Please… The drake is not optimal for lv 4s. This is hurting my head guys. How many times do I need to say this!?
'rubs head in frustration.
4 Likes
T1 Battleships, other the the praxis, basically disappeared from the scene when their price got trippled by the introduction of the battleship components, that also doubled the marauder price. Around two years ago, you could travel from any highsec to any other w/o being able to get a single non-Praxis BS on dscan along the route. Marauder usage was unaffected by the price hike, mostly because their users don’t even consider the idea of using other ships then marauders.
The Level 4 missions that received any mentionworth attention in the last 5 years, which are the same that received any attention in the previous 5 years, are the anomic missions, and the ships popular to run those are Dramiels, Daredevils, Kitsunes, Vagabonds, Gilas and the Cerberus, though many other ships, especially the Enyo also were very popular at some times, and none of the people farming those missions claimed that other ships couldn’t be used, in fact people were always trying to find a better/cheaper ship/fit for the task at hand. The introduction of the abyssal deadspace created new opportunities for players up looking for a high-risk-high-reward challenge, i.e. the same players that were running anomics before. Many left to run abyss and never returned, others got bored of both and tried wormhole content, where the real marauder PVE content is in.
“Standings Grinding Mission” runners using marauders never used them because they were optimal for the tasks at hand, or otherwise each golem runner would have multiple different golem fits to swtich between the missions, aside of multiple kronos and vargur and paladin as each outperforms the other at some point. The reason the standings grinding mission runners use the marauders instead is because they are too lazy to think about optimal running and want one fit that “can do all” the standing grinding missions w/o having to bother about the details. But when it comes to laziness, nothing can mess with Gilas and Ishtars.
A Drake, unlike a marauder, can be used to try running anomics. No successful run with a Drake was documented so far, but if you come up with a Drake/DNI that can do it, you found a way to get more isk/lp/standings/loot then with any security mission running marauder in the same amount of time, while I bet some players would also offer to give you some months worth of marauder crab in isk/PLEX to publish information on how you’re running anomics with a Drake.
#truthbetold
Seriously, a Drake can run L4s yes. But you can only ‘recommend’ that if you love to bath in other peoples agony. Holy moly…
@ArtyDrake : seriously, Information Command Links Tech2? Do you realize how much freaking skillpoints that is to get the full bonus? If you can field this you either have the SP to use a much more efficient ship than the Drake for L4s (if you have command specialist skills use at least a Nighthawk goddamnit…) OR you should have invested all these SP a lot better (HAC, T3C). And even if you do it with that ship, 360 dps are still simply lousy. Even switching to Furies against Battleships/BCs with their 420 DPS is still lousy to run L4s with. Yes, you can do it, but it is far from being efficient. If you can’t field firepower that does reliable (aka close to full application) DPS of at least 600 vs the big targets, simply don’t run L4s but blitz L3s.
The next step from running C3s in a Cruiser/FactionCruiser is using a HAC (aka Cerberus), because you can use all your skills for medium missile systems + can tank all the missions via Afterburner. And from there you can make the step up to either Tengu or Battleship class. Nighthawk if you go the command ship route (some ppl might want this because it also increases their usefulnes in their PvP gameplay). But don’t use a Drake…
and you wouldn’t. To avoid any tank issues you can create a Heavy Missile MJD fit. In any case it sux because of DPS. Long story short - Drake’s tank and it’s DPS scaling just nasty with gear quality. You can put there all purple modules and you’ll be disappointed. There a places when Drake is good, but not for L4 missions. For example, many L4 missions have rats with different resistance profiles.
3 Likes
That’s probably the most direct and concise answer to the OP in this entire thread.
hu ? a few do (scarlet, silence the informant, worlds collide). Most don’t.
Even drake’s new sibling alligator so far in pyfa’ing is not looking to have me go the kronos is trash pve wise lol.
I mean I have it since another alt dipped into gurista since I am trying all this new stuff out. it should be interesting, but I won’t be taking it to clear out rooms of battleships in lv4.
Depends where you’re fighting and whether you’re being picky with them. I know I’ve certainly got Angel and Drones in Gallente space.
Amarr and Minmatar space will have you fighting against things with EM and explosive as their best damage type. Although, ironically, in Minmatar space, I get a lot of kinetic. Like… a LOT of kinetic; Serpentis, Mercs, Mordus, Razzmatazz, Damsel, Scarlet.
Alright I am at my wits end about how much you love the drake… Let me reply to some specific points. Wall of Text alert.
NGL Battleships were always expensive before the indy changes. They were always for the slightly more affluent newbies. (About 500-1bil networth)
I would like to disagree because CCP massively buffed bastion module and that has led to a MASSIVE increase in usage AND supply of all marauders. Prices have stabilized for a long time now.
Yes, we know that. Thanks for pointing that out in a needlessly long statement. CCP hasn’t touched missions in a long long time.
You know I said this right? Go read post 71 where I state that people use BS, and t2/t3 crusiers (some faction crusiers also) for lv 4s. Ofc people use advanced frigates. The point is it’s not t1 trash. 
(showing my bias here)
Of course!! The drake is simply NOT better at doing lv 4s vs advanced ships in this game. Do you want me to do a holistic cost/efficiency cost assessment!? I have enough experience in lv 4s to say the drake is not optimal.
This is the problem with your argument here. All of us are looking at EVE prehaps 6 months ago to 1 year ago. You are looking at EVE 2-5+ years ago! I look at today’s meta. Not what was the meta years ago.
This is not relevant to the topic at hand. I know that fact lol. ofc each ship has pros/cons
IT CAN! If you are refitting in missions ESPECALLY lv 4s IN A MAURADER idk what you are doing but it aint optimal hun. If you want ill SS my golem fit here for everyone to see. Just say it and I will do it! My golem and any marauder fit can be made to run ALL lv 4s w/o refits. I got skin in this game when I do lv 4s.
I wonder why? 
Wow OK HUGE WALL OF TEXT Via quotes. If you read it enjoy it. If you don’t I am ok lol. OP you need to learn how to condense your statements down ALOT and speak at the topic at hand. We don’t need to know the history of PVE in EVE for the past 5 years.
It’s not about having varied missions, but about having missions in which there are enough resistance profile variations that being able to change your damage type is important.
Alligator definitely shines with bling. It is really tight on CPU so I would just go EE implants to make it easier. Definitely a big step up from the Drake, you can get over 65k EHP with a large shield booster and 900dps with HMLs and Hammerhead IIs. Damn.
Wait, are you saying Kronos is trash for pve? You crazy, it’s a monster! 
Noone has recommended a Drake over other ships. The thread title sais drake, and the OP asks for an inexpensive fit. There have been numerous advices to use other ships. Yet this thread is about drakes, so the discussion should be about how to fit a drake to run lvl4 security missions.
The OP said skills were no issue.
I have mastery 5 through the complete caldari subcap range. And nevertheless I used Drakes and Ferox to rat recently, eventually downgraded to Caracals which I’m now using because they travel alot faster. I have a Golem, too, it’s docked at the same station I usually drop my caracal in…
Since wargear availability and skill points are not the issue, what makes me favor a T1C over a T2BS?
Well, you do realize that the OP has not limited the lvl4 mission running effort to take place in high security space, right?
In a BC I can just chill and continue to rat despite neutrals appearing on local or dscan when I’m missioning in low or null. With a BC/Cruiser, there’s no need to de-siege simply because the neutral might be coming for me, there’s no need to worry the travel fit can’t be applied before I might have to get out, and, in fact, with a T1C/T1BC there’s not even a need to get out of my site at all, actually, unless the mission needs a specific item to be picked up and I worry the other player might steal it.
They come to the mission deadspace for a fight, so just give them a fight. And if they happen not to care for the T1C/BC, I can interrupt the ratting effort and try giving them a fight, even if they didn’t ask for one.
I mess up or get baited, and lose a Caracal? A Ferox? A Drake? Who cares about a BC lossmail? Reship and try again.
A Marauder on the other hand is blissingfully expensive. In highsec it’s among the most expensive thing you could use, i.e. also the most expensive killmail you could be getting, increasing motivation to gankers, and even the logistic effort required to obtain a new marauder and get it back to my home station would be significant. A drake can be assembled locally from resources reprocessed out of the loot dropped by NPCs in less time my toon would take to gate to Jita in a shuttle and return with a new marauder, or the wait for jump fatigue timers implied by jumping a jump freighter towards jita and getting it back with the marauder inside. Many corps members have spare BC, the local markets offer then for an “insignificant” extra over Jita only, so just get one from market or corpmates and be back on grid in 2~10 minutes.
Someone claiming he’ll fight off gankers with a PVE marauder either has no clue what he’s talking about, or has no competent gankers in his area, especially given that it’s going to be a 1vs1 for a very short time only given what a bright shining gank magnet a marauder is.
Nighthawks are more flexible at that point then marauders, but they, too, are too efford-constraint to replace and considered too good of a killmail not to expect a lot of people coming to be on it.
With a throwaway able Cruiser or BC, I have just as much of an initiative as the ganker has.
With an expensive T2BC/T2BS, especially with an “optimized PVE fit”, which is likely useless against gankers, the ganker has the initiative.
The same goes for Wardec Hostiles independend of security space. They can come for a Drake, maybe it’s gonna hurt them, maybe they’ll just grab a KM … worth less then 100M isk.
For a marauder… they can get a killmail that is priced at the level of a medium sized structure before even accounting the modules on the marauder, and they can get it without having to bother about citadel invulnerabilities.
Indeed, Drakes are used to multibox C4/C5, C3 is T3C solo material.
A Cerberus can probably be fit to “reliably” run all C3 sites, though that fit will likely require quite a bit of bling, and even then, either the Emergent Preservers or the Awakened and Sleepless Preservers will be quite painful, depending on whether the Cerb has HM/HAM failing to apply on the emergents or RLM inflicting only insignificantly more damage then the awakened and sleepless can spider repair.
How exactly does blinged Cerb crabbing in Wormholes relate to inexpensive Drake lvl4 security running, though?
A Drake, like any Missile Boat, isn’t damage locked though. It’s the Ferox and Naga which are locked to thermal and kinetic, a Drake can inflict whatever it wants.
The mainline BS were in the 100-130M isk range by 2019, i.e. a third of the current price. Here’s some historic market data if your memory doesn’t serve you well:
They buffed the marauders, and also the battleships’ tank module buffer bonuses, well after they implemented the industrial changes, and primarily because outside of highsec, noone was using battleships any more.
In the time between the indy changes, and the BS and marauder buffs, which lasted about a year, marauders were used in highsec virtually unaffected by the rise of investment cost.
It was written by someone else in post 21, and by me, too, in post 24, and contested by your claim a BS, T3C or gila was needed in post 29.
Any T2 Frigate, and any T1 frigate “trash”, too, can complete “The Recon, part 2”, absolutely reliable and faster then any BS, as it implies no less then 3 times aligning and 2 warps, i.e. 3xAB pulses which take 3x8 = 24 seconds simply to align the battleship if the site is in the same system, providing an example of a mission that’s done faster with a t1 trash frigate then with “optimal for lvl4” marauder. The distance to cover is 70km, any frig can cover that in 24 seconds. A Marauder can use MJD to achieve the objective, but even then the MJD takes 9s to spool and that’s after the warp was slower, and resulting in the BS very likely being moving at full speed in a direction it can’t warp out, i.e. taking two instead of one AB pulses to align out.
The ecm anomics can be done with a Griffin too btw. Odds to mess it up are just higher.
You are aware the text you’re quoting is a reply to a user who claimed the eve PVE meta hasn’t changed in 20 years, are you?
And these pro and cons make each of the marauders optimal at something, assuming the game has a concept of balancing. I.e. for whatever a Paladin is optimal, a Golem will not be.
The Drake is optimal, like the whole BC class, in being a medium tier high DPS/Tank for low isk investment.
A Raven deals more DPS on paper and in some settings, such as fighting other BS, stations or capitals it also deals more DPS on grid, but what’s the DPS/isk of a Raven fit and what’s the DPS/isk of a Drake?
How about mobility? While among the least mobile BC, a Drake doesn’t have to shy a comparization with a BS on the mobility front, either. A random pvp-drake for brawling, which is what a drake is usually best for, can be used for PVE in any mission that doesn’t have a lot of webs in it, too, while having 80k-ish ehp and 700dps-ish damage on paper. A Raven can easily be fit to outperform both, but comes at a significantly higher isk investment. Also, damage application consideration is much more important on a Raven then on a Drake, which applies better out of the box.
I always had the impression that all decent marauders had an on-grid fit and a travel fit, as the cloak and microwarp would have too negative effects to keep them installed on-grid, while jumping a stargate into a decent camp, w/o cloaky MWD capability, might end up being not so optimal at all, and for that reason, to marauder pilots refitting the marauder in missions was the most trival thing to do, rather then them considering it to be doing something wrong if they had to refit. And since you’re refitting anyways, how about fitting mods that are superior for the specific mission even if inferor for another?
OR not refitting, but then also not claiming it was optimal.
Noone needs a screenshot. If you want to share your fit, use EFT export, so people can import/simulate it and consider how it would perform. Posting it would, btw, make you the third user to share a fit in a 90+ post thread about fits, so compared to the most posts here, which focus on bashing other fits rather then at providing examples, a Golem fit in a Drake fit thread probably might be considered on-topic given it matches at least the fit part.
1 Like
It was a writing mistake, I meant L3 Missions in a Cruiser/Factioncruiser, the next step would be HACs/T3C to use in L4 if one doesn’t want to go the Battleship route. And if BC sized hulls, then a Nighthawk and not a Drake.
And to all the rest you wrote: Sorry to say it, but It is completely irrelevant. Sorry to be that blunt. L4 in a Drake is just a bad idea from whatever angle you look at it. Except you really don’t care for ISK, but then why the heck even run these missions? It doesn’t matter if you won’t “recommend it over other ships” or whatnot. Even the idea to try to grind L4s in a fit that can barely do 400dps is the epitome of “wasted time”. I won’t even argue any further, just feel the urgent need to warn anyone who might think after your walls of text that doing it could maybe be a good idea. It isn’t, because the money you make per time invested is simply horrible. Mining Gneiss in a Venture probably returns more ISK than that.
1 Like
Holy wall of text, batman. I thought I had it bad.
1 Like
If you care about ISK, why do you bother about lvl4 securities?
Mining Gneiss in a Venture, as you write, provides more ISK. Don’t know whether a Venture can crab more isk/m then a marauder can in lvl4 highsec securities from a 0.5 sec agent and trading the LP for items to put on the market, too, but a mining barge definitely can, and piloting a barge with T2 lasers and stuff is somewhere between 5M and 10M skill points to perfect, while the barge is an order of magnitude less expensive then a Marauder, too.
Don’t like mining? No biggy, scan down a wormhole and go find some hacking sites inside. Can also be done w/o the wormhole bit, in null or low, at a slight and medium loss of income against the WH variant. Again, with 10M SP, exploration skills will be pretty good and a buzzard/anathema/…is quite inexpensive, too.
Want to cause other ships to explode? Join any corps that does abyssals. At 10M SP, you can fly retributions and hawks, and even if your corps doesn’t promote abyss, many players are so out of content they’ll just run it with you since that’s a change of pace.
Exploration is fairly random, but will be somewhere between 100 and 200 m isk/hour in WH or null once you learned how to properly do it, mining in low is 150~200m isk/hour depending on the rock type, too as long as you have a porp or whale crabbed up, abysalls are somewhere around 200m isk/hour once you learned how to do it and when pricing in the replacement ships and the time wasted for failed runs.
How much does a Marauder crab in highsec, even if it takes missions from 0.5 sec agents only and trades the LP for items to sell in addition to bounties and loot?
It needs much more SP to properly be used, and much more ISK to invest into ship and modules, but is it competitive with exploring or mining or abyssing or other high yield activities I skipped?
Limiting the activity to highsec and marauders, wouldn’t highsec escallation crabbing print more isk then lvl4 securities? Or teaming up for FOBs?
Oh I know. It was a joke. I love dropping in a blaster fit. 60KM ish or less…its dying. I heard rails got fixed somewhat but haven’t got around to that yet. Blap frigs at range…solves that battleship problem too.
just fly a gila or ishtar
~Plot Twist~
BCs aren’t made for L4’s.
A decent vet could make a BC work in L4’s but it’s going to take you so much longer and you’re gonna mess the goo in your capsule at least a dozen times per mission when your shield/armor/hull alarms blare in your speakers.
Just get yourself into a basic Dominix and use Sentry Drones. If you wanna fit rails, go for it, but you’re better off using Drone Link Augmenters in the Highs for range tanking. Also, MJD to bounce out 100km when they get too close for comfort.
2 Likes
none ship is “made for L4´s” !
all ships are build around PvP ! you only can use it for PvE !
the skills to fly them “perfect” could be time applied to half decent BS as well. Unless looking at fleet boosting in command BC’s or pvp…BC 5 is not what I’d have a do or die train. That could be time to battleship or hell t3 cruiser.
THey can blitz l4 okay. I prefer t3c for that.