Missions & Complexes

optimal is short i' m almost never in it, it's like 20km or so, fallout is like 42.5km (from memory), i use antimatter L (you get better result with NULL L but that's t2 and it's really over the top)... anyway i hit at 40km for 950dps , and 70+km for 200dps (which is not good i know, but those are blasters)... you might say why not rail if most missions are around 40km... well rail tracking just suck, if anything get close you'll never hit it and since i just drop in, bastion, MTU and shoot away that dont work well....

i rarely use my light drone , i shoot approaching frigate with easier if have the time to lock them before they orbit, once they orbit you have to use light drones, anything bigger, cruiser,battleship you just melt.

all marauder are certainly good enough for l4, you can't go wrong with any of them, it depends on what gameplay style you look for, micro managing target painter, torpedoes cool down, etc was not fun. just lock and shoot that's fun, kronos blaster fit that idea.
vargur is probably great too but it's shield tanked and i already said why i prefer armor over shield , much better EHP buffer.
paladin is nice as well but it's scorch or nothing from my pov and i dont like having to have t2 ammo around , i just travel with t1 BPO and craft ammo on the spot where i travel that's how i like it.

i'm not interested in sniper fit.

Anyone tried Polarized blasters?

If you want only one, don't use a marauder.

Did Angel Extra with bonus room in Kronos was curious will it die in fire with just an DCU II as tank it did not did it in less then 40 min.

I believe it can be done in 35min with my current setup but i did yak with my girlfriend at the end of mission losing focus left 2 web drones II thinking i don't need to kill em for bonus room to enter and i overshoot my targeting range in bonus room.

Those few things can shave few minutes and in my view Kronos is among very top ship choice for any mission.

Since it have large drone bay i think i will start using web / tp drone combo i found that beside small ones non bonus med drones don't pack any meaningful punch.

Bonus room starts at 27:20.

When some starts a sentence with " I guess.." it doesn't fill me with confidence.
Best you try them and then comment. Marauders are immune to EWAR, tank like beasts and free up slots because of the bastion to fit things like web's, TP, TC's, etc.
And basically in saying "if you get one ship, don't get a marauder", you are saying whatever your choice is it will fit any situation. I would really like to know which situation I would get myself in to, in which my Golem, is going find itself in a situation its not suited for.

Looks at my sig... um sure, I'll get right on that...

Like I said previously, they're decent but underwhelming in the dps and mobility department. The DPS can be mostly resolved by running polarised however this really exasperates the mobility problem in all but the pulse paladins case since you can still relatively effectively snipe so mobility isn't as huge of an issue. Pulse paladin of course has the problem of damage type then. If you switch to longer range weapons on the other 3 you exasperate the dps issue. The Golem for example, even running Fury Cruise you're doing at most 160dps more than a Gila and less than both the Mach or Barghest and then you're going to have issues applying damage to certain targets.

There are areas where marauders excel and I preferred them over other ships around a year and half-ish ago? Right when the bastion changes came in. Ran them quite a lot in fact. But since then loot and salvage has dropped so low it's a ridiculous waste of time to do loot and salvage and pirate ships beat them in full clear in most missions.

The only reason why i say 'I guess' is that I haven't run the Vindicator yet. Now I don't know if it'll set any records for blitzing necessarily but considering it can out dps any other BS in the game by quite a large margin, and out dps any non polarized Marauder with rails it's most definitely an interesting project I might look into.

The way I see it if you have a low DPS ceiling, something all the marauders suffer from, there's not much you can do about it regardless of how good your application is. If you have a high dps ceiling then the potential is there, it just takes good piloting and good fitting to unlock that potential. Marauders bring something to the table that currently just isn't useful anymore.

Because you're using a Golem to clear/salvage and not to blitz, which is what RHMLs are geared towards. When you factor in reload time, RHMLs put out less average DPS than either cruise missiles or torpedoes.

The long reloads is a really big gut punch for sustained dps (even if the application is a lot better) and means that realistically RHML using fury ammo and Cruise using Faction ammo has near identical sustained dps and similar application. End of the day it's a case of 6 of one and half dozen of the other.

On a side note, not all effective launchers are created equal. A typhoon for example, with it's rof bonus rather than damage bonus would be slightly worse off using RHML than a damage bonussed hull would be. It's a good rule of thumb on weather or not to use Cruise vs RHML. Range is of course also a consideration on non bonussed hulls. This is why the Barghest makes such a great RHML platform.

It is a bit of a moon sized pancake I'll give it that. I got stuck on another Barghest on the undock once. Now that was a sight to see.

Misleading stats are misleading. The # of BS mean absolutely nothing. It's the % of total EHP that those BS make up that's a far more important statistic AND the % that is elite frigs and cruisers.

Also the whole splitting launchers it's also actually making it worse since you're giving up the one advantage RHML have, witch is burst. This means you're having to chew through even more EHP as regen and repair is allowed to add more EHP to the total you need to kill for the mission.