Missions & Complexes

Hi all

I'm currently looking at ships for L4 sec missions, but I really really hate battleships due to lack of movement speed. Just absolutely can't stand them. Their pace is just too slow for me to the point where I'd rather quit playing then have to run them.

Right now I can fly Gallente cruisers with good effectiveness, recon, assault, T3 (Proteus). Have pretty decent drone and hybrid skills along with the necessary support skills for them.

Caldari and Amarr ships less so, don't have T2 heavy missiles and above just yet, and my laser skills above small are abysmal.

Minmitar ships I completely ignore because I don't like the way they look and feel while flying. Likewise, my arty skills are non existant.

I can do some of the L4s in a "sniping" drake using T1 cruise launchers with faction ammo, but it takes forever and I can do only the easy ones.

In addition, I will be moving back to null / low, so it is highly preferable that whatever ships I end up training need to have some decent PVP variant fits available as well.

So.....

Throw some ideas at me, experiences, feedback, comments, fits

I fly Gila as my main ship right now, its ideal for L3s, but on L4s it seriously lacks no matter how much I played around with fits and looked them up on sites like osmium etc., it just doesnt have the tank.

Ishtar I was kinda looking at and messing around with fits, but have not commited to it yet. I should have said my drone skills are pretty good, but up to heavies, dont have T2 sentries yet and won't for a fairly long time. So without the T2 sentries the Ishtar I am able to fit and fly offers only some improvement over the Gila. It will be problematic for me to do L4s in it.

I have ran hundreds of missions in an Arbitraor, and a caracal lol, the Gila is more than sufficient to survive any l4 mission, or for that matter any null anom. 100mn AB gila can survive with very low skills, but 10mn works fine too, so long as you pay attention to where you are flying. if you are trying to sit still and face tank the damage, almost no cruiser works, but if you simply turn your AB on and get to range, almost any cruiser with a passive shield tank will breeze through any non gurista mission. This does ofc mean killig web frigates and towers to be the most important thing.

As to the Original question, especially if you are moving to null the ships you want are the VNI, Ishtar, and Gila. The 100mn shield buffer VNI is probably the most common entry level anom runner around, the Ishtar and Gila are very solid choices as well.

tl;dr: it is about damage rats can apply to you not how much you can tank.

battleships are the best ships for lv4 mission running

no other ship type is as good

if you refuse to fly BS then you should accept that running them will be harder/slower/ more annoying than it could have been

try a machariel for speed and handling- you might like it

Passive AB Gila with RLML's
Use the missiles for the frigates & cruiser spawns, drones for the BC's & BS's
L4 missions are not hard in a Gila
you wont be doing the AE4 bonus room however

easy way to fit a Gila

high slots
- Missile Launchers

mid slots
- 2 shield hardeners
- some shield extenders
- an AB
- #optional drone navigation module + script
- #optional target painter

low slots
- some dda's
- #optional drone tracking module
- #optional shield recharge-rate module

rig's
- Purgers

The Gila shouldn't have any issue tanking L4 missions. Just don't sit still, orbit something or just move around at all times and let your signature radius do most of the tanking for you.

Also, if you are disgruntled with the slowness of L4 missions, you should check out Anomic Missions aka Burners. You need to run those in frigates mostly, sometimes cruisers, and they are very fast and arguably waaaay more profitable than regular L4s.

Look into a active tanked Tengu, with Fury heavies.

They used to be very good before the nerf, but will still work today.

A Raven will do L4s faster though, and moving around in the mission is not necessary.

Rolfski, if you are asking for yourself, the only battlecruiser an Alpha can fly is the Gnosis. Every other battlecruiser has minimum skill requirements that an Alpha cannot train for.

The good news is that the Gnosis is a decent battlecruiser. It has bonuses for every weapon system in the game that a player can use, it can be shield or armour tanked, it has decent speed and it has enough drone bandwidth to control 5 medium drones (Alphas cannot train for heavy or sentry drones AFAIK).

The bad news is that the Gnosis is more expensive than the tech 1 battlecruisers from the main empires. The Gnosis is not built by players, it's given to players by CCP for special occasions, which limits how many of them are in the game. The other bad news about the Gnosis is that it costs more to insure one than you will get back as an insurance payout if you lose it, so a Gnosis Is really not worth insuring.

As for the OP, maybe try a battlecruiser. Some L4 missions have fairly intense incoming DPS at the start of the mission, so if you don't have a battleship class tank or close to it, you might want to be careful which missions you accept.

Even so, most battlecruisers will not handle all L4 missions equally well. As I said to the OP, some L4's throw a lot of DPS at you early in the mission, and an Alpha will not be able to unlock the full potential of a Gnosis due to limits on skill training. You would need to be careful while you are learning which L4's you should avoid.

give the AC mach a try.

something like

https://o.smium.org/loadout/147213

Did they take micro jump drives out of the game?