EVE New Citizens Q&A

It's true.

Defenses in EVE work on the principle of putting everything you got into 1 defense (shield, or armor, or speed).

Attacks in EVE work on the principle of attacking with everything you got as soon as you lock targets. There's no holding back your firepower for later. The enemy is repairing their one defense as much as they can, if you don't breach through he may kill you.

You fit your guns for a range (short or long range, autocannons or artillery) and then you support that range / doctrine with afterburners, MWD's (speed modules to let you keep the range you want), webifiers to slow down the enemy ship, etc.

If you mix long and short range guns, all you do is you only use half your weapons rack for any encounter. Even if you have multiple enemies, it's still better to focus on killing each one fast, because once they're dead they can't do damage to you.

EDIT: On bigger ships, missiles can be used as a secondary weapon to kill the small fast frigates bugging you. Mostly because if you fill out all the gun slots your ship allows, you'll be left with only 1 or 2 missile slots, and the loss of DPS isn't too bad, whereas the gain in being able to kill a frigate that has you webified and warp-scrambled is a big gain. But bigger ships also have drones for that purpose, so again, add the missiles to your main DPS range.

the advice to not mix weapon types is based on ending up with multiple ranges by weapon type
also different metalevels of the same weapon type have slightly different performance marks

so its generally best to fit 6x weapon_of_doom as you also get the option to group them, making volley fire easier.




75m3 dronebays
paper-dps would suggest 2x heavies, 2 medium and 1 light scout drone is optimal
realworld dps says the 2x heavy drones cant hit small ships for ****, and the 1x light drone doesnt do enough damage to large ships to make it's presence worthwhile

load 5x light drones (25m3) and 5x medium drones (50m3), use the lights on frigates, the mediums on everything else.
(move them into "groups" when in space, so they are stored seperately as [light]+[medium])

I just saw the best explanation i've ever seen on the thread like, right above this one. Not my words here..

THAT'S how you build your ship. otherwise you're always flying with half of a ship instead of an entire ship.

It is true, but it holds the least truth for a new player on low level missions.

Basically in eve you want to be at the range where your guns hit best, and obviously this is easier if you have all the same guns. If you are using autocannons you will be far too close for your artillery to hit and if you are using artillery you will be at far too long range for your autocannons to hit. For new player its not that obvious as the rats tend to swarm you so are all in range and the small artillery etc still has decent tracking, but as you move up it becomes more obvious. For this reason the default for turret users is to have their turrets all the same to do main damage at a range they try to keep at while relying on drones or launchers in spare hi slots to kill the frigates that may get too close for the main guns.

New players don't tend to have the skills for drones and auxilliary launchers so for them having an autocannon do deal with a rat too close to hit with their arty is no big deal.

Look at the Dragoon. It's three turrets and three missile launchers. I'd like to see the "never mix weapons" guys try to explain that one away. Even the Comorant has a single missile launcher mixed in with it's turret thing. Just two of many examples of ships that mix turrets & launchers together.

Ah but now they'll say "that's different!" and focus on mixing turrets. Can it be done? Should it be done? The answer is simply: Does it work for you? It's your toon, not theirs. It's your subscription money, not theirs. Never let anyone tell you how you have to do something.

There are pros and cons to both.

The pros of all-same gun turrets is ease of interface (F1 solves everything!) and potentially higher DPS ... in theory. Having only one turret type also means only one ammo type to worry about, one range bracket to worry about, and one valid tactic to try to use for every situation.

The cons of all-same gun turrets is lack of flexibility. You'll only have one operating range (unless you change ammo), one worthwhile strategy and one damage type. Meaning if you take your all artillery destroyer out and get zerged by nimble little frigates & drones you're screwed. If you take your all blaster destroyer out and get webbed by someone else using artillery, again your screwed. All-same turrets means that you'll do one thing really good and suck at everything else. Sometimes F1 doesn't solve everything.

The pros of mixed gun turrets is flexibility. Mix autocannons and artillery together and switching range is simply a matter of switching between F1 and F2. You won't need to change ammo, or more likely be chasing the reload timers as things change ranges too quickly to keep up. You'll be able to engage targets at long range & short range close to equally well, and neither getting zerged up close or webbed at range will be the automatic death of your ship. If you play your cards right, you can actually get into just the right range to use all your guns on your target equally well, too.

The cons of mixed guns is overall lower DPS unless you can get your target into a range that lets you use all your guns together. If you've split your guns 50/50 then that's a significant loss. Unless you're flying something with massive tank or a (ha ha) drone boat, then that DPS loss is really going to hurt. Getting all your guns into optimal range is going to be a lot harder for a mixed weapon group than it is for an all-same turret batch.

So unlike most of the box-brained fanatics out there I'm going to say that there is not Universal right answer to this question. There is only the answer that is right for you. Back in the day I flew a Myrmidon with mixed guns. Why? Because on a drone boat the guns are just secondary armament anyway. I kept a pair of medium railguns for supporting my drones with a little bit of long-range plink and then added a pair of small short range gatling lasers too - that way when little frigates got up in my grill I didn't have to recall them to deal with it. Mixed guns was appropriate for what I wanted the ship to do and worked just fine within the abilities of that ship.

Also worth noting: Ever since the patch a lot of mission rats frigates have been sporting warp scramblers. Being able to deal with these rats has become a major priority to mission runners as of late and anything that helps prevent getting scrambled in a mission can only be a Very Good Thing. So if you've got to trade some artillery for autocannons to get those scramblers off your back... well, a lower DPS fitting is better than a dead ship.

You can attempt every mission with a flexible ship and wait to be surprised after you've entered the pocket, and it's actually a good plan because doing half DPS gives you plenty of time to think on your feet and figure out novel ways to put that flexibility to great use while taking damage waiting for your targets to die.

Or you can read the internets, and the evelopedia spells out exactly what NPC's you're going to face in any particular mission pocket, how they're triggered, what their resists are, and what range they have, so you can fit full DPS at the exact range to take them out without thinking, so you can double your ISK income by doing missions 2x as fast.

Larger ships come with primary weapons (guns, missiles, or drones), secondary weapons (1-2 missiles, neuts), and tertiary weapons (drones typically), and if 3 weapon systems doesn't allow enough flexibility I'm not sure what will.

Other than the specific case of a battlecruiser or battleship sitting there trying to DPS mission rats, your choice of range will be taken from you in quite a few circumstances. Frigates survive larger ships by being fast and orbiting close (not too close); interceptors survive by NEVER getting in range of webifiers, and if the fleet commander is asking for snipers you better bring a long-range artillery ship with enough DPS to look allright on the killboard when they post everyone's DPS-on-target numbers.

Since I bought it over three months ago. Had another one before since... egads, as soon as I learned Battlecruisers I?



Nope, it's a mission runner. Or it was, before the drone nerf. Now it just collects dust alongside my Gila and Rattlesnake. I'll miss them.

Only lost one Myrmidon ever before that - back when I was new and didn't know what an Incursion was. Curiosity got the better of me and my lone battlecruiser managed to last a whooping thirty seconds against Sansha's god-mode blob. At that point, though, what gun config I was using was pretty much irrelevant.



I've rotated through mixtures of cannons, hybrids and lasers over time... experimenting with each. Eventually settled on lasers. I'm stingy. Two medium for long range plinking and two smalls (with good tracking) for pesky frigates that got too close. Looked goofy but it worked.

Point being, the ship is still intact. I call that a win.

"Any landing you can walk away from is a good one."

Split weapon systems is not the same thing as mixing weapon types.

Minmatar ships are the best examples of split weapon systems. The key is to fit missiles and turrets that complement each other.

The Cormorant doesn't have a missile bonus, so the launcher hardpoint is often left empty or used as a utility slot, as there is often no point in using an un-bonused weapon.


The con is you can end-up with a fit that is poor at many / all things, rather than being exceptional in at least one.