Hi, I’m new to this beautiful game (1 month) and currently I have an Incursus with 3 small railguns (kite style), with which I’m satisfied at the moment (I play PvE and yesterday I was sussessful in defeating an entire pirate forward operating base alone, although returning several times to the base for repairs).
My question is:
Yesterday I saw that I was much more effective against cruisers using antimatter instead of iridium and shortening distance from 26 to 8 km. This way I almost take no damage and hit with more strenght, but it was not a quick solution.
So I was thinking, could be a good idea buy also 3 small blasters and use them with antimatter against enemy cruisers to finish them more rapidly and then go to the closest base and switch back to railguns to easily destroy frigates at distance, or is a waste of money?
I am puzzled because Incursus have a small hangar so I have to decide between destroy enemies more quickly but lose some space to carry additional equipment or take more time to win but have more space for looting, hence earn more ISK.
Blasters do more damage than railguns, however they have much shorter range, so whilst you may get 8k with antimatter with rails, you may get less than 1k range with blasters… but you will do more damage.
Well, I always end up training drone skills and get into an Algos asap
My ratting experience: With blasters it’s quite hard to apply all the damage and micro your drones parallely cause you have to micro the ship itself quite often. As the impact of the volleys didn’t look much harder than these of my railguns while I received much more damage being close, I was kinda disappointed of the blasters. But probably I’m just doing it wrong.
I love my Tristan, algos, and vexor, drones yeah baby. I keep a kite Thorax to hit heavy sites. I usually take 2-5000 rounds of antimatter and iridium rounds and 1000 round of thorium or lead for super long range
I prefer rails over blasters, I’m too timid to commit to face tank all those shots to get in close.
Very nice. I was thinking about trying it too, just didn’t have the time to put into it.
Blasters are very nice. They do a lot more damage than rail guns, as long as you stay in range.
What you discovered yesterday is called “speed / signature tanking”, basically if you orbit a big ship very closely (1 km), you’re too fast and too small for its big guns to be able to track you and hit you.
So frigates rely on this “tank” a lot. You should make sure you install a 1 MN afterburner in your frigate, to bring up your speed even more.
And if you’re going to use blasters, instead of going back to station to switch to a kiting setup, just install a Stasis Webifier in your blaster Incursus, so that you can “hold down” the enemy frigates and keep yourself at point-blank range. Your enemy frigates will die in only a few shots; and if you have afterburner for speed and webifier to root them in place, you’ll have no trouble killing them very nicely with your blasters.
Blasters out damage rails by a fair margin, however they have negligible projection. While you will destroy a target more quickly with blasters, you have to spend time repositioning your ship to bring your target into attack range. With rails you can generally begin to apply damage as soon as you have a target locked, with little to no repositioning.
It is less of an issue with frigates, but as you move up in ship size mobility drops, and time spent repositioning becomes a major factor.
Signature / transversal tanking are to me best ways to tank in this game. They are however also the hardest to pull off correctly and require practice.
The basics of it are, that you want to keep your signature as low as possible, this includes avoiding modules that blow up (give you a bigger) signature radius such as microwarpdrives and quite a few shield modules (especially rigs).
So if you do sig tanking, afterburners are far better then microwarpdrives, even on ships that reduce microwarpdrive signature as part of their hull bonusses.
To effectively use transversals, you’ll need to enable it on your overview (I have transversal in both PvP and PvE tabs) so that you can see the transversals to your target as well as general to everythign that is currently agroed on you.
In essence, whenever you have high transversal to your target, you will tank them very well. To give you an idea, on my Gila, which is a cruiser and I have 150ish sig radius (maybe a bit less or more, I forgot exact number), with a transversal between 500-700 the traget of that transversal usually misses me completely, or hits for extremely low numbers, single digits or 20s, occasional 30s or 40s only if its an artillery alpha or something like that. Whereas same targets will plug me for 80s-140s when I am moving slow (transversal of 50-100).
When your transversal to your target is high / very high (600+) its difficult for that target to hit you, but unless you have enough tracking, it is also difficult for you to hit your target for full damage, you’ll be doing a lot of partial. When your transversal is low you can hit target more easily but will take more damage. Add to that overheating, if you know you are goign to be low for next few cycles, might as well overheat to get the most of your guns, then turn it off when climbing back up to high.
The things that matter on your fits a lot are your velocity and ship agility. With high ship agility you can maintain more velocity on orbits and turns while retaining speed, you dont need to slow down as much. High speed won’t help you any if you have to slow down too much to use it when turning or orbiting.
To fully observe the effects of this, since you have Gallente frigates, I highly recommend you get yourself an Atron, fit it with 3 Inertia Stabilizers ( meta 4, I think they are the D types ? but not sure ) in low slots, and not 1 MN, but 10 MN afterburner (use the compact or enduring). Fly to your basic lowbie asteroid belt with some rats in it and turn on your afterburner, then pick one of those rats and start orbiting at various ranges, with and without the use of afterburner and see what happens and how it works. While at it, also not your align speeds and how fast you will go into warp, this is an extremely important skill and a factor that will affect your entire game for the rest of your Eve career.
Things you should keep in mind: Astrometric rigs lower your armor (bad for Gallente ships in general except a few shield fits), Even PvE rats will get you with webs and neuts, maybe not at the low levels but as you progress higher. Webs will just slow down your speed and neuts will make it difficult for you to maintain your afterburner. Therefore, the ships that do that to you need to be your #1 targets and taken out ASAP before anything else.
Next is manual orbiting. This is really a skill in itself and takes quite a bit of practice to get right. It is far more effective then auto orbiting as it allows you to manage the low / high transversals along with your weapons / tank and their overheating to a greater effect then auto orbiting.
I should note, that this also requires quite a bit of skill training unfortunately for the bigger stuff, for example doing the higher DED sites or level 4+ missions in a cruiser. You will need at minimum level 4 skills in afterburner, capacitor, ship agility, all velocity related skills, etc. 5s are of course better. And then there is PvP which is entire different ball game due to variety of your opponents fits. They may for example have a strong web, or just go for high velocity and high tracking themselves.
