Ships & Modules

Sure thing m8... But you have not been playing the game long enough to fight us when we were in molden. Although a quick glance at your KB suggests that you are incapable of getting a kill unless you have over 100+ people helping you out. Pro PvP

I'm not really advocating beam Oracles but immediately after the release of Crucible I was using one to snipe off the highsec gate in Amamake and it was staying on gate by being out of gate gun range with sufficient lock range/scan res and alpha to instapop small ships without the need of tackle, I used that fit in the fight i'm describing. I'm merely pointing out that super long range (optimal of 178+48 km iirc) can work in the right circumstance. You'll notice that I did not include a beam Oracle in my list of long range fits I typically use, that was not an oversight. The pulse version is far superior in most cases. Getting hard tackled with a pulse Oracle when you have 6 versus 40 is pretty much a guarantee, so the beams just won out in this one case. As I said in the long post, this sort of situation is very rare but it does happen and typically when it does happen the situation changes before you can get organised.

As for the battle report I don't have it at hand and it would take some digging to find but it would not appear overly dramatic, it took place very soon after the release of Crucible though I can't remember exactly when that was. Can't remember exactly how many ships died either but it was probably only 4 or 5 and if we took any losses it would have only been the original ship they jumped on, I can't remember how that turned out at this point. Many of the Uni ships got hit hard from single volleys and would warp out in structure and did not return, jamming was too prevalent so alpha was our friend though we did have things pointed at some stages, larger ships were too thick to kill but could not run anything down so Uni left after taking a few deaths. All told it was probably only 2 warp in and outs to the entire thing. Pulse Oracles may be superior in most cases but it was the extreme distance that had to be covered that allowed the Oracles to stay on field long enough to be effective, with most of the enemy being either frigates or dessies, I didn't see much hope for pulse oracles not becoming lost ships in this one circumstance. Although I admit the kill total was not impressive it felt a lot better than taking a much larger risk by going into jamming range of the Blackbirds, it was largely the fact that we were out of the blackbird's lock range that allowed us to get to work at all and pulses would have also put us much closer to hard tackle range making aligning out even on landing (as the Oracles were doing) extremely risky at best. It was more us deciding to poke at the blob because it was there since we weren't able to straight up engage it tbh, it just worked out fairly well for something we threw together on the fly.

I think there is actually a FRAPS of a part of the fight on YouTube posted by Liang Nuren in one of the videos he's posted though I don't remember which one it is in and it doesn't cover the whole thing.

EDIT: I should add that battle reports from Amamake are typically very difficult to take anything away from as we often spend a great deal of time in the system and so the report shows everyone who was on a kill or lost a ship on either side over the course of often several hours at a time. It is very rare that they give an accurate picture of what was on field for any specific engagement.

Your camping a gate in Ama.... Not really pvp. No offense, but gate campers cannot fight a true pvp gang / fitting. You are there to gank, not to fight. As i said, long range guns have their place in fleets / very specific instances- but when it comes to actual PvP pulse is superior.

Because someone in your alliance wants to get rid of his stock and another one makes it possible before changing for something else for the same reason.
Could be an explanation, hypothetical but plausible and wouldn't be the first time this happens.


This being said, I dare you to come at 70km or even at 30 of a Megathron fleet, I think you'll cry out loud you got blob for 2 main reasons.
The first one is the ship bonus making it so you don't need a dam tracking script/Te, so to tell you how nice tracking is on those and second because either with AM (and at least 1 script range) or T2 short range, you'll be putting small but repeated holes on your targets, you can go as fast as you want you'll have higher tracking issues with your Pulses than Mega with its rails.

Of course to get further in this discussion we need start talking about tracking formulas, traversal, how the enemy FC should/shouldn't react etc etc.

All this to say, that yes sniping stuff is not optimal but despite bad dps with LR ammo and rather average dps with AM rails on Megathrons are rather nice, not very good or better but nice.

My biggest concern about these ATM is the ammo, indeed this stupid ammo with more or less cap consumption, different ranges you shouldn't even think to use because the precedent one will hit harder in fall off the actual in optimal (this is really idiot but it's hybrids)
Imho regular AM should be doing about 5% more than faction AM current dmg, and faction one about 15% on top of that, but of course this is just an opinion

Yeah and exactly because at max skills the next ammo type giving further range and save cap will be doing less damage in optimal the precedent one does in op+1 fall off (after 2 it's quite ridiculous dmg anyway), barely worth for cap saving anyway.

I'm hitting at about 120 op+FO and FAM with a shield mega, then the only thing I need to hit further is faction Lead, will hit twice harder than Spike because no tracking penalties. Then 200km+ with rails to make spike worth of something you need at least 3MFS in lows which brings tank at BC levels and better have numbers to do any real dmg.

First Hybrids revamp was nice for a start, they need to push it a bit further and make some other changes.

Yea I just read all of that as well hah. There's some other important details too, the Ferox that was used had an active tank and a cap that lasted what, 1m30s? The Drake was passive and did not require any faction gear, still had almost double the EHP. Also missing that the Ferox was with 1 specific type of ammo, while the Drake has selectable damage types. Another important details is the fact that Missiles don't get glancing hits / misses / .... so your damage will be much more steady. Although it really doesn't add anything to the rail discussion, you would have to be a total muppet to take a Ferox over a Drake.

Like other people have said, rails are just too in the middle for everything and medium rails are just horrible. I don't want 'OK' weapons. If I'm going use a turret system, I want the best. Especially for PvP, that little edge another turret system gives, might just be the edge you need to kill your opponent and survive the fight. EVE is all about min/maxing. The middle road is the one no one walks. :P