Missions & Complexes

Since the Mach is king might as well go with that. It's gonna be a while before CCP's ship nerfing gets around to it.


DMC

what's your mega fit and how are your skills? Just swapping to a mach isn't going to make everything better if you don't have the skills to use it. I'd suggest sticking to a t1 BS just to learn the missions then upgrade to the mach once you know what you are doing and have the skills to fly it. Kronos is pretty good too, but again gotta skill up to get into it, so might as well learn how to with the megathron. I'm assuming you are in lanngisi, so angels have a kinetic hole and like to come up close, perfect for blaster kronos. There are also some missions vs serpentis where kin/therm is great too.

and if your skills are really low, it would probably be better to ship down and go run level 3 missions. You should be able to chew through a bunch of level 3s and make more over time, than slowly running a level 4 that you aren't skilled to run. I'd suggest either a megathron with hypers, lots of damage mods, and sensor boosters. A brutix with rails, a lot of damage mods, and either hypers or locus rigs. or a railgun tengu/proteus. The t3cs with warp speed fits and rails are very good at blitzing lv3s.

Tengu probably won't be fast but it should complete missions no problem. The dps ceiling on the tengu is just a bit too low for me. for lv4s I'd probably go missiles, but it can do plenty of dps with guns too. I need to play around with the new setups.

All of this is my opinions so it's only value is whatever you take away from it.

Machariel is not the king for those who want to full clear and loot / salvage. Yes the Machariel will work, and yes it has many benefits, most if not all of those benefits are wasted when doing a full clear loot / salvage mission style.

Rattle is a good choice and I fly one occasionally but mostly for nostalgia reasons since it was the first BS I ever flew. Excellent against those NPC weak to kinetic and thermal, about average for everything else.

Navy Raven, Navy Scorpion and the Domi / Navy Domi are other options that would work well so consider those as well.

Looking longer term we open up the four marauders which are the true kings of the full clear loot / salvage mission style so here is a brief view on the four.

Kronos - nice ship, I like it when I want to get up close and personal and punch things in the nose. Not the best overall because of the short range (relative term) guns.

Paladin - also nice ship and devastatingly effective against those things weak to EM and to a slightly lesser degree thermal. Horrible against the rest when compared to the other three.

Vargur - better than that other two because longer range guns and slightly more speed. I consider this the best option for those who prefer a turret based ship, but still it is not the best.

Golem - to me this is the single best ship for full clear loot / salvage. Range to the targets is irrelevant because cruise missiles. Missile travel time is irrelevant since you are one pocket back working the loot / salvage anyway so that travel time really does not affect completion times. More consistent in killing speed - using intercept the saboteurs as an example it will complete the mission in the same amount of time whether I am running against blood raiders(em weakness) or Guristas(Kinetic weakness). At least for me that consistency makes the entire process of kill / loot / salvage easier to handle and in my experiences takes less time overall.

While we are at it EVE Suvival is a valuable tool for those starting into level 4 missions. After years of running level 4's all over EvE I still use it on a regular basis for missions I have not run recently.

Just a off the cuff example. I got Smash the Supplier and decided to farm it by not killing the transport ships. First I used a fleet Typoon fit with cruise/wardens/mjd. Took 41 minute to kill the ships. The I used my Vargur fit with autos/bastion/mjd. Took 31 minutes. Next I tried my Mach with autos/mjd. I was well past 50 minute when I stopped keeping track of time. Problem with Mach was it didn't have the range nor the tank and would have to mjd out to avoid dying. The Phoon and the Vargur only had to use the mjd once. In the Phoons case it could kill at range to mitigate damage and in the Vargurs case, go into bastion and tank the damage.

In case you are wondering why I do Smash the Supplier, the imperial tags add up to 72 million isk. Not bad for a half hours work.