosive rockets do more damage than EM rockets and, across the board, the potential payoff of going with thermal or, especially, EM is huge, while the downside versus explosive if they have fully rigged to level out their resists is relatively small.

This whole novel has been to say, to the two other Vigil Fleet Issue solo pilots out there, don't listen to the hivemind that says Nova-or-GTFO. When you look at the numbers, you should definitely also be carrying either Mjolnir or Inferno and swapping them in before you fight a shield tanked ship.