Do you loathe having to use drones on your battleship to pick off smaller ships? Then this thread is for you!
The Heavy Stasis Grappler can be an effective tool for nailing frigates as well as an alternate to using a flight of light drones or smartbombs. But there are several caveats…
• This only works with short-range large weapons: Blasters, Autocannons and Pulse Lasers.
• You need a ship with a tracking bonused hull (trained to at least IV). V gunnery skills are key. In addition, you need to boost your base gun tracking by a minimum of 50% through a combination of implants, rigs, tracking enhancers and tracking speed-scripted tracking computers (T2 minimum).
• You may need to overheat both your grappler and tracking computer.
• Finally, you will almost always need to move towards your target. Remaining stationary will work on some targets but the most persistent will require you to approach.
An added advantage of the Heavy Stasis Grappler is that it will also allow you to nail destroyer and cruiser sized targets that fall under 10km (these can be hard to successfully target otherwise).
Is it worth sacrificing a prized mid slot for? Only you can be the judge.
With cruise missles it actually really doesn’t matter. You can MJD and use regular T2 high damage missles at 100+km with just 1 missle guidance computer running precision script + 1 enhancer or rig, and on top of that reload on T2 cruise launchers is only 10 secs, so you can switch to precision missles once the range gets closer, even at point blank, and still do excellent. It takes one extra volley to take out a frig thats at 10km or less and orbiting at high speed, the other ones still go down the same, so its really no big deal.
at 100km you are going to be doing less damage, and most pve ships are already overtanked it really isn’t a benefit for most missions. It can make sense if you are a low skilled newb, or semi-afking missions but not if you are actively running missions.
Personally I’ve been meaning to try a grappler, but it just seems way to situational. Heck it might even work with long range weapons, used to run a web back when it was 90% (or even 99%) on my marauders, but now I think you are just better off with another tracking comp. maybe bring a web or grappler in cargo with a mobile depot,
In the context of shooting frigate and destroyer NPC’s, any decent fit ship is going to 1 shot them at 100km, so it doesn’t really matter.
I can see where a grappler could be helpful, yes, but Id throw it down as very situational, especially vs a regular web. Im 99% sure it would be useless combined with LR weapons, at the point where your getting the full strength from it you very likely can’t track a small ship thats moving even 30 m/s
I’ve found that you have to get the speed of any drone or frigate down to under 45m/s in addition to increasing the tracking by the aforementioned amount.
You can also accomplish this with a stasis web and grappler, but this consumes two mid slots. The idea was to figure out how one could achieve this with an existing tracking computer (almost all gun fits are going to have at least one) and single grappler.
And yes, you can definitely MJD out to 100km and then snipe them from a distance - but that also requires a mid slot so you’re not really any further ahead than if you ran a grappler. I guess for railguns, beams or artillery (does anyone run PvE artillery fits?) this is probably the best alternative since you often can’t reliably hit anything small at ranges under 30-35km anyway.
I should also add that MJDs typically favor Marauders since they benefit from the reduced cooldown.
Another question though is are the smaller ships that much of an issue that devoting slots specificlly to deal with them vs just letting lights do it worth it? I personally run a Mega pulse paladin, which was origonally a tach one until I switched, and I’ve never really had to worry about little things, I just pop them right away before they can start moving
I did some tests with stasis grappler and alas, its all but useless in pve due to totally craptalistic range.
Use that mid for drone tracking computer, watch as enemy frigs pop like fireworks.
That might actually be useful for a mission like damsel where everything tries to rush you. Although I’m typically using something like blasters which have plenty of tracking and usually only need the web.
Also on pirate invasion jump into the bottom group and blap everything to complete the mission. although everything flys away from you at 0 transversal so if you need the extra tracking you are taking too long to kill stuff imo.
and yea that was pretty much my earlier point, easy to blap on approach, or just let the drones deal with it. The grappler is just too situational for general mission running. If you are refitting for specific missions it may have a spot, but I probably wont recommend it in general.