Missions & Complexes

wouldn't know never used a caracal they look ugly to me. I only suggested it to OP because he likes Caldari, but he could just as easily use a Moa. As for DPS you should know better, the raw number does not matter so much. The application of light missles against the many small ships found in L3's will be much better than Ham's and certainly better than Heavies. Back when I used to do high sec PvE I did it in stabbers and arbitrators and found myself killing everything plenty fast. I even brought the arby into J-space for C1's and C2's which are easily doable by T1 cruisers.

As for losing the ship, you will find that CL's can be quite tanky in a site due to the fact that most DPS comes from big ships so the small sig size of a CL mitigates lots of damage. While everyone else had billion isk brick tank loki doctrines for Cap escalations my corp used fleet stabbers and Ashimmus for a quarter of the price.

Which brings us to cost, ofc the ******* cost matters you run the sites to make money. Smallest investment for return is the point.

The point of all this is that there is no reason for OP to continue wasting time on L2's with a CL when he could be making much more isk in a L3 even if he did have to warp out in the middle which he shouldn't unless he hits the trigger too early. By the time he gets to CH and Omega he should be doing L4's or better yet, getting out of High K space.

Gila for sure, it can tank well enough that you can sacrifice 2x rig slots for double hyperspatials and that is really the best way to blitz l3s. A great deal of your time will be spent simply warping to your agent or to the system to do the mission in. Ships like the Raven or Drake take a long time to align, and a long time to warp, and have big sigs so that they tend to need comparatively more tank than an AB gila. DMC has a nice rule of thumb chart but, here is mine:

Lvl 1: Worm
Lvl 2: Worm
Lvl 3: Gila
Lvl 4: Gila or Rattlesnake
Lvl 5: Spider tank Rattlesnakes (I love carriers, but too many l5s have gates to make them that good for them IMO)

Forsaken Hubs: Gila/VNI
Havens/Sanctums: Nyx>Hel>Thanatos>Nid>Rattlesnake

Just get in a Guristas ships, and stay in them basically. There are also FWIW some solid reasons to go with the faster fighters from Minmatar carriers, rather than the tankier ones from the Gallente ones, but I fight Gallente carriers to work out well enough, and they have the same skill training path as the Gurista ships for the most part.

If you think the speed of a stabber can compensate for its 340 less (or 40% less) dps than a hurricane,
lol okay

No, I think if you are doing L3's in a cain you are wasting time by not doing L4's that it could be doing.

Absolute genius! Its almost like I said exactly that, why in fact I think in my first comment I said, BB would do L4's faster than CH. This does not alter the fact that CH are wasting time running L3's, they should do L4's. It does not change the fact that OP alpha can start running L3's in a CL instead of wasting time on L2's.

Lol I wish.

Still an alpha, been watching the thread since I posted it. I'll be omega'ing soon, hopefully. I honesty wasn't expecting this thread to be viewed this many times

Seeing what everyone's been saying, I'll probably train into a Drake, run L3s, then the moment i have decent enough skills, jump in a Raven (I'd probably fit the raven with meta stuff mostly, until I get the skills to use the T2 stuff [Apart from damage control/ballistic control obviously, as I can already use T2 variants of that]). I've been running L4s with a corpmate, and seeig how much money there is to make, speed-training into a raven will get me on the isk-train faster.

Once I've done that, I'll start using the more fancy ships (once I can afford them, and have decent backup skills) like the Gila/Rattlesnek.

Have a corpmate who uses the Pancake for all his L4s. Seems very effective.

Thanks for all the responses/suggestions. I think I'm sorted for the future, but there'll most likely be more alphas/low-SP pilots in my position, trying to work out what to do. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Keep posting ideas, if you can. Thanks guys

there is a certain point where running level 3s quickly will be more income than trying to run lv4s slowly, especially if you try to force it in a battlecruiser or low SP battleship. when it takes you 30m to an hour, if not more, to run most missions you tend to want to be cap stable, and due to your low dps you can't quickly clear npcs so you need a large tank. These issues compound and form bad habits. And at the same time you could run 10 level 3s in that hour instead.

Do you have any good tengu pve fittings you want to share?