Warfare & Tactics

Or there's something I'm seriously not getting. Knowing me, it's probably the former.

Look at my combat log - actually, don't. It can be summarized by saying that I lose every encounter I have. Let me tell you how every pathetic "battle" I have works:

I see a target while flying in my expensively-fitted Rifter, fit courtesy of Battlclinic. The target locks onto me first. The target shoots before I even have time to react, taking out my whole shield. I turn on my armor repairer, but it's too late. The enemy takes me out with the second shot. Do you want to know how stupid I am? The exact same thing happens again an hour later. Regardless of whether I'm facing a cruiser or a measly frigate, it's no exaggeration to say my record time of lasting in a battle is a whole five seconds. That's how awful I am.



What am I not getting? Is there some kind of hotkey for targeting I don't know about? Do I need to get a different fit? Change my tactics? Get an implant? Train different skills? Or should I just accept I'm terrible and stop trying?

Please respond, it's embarrassing to have what's easily the worst combat log I've ever seen anyone have.

Dude - Join a player corp.

Stop flying Rifters. (Tao will awox me for saying that)

Don't get fits from BattleClinic.
99% of what is on BattleClinic are fail fits.

Well, from your Rifter-Deaths it's simple as that:
1. Was a fight against a T3
2. Was a figth against two Players one of which did disrupt your tracking

Armor Repairer works too slow in PvP fight, better get more res or an plating to increase your EHP.

You definitely need to hook up with a PvP corp.

Lets look at your latest loss:

rifter vs thrasher.

1. You should not have bothered engaging. A rifter is going to lose to a thrasher 99 times out of 100. 100 times out of 100 if you don't know what you're doing (and no offence, but you don't... yet. )
2. The fit is plain bad in numerous ways:

• You have a long point (warp disruptor) matched with a afterburner and a web. This setup rarely makes sense, you want to swap the disruptor for a scram. This will allow you to turn of your opponent's MWD (assuming you can actually get in range)
• The 50mm plate is totally pointless. You have a repper but no resists. If you're set on doing the active repping thing then change that 50mm for a DCU or EANM to get your resists up a little.
• Tech 1 fittings. When fighting solo in lowsec you will generally be going up against veteren players with tens of millions of SP and lots of isk. That means Tech 2 fittings (weapons in particular) are very much a minimum standard for successful soloing.
• No rigs. See previous point. 99% of ships you fight in lowsec will be fully rigged.

Taking all the above in to account, I would say you have almost no chance of beating anything solo in lowsec (even if you do tweak your fitting). You really need to hook up with a group. Get used to flying and fitting ships. Once your character has built up some skills and isk, then you can try solo again.

I do agree you should join a player-run corp. You'll make friends, learn the game faster and play longer. Good for everyone involved.

The only bad advice in this thread is about BattleClinic. You should never grab someone else's fit and expect it to i-win. There's no such thing as an uber fit; a loadout is reflective of your role and your objectives. BC's loadout forum is a place to learn and discuss loadouts and their rationale.

If you just grab a top-rated loadout from any source--even from your corp-mates--you'll be as much in the dark about how to fly your ship as when you started. Always look for WHY the loadout works and the OBJECTIVES it tries to achieve. And that knowledge comes from you trying, testing, and experimenting. Oh and dying but that's a critical part of EVE

Join a player corp, you just need some experience is all. Join fleets for a bit, learn basic game mechanics, then go back to solo

yaaaaa. the element of surprise is the best way to make up for a deficiency in skill points or not having links when the opponent maybe does. unfortunately, the rifter is by far the WEAKEST ship out there for that because it's layout is so limiting that you're pretty much stuck using ACs and an armor tank and everyone knows it.

Slashers are still somewhat popular for surprise fits. Basically, any frigate with four mid slots gives you some latitude in whether you can fit extra tank, another web, or some EWAR on and then it's just a matter of choosing targets that stand a good chance of falling victim to your special trick. A TDing brawler Slasher, for example, will work well against hybrid weapons because you can either use a tracking speed script to gimp a railgun's ability to hit you or an optimal range script to kill blaster range and then you can just sit back into a good orbit and wait on the killmail.

For frigate combat, Thermodynamics V is also pretty much an absolute necessity. Overheating can give you the edge you need to catch a target, disengage from a target, burst through their peak regen, squeeze all you can get out of your own reps, and since the latest round of changes it has now become necessary to get the max effect from EWAR mods. It does a lot.

This is flat out misconceived advice.

A HUGE amount of frigate fights have armour repairers involved. Often plating your ships makes them too slow and a resistance mod + repper can make you pretty damn tough especially if you use a AAR. The key is to know when to activate the repper. Seeing as armour reps work at the end of the cycle you need to activate as soon as you see your shields taking damage when low SP as your shields won't have much in them so you need to start 'repping' early.

The fact Op is in here asking for advice rules out that he would be bad. Inexperienced maybe. Hang in there buddy! It took me a while too to get halfway decent at PVP too, it will require some time and trial-and-error untill PVP really "clicks".

Also, the Rifter is getting a slight change in ship bonus. It used to be king of the hill in frigate land, untill other frigates got buffed to a little over it's performance. That being said, it's still one of the most versatile frigates in the Minmatar lineup. Try the Slasher too!

Please do not take this personally, but your post and fits show a fundamental problem in your approach to frig pvp.
I will try to help you a bit by going over the problems individually.

I assume you copied the best rated fits on Battleclinic and downgraded them to suit your skillpoints. This bears a couple of problems.

You can do this if you know what the fit is supposed to do and you are willing to sacrifice a little bit of its effectiveness to accomodate your skillset. However this only works if you do not completely cripple the fit as is the case with the slasher here.

By downgrading the entire fit to T1 and not using rigs you limit the effectiveness of a ship by (i would guess) around 15%-30%. However some fits rely on specific T2 mods like the slasher here.
The idea behind the slasher fit you posted is generally to use an optimal range disruption script in its TD
and use t2 guns with barrage ammo for longer shooting range in addition with two range increasing rigs.
This, coupled with its great speed lets you keep opponents at around 6-7km away from you, which means
that most blaster and autocannon ships will not be able to hit you when they are optimal range disrupted.
You can then whittle them down from that range.
So the Slasher relies heavily on range dictation and superior gunrange whilst within 10km of its target if against blaster or autocannon ships.
In a fight against a laser ship, the slasher can actually outtrack them and orbit at 500 with a tracking disruption script.
Most laser frigs will not be able to hit you.
With good skills the Slashers neut can actually be run capstable which further helps against active tanking ships and blaster/laser ships and offsets the rather low dps of the slasher a little bit.

By downgrading to T1 your slasher is not able to fill its strongest role of kiting within scram range, coupled with your low skills which will probably let you loose against most stuff in a strait up brawl, this means that you will most likely not kill anything with the slasher.

Regarding the RIfter, it is basically a tankier and slower version of the slasher with less range and no TD. If you have good skills you can pull that off and do basically the same things as the slasher with a little difference in target selection as to what you want to kite and what you can brawl.

Do not get me wrong though, you can (even with very low skillpoints) be effective at frig pvp. A fast way to improve your performance with the slasher would obviously be to train T2 guns. And try to go for Overheating next. It is a little longer to skill (1 Week i believe) but it can give you a boost of up to 30% of overall performance and offset years worth of skillpoints that way.

I reccommend you to read the Know your Enemy Blogs by Azual Skoll in regards to all Frigates to get a general view of what each ship is capable of.


Remember: Try to think of what you want your ship to do and then fit accordingly and not fit the ship and try to figure out what it can do.