Ships & Modules

I knew someone would jump on this... I specifically said I was only talking about soloing, which is also what OP was talking about. I've used hamgus plenty when other ships were around as well. I would even agree that HAMs work fine for many specific plexes.

However IMO there are only two reasons to use HAMs. The first is the 900-1000 dps you get with rage, and the second is the somewhat better damage application vs frigates when not using rage. The second reason only is a big deal when you don't have skills/hardwires/rigs for decent application, and the first reason is rather countered by the fact that every second spent not firing rage HAMs is wasted dps, and your range won't be great. With HMLs you can get a solid 700 dps at over 70km range (near 100km w/ faction) against everything cruiser sized or bigger, which means you never have to wait on movement to start killing the highest priority target. Gurista BS do like to meander away from you, but you're right in that most gurista plexes don't have anything that punishes HAMs.

However, once you consider escalations, serpentis/angel sites, or anything where the difficulty/danger is cranked up, HMLs win outright. The ability to snipe stuff like jammers, neutralizers, stasis towers, and those dangerous close-range escalation bosses, to deal with repping structures that stop repping beyond a certain range, and to do all of these things while MWD-ing away from tacklers (or the warp in beacon) becomes priceless. Also, if you run 6x HAMs and a mwd you run into some (solvable) powergrid issues.

PS, the ishtar doesn't "almost" speed tank guristas, it can pretty much speedtank while sitting at 0m/s with a single kinetic hardener and a repper.