Missions & Complexes

Viable ... maybe. It'll take you for-freakin'-ever to kill battleships, and you may sometimes have trouble to break their tank at all.

Of course, you can always cherry-pick your lv4 missions. There are several that can easily be completed in a shuttle (Recon 1&2 and Cargo delivery, for example).



CN ballistic control systems instead of T2s. They're a good investment and you can use them on any missile boat you'll fly later on, including Tengu, Raven, CNR and Golem.

Implants. Get the +5 missile launcher ROF ones and the target velocity/target signature 5% ones, and possibly the heavy missile damage +5% one (if you plan to stick with heavy missile boats instead moving to cruise missiles boats).

Keep some faction heavy missiles ready, you'll need the extra damage occasionally.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but use EVE Survival. If you are doing L4's in a Drake, you will need to have a plan for some of the missions to avoid spawning everything at once or aggro'ing everything at once.

With t2 launchers you'll make decent isk/hour in a drake, so a Machariel wouldn't be too far off.
HML scream Tengu for me though, so you could take a look at them too. For pure isk/hour the mach would be better and training for it is definitly faster (a t2 mach with meta4 weapons, Battleship II and my mediocre support skills already deals 617dps in guns alone)

I don't like the Loki for lvl4s (and the Legion/Proteus as well) as they lack the range the Tengu (and Large Weapons) offer.

In my opinion it depends on what you're going to do: For L4s the Machariel is the best you can get and if you're going to stick with Minmatar anyway there's no point in not going for Machariel.
If you're not so sure what you want to do (Missions, exploration, pvp) the t3 cruisers are a good way to skill. With Cruiser V and Medium t2 Weapons you'll have all the tools you'll ever need - HACs and BCs for PvP, Logistics for Incursions and PvP, t3s for Incursions, PvP, Missions and Exploration.

Strange, I never dropped into armor.
What mission did you fly?
Did you stand still or did you move around? Drake is a brick and has the signature of a small moon, but you still mitigate some damage from battleships when afterburning around

Ok so the mission was this one http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=RightHandofZazzmatazz4

Pretty straight forward.

I followed your advice re XR-3200, thank you

I read in EvE survival that I need to tank heat, so fitted two T2 heat shield hardeners and a T2 Invul Shield.

As I couldn't afford T2 Drones I stayed with T1 Warriors (Minmatar Drone V, Drone Int V).

I usually orbit at 15-20 k with my 10MN AB switched on.

Do you see anything I'm doing wrong? (other than the lack of T2 HML and T2 drones)

Thanks!

I'll quote from Eve Survival:


Orbit the structure at 50km, kill the web/scram frigates and then take out the other ships on after another.

Buy two cheap hull repairers and two cheap armor repairers, fit them, undock, repair armor and structure, dock, sell hull and armor repairers, save 5.5 MISK.

My best advice OP, start working towards another ship. As many have said, you can, but you're severely limiting your max dps if you stick with a drake. Work towards a battleship if you want a big, bulky, less skill intensive ship or a HAC/T3 if you want smaller more skill intensive hulls.

You won't need the cruiser launcher control certificate - HAMs are hardly used for missions, the range is too low.
The other two are very important (for most things, not only for the tengu)

i know it sounds silly, but if you have the money, while you wait to train for your tengu, try getting another drake. as with most ships the choice is gank, or tank. as well as a salvager, i keep a second drake at my forward operating base. the first drake is the dps boat, 520+ dps, mwd for scooting about at 975mps, but only 25k ehp or so. there are 4 shield recharging mods, and a small pithi shield booster that i can run indefinately, its good for most L4s.

HAVOK (drake)

highs

7x HML II

mids

experimental 10mn mwd
pithi c- small shield booster
CN magnetic scattering amplifier
CN heat dissipation amplifier
invuln II
shield regharger II

lows

CN ballistic control x 3
shield power relay II

rigs

shield extender !
shield purger I
warhead rigor I




the second ship is more tank, this one i tried for a balance, you still need enough gank to kill bad guys, but sometimes you want some dam-ned TANK to through a mission. it runs 435 dps, and is alot slower with the AB, at 369mps, but she has over 61k ehp. i added the drone augmentor for a bit more applied dps at range.


DOMINATOR (drake)

highs

7x domination HML
drone augmentor I

mids

2x invuln II
2x large shield extender II
CN magnetic amplifier
fed navy 10mn AB

lows

3x domination ballistic control
shield power relay II

rigs

2x med shield extender I
med bay loading accelerator I


this set up gives me two options for missions, i use the dps boat for regular just doing missions, works fine for most L4s.
never had too much trouble with the BSs, i usually kite the red dots, and hammer away at distance, with the other ship, if i need to get in close, i have the tank to sit inna pile if i need to. ive on several occasions, used both inna mission, if i find incoming dps too great ill go get the tank. when the little guys are all dead, i can jet back for the dps boat to finish off any BSs that the dominator leaves behind.