Ishtar T3 Problem

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1

Hello,

I was dong some T3 Exotic Filaments in Ishtars (Fitting below) and lost two of them to spawns with Starving and Striking Vedmarks. There were other ships too but I do not remember which ones. The incomming dps is very high and my reps are barely able to tank it in overheat after the assault damage control is on cooldown. I tried to reduce the incomming dps asap by killing some cruisers but they got heavily repped so by the time I was dead I only killed one enemy.

I wonder how other people handle those spawns. I think I make some general mistakes when confornted with those enemies but don’t know which ones. Or is my fitting not good enough for T3s?

[Ishtar, My Try 2]

Assault Damage Control II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II

10MN Afterburner II
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery
Medium Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 800
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II, Tracking Speed Script

280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
Drone Link Augmentor II

Medium Nanobot Accelerator II
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II

Caldari Navy Hornet x5
Caldari Navy Vespa x5
Caldari Navy Vespa x5
Caldari Navy Wasp x5
Caldari Navy Wasp x5

Quake S x2000
Navy Cap Booster 800 x12

Stats: 575dps by Wasp Drones and 469EHP/s with Standard Exile Booster

2

Let me preface that I have zero experience with an Ishtar or Sentry drone mechanics, but I’ve run hundreds of filaments.

Playing with fittings, it seems that if you aren’t using sentry drones with an Ishtar it’s a bit of a waste. Heavy drones are going to have a rough time hitting anything except the big guys, so a sentry could be plopped at the room entrance and preform the same function more efficiently in my mind. Fit a Microwarp and try to kite around the room while prioritizing the scrams first. Yes you have to waste time gathering the drones back up, but if you use a MTU to gather loot you should have some time to spare going back to grab them.

Again all hypothetical, so more of a suggestion.

[Ishtar, Maybe?]

Assault Damage Control II
Energized Explosive membrane II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano membrane II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II

50MN Mircowarpdrive II
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery
Republic Fleet Medium Cap Battery
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II, Tracking Speed Script

280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S

Medium Anti-Thermal Pump II
Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor II

Warden II x 5

Quake S x2000

3

I’m pretty sure you mean Vedmaks + Damaviks spawn (cruisers + frigates), because Leshaks (BS) don’t spawn with cruisers… And in that case you have basically two options: you either have mwd, so you can keep range from the frigates and kill them first, then take down Starving Vedmak, then the other one. If you don’t have mwd, Damaviks will catch you and hold you on spot, so you need tank strong enough to withstand incoming damage for a while and kill the Starving Vedmak ASAP, then the other Vedmak, then frigates.

But yes, this is imho the worst spawn you can encounter in T3, especially in Firestorm filaments, where they got bonuses both to armor HP and damage thanks to thermal resist penalty.

4

@Dragos_Highwind Thanks for the input. Maybe I will give it a try. But I know that there are many people running T3-5 in Ishtars with AB and I wonder how they do it.

@Lirbiss_Naraunt
Yes, I ment the Starving Vedmarks, not Leshaks. I will edit this in my entry post. Thank you for explaining how to deal with them. I think I tried to kill a Frigate first before the cruisers came in range and switched to the Starving Vedmark too late.

I have two questions:

  1. What numbers for the tank are reasonalbe to run T3s (only tried exotics with the Ishtar) savely?
  2. I have trouble killing the Vedmarks fast enough. Should I switch the cap booster for another Omnidirectional Tracking Link? Or will this make things worse because I get neuted dry too quickly?
5

I’m afraid I can’t be of much help to your Ishtar fit, never tried it in Abyss, but in my hybrid Gila in which I’m safely running most of T3s I have something about 120hp/s passive + 97.5 hp/s from LASB.

6

At T5 I almost believe you would have to run AB due to drain damage and scram = death. T3-4 should be flexible enough for a MWD. That said, hearing being able to reliably do a T5 in anything but a Gila (because it’s OP as hell) rather surprises me. With getting lucky enough to not hit the brutal rooms sure, but reliably? eek.

7

Oh maybe there is a misunderstanding. I don’t know if people are running T5s in an Ishtar reliably. I just saw fittings for T5 out there and the comments did not seem like they disappove.

For me it is important to know if my losses were due to bad piloting/strategy or if my fitting is just not good enough for some T3 spawns.

Edit: Regarding strategy I got some advice, but I am still unsure if my fitting is good enough for the T3s.

8

Not sure how you handle these spawns but the vedmark cruisers starving, hollow you take down asap. Their damage application even with ab running is quite good and it ramps up. If you don’t take care them straight away I know in T5 you start getting hits 1k. These you get DPS on first asap then the webbers neuts etc.

They don’t have a weakness which is easy to bypass unlike their battleship counterparts. So raw dps and tank is best way to deal with them other then that you might need to bling your setup a bit.

9

Power dps thru them the sooner they are gone the better,webbing them helps,unsure how helpful those bare howitzers are would go AC with faction or barrage ammo so at least you get hits on a cruiser and up with them.

Pretty sure howitzers will miss all the time orbiting non webbed vedmaks

10

EHP/s is irrelevant. You need HP/s not EHP/s. Big difference. The requirements vary from player to player and from ship / fit to ship / fit, how much speed tank you have, your sig size, etc. etc. so I will tell you how it scales for me, and is mostly applicable to most ships. A note here, shield ships are bit less demending then armor ships because of the passive shield regen, even if you are not fit for shield regen it still adds a little bit to your active shield rep to help you achieve the HP/s, whereas armor ships can not so they need a bit more.

EHP/s is less relevant cause it varies and goes up / down with resistances and can give you a completely false representation of what you need, so look at HP/s, not EHP/s. EHP/s can go up while rising the nymebrs up of off irrelevant for the situation resistance, while HP/s will stay flat.

So here goes, for me, 1st off a Large Faction cap battery is a must. Either on armor or shield. I like it a ton better then having to fiddle around with cap boosters, double this in upper tiers when I have to overheat the booster. It needs to be faction because of the bigger resistance and lower fitting reqs, the T2 or T1 just doesn’t cut it.

Once I have my cap down, both resistance and volume / recharge, then come the reps. For shield ships, to comfortably handle a T3 neut spawn I need to have 90+ HP/s (87, 89 is still ok) this can be relatively easily achieved. For armor fits, this needs to go a bit higher, around 100 HP/s, all while remainign perfectly stable with everything running. In T4s this goes up to around 130 ish HP/s on shield ships, 140ish on armor ships, in T5s I need 150+.

How you achieve those numbers is entirely up to you, you can use your fit (rigs, blinged reps, etc.) boosters, implants, whatever works. Plug it into Pyfa and see. Also, I’d rather have a recharger then a booster, thats just me though, if I were doing that. Switch some of your drones out for thermal (Gallente) drones. They do more raw DPS, but keep the caldari drones as default. You will be taking out battleships a lot faster with Ogres then Wasps.

You can kite the Vedmaks DPS, just go out to like 22-24 km + range, I forgot the exact number, may need to overheat your prop to do so. This may be hard to do while being neuted from the Leshaks, but it is doable, you don’t have to kill all of them, just enough for your tank to stop going down.

You may even consider a 2nd cap battery, medium or small to stack resistances, yeas there is a penalty but you still get a ton of it, and if you lack PG / CPU then dump the Howitzers, focus on being a drone boat. On a 2 armor rep set up, maybe try an anciliary for your 2nd rep, it will give you an “oh fck” button, you will use a single rep as default that one being as cap efficient as it can possibly get, while the anciliary will become your big one, burst rep.

11

You don’t need kite leshaks a simple game of playing tag with them so they miss resets damage so it doesn’t build up.

12

I’d fit a web

13

Thanks everyone for your help. That is awesome advice.

@Mina_Sebiestar The Artillery Weaposn are just there because I had PG/CPU left and they do not use capacitor. Did not consider them as significant dps source and mostly used them to shoot caches and nodes. Small Autocannons will probably be beyond falloff range in most cases. Even though they have good application in falloff their damage will probably be very low.

@shaun_27 What do you mean by ‘playing tag’ with the leshaks?

Multiple people have suggested to fit a web. I understand that it will increase the damage application of my drones. But so does the Omnidirectional Tracking Link. Is the Web better in that regard? Or which module would you drop for a web?

14

What I mean by playing tag is going between the groups leshaks and getting really close or orbit so some miss which appears to reset damage so it doesn’t stack. You could also get out range do same but I tell you now you run high chance in T5 sites timing out and maybe some T4 sites.

Using my method I have had no problems with the neuting spawns or renewing, in fact renewing I had 7 in T5 thermal wasn’t a problem DPS wise. But as I said kiteing out their range at least in high thermal sites theirs a chance you could time out.

15

Ditch the 2 TII Armor Repairers for a deadspace corpum a type armor repairer - this will free up a low slot for either another active hardener or a deadspace EANM.

That ADCII is nice but only for those dire situations when you’re about to lose your ass.

The DDAII’s are nice but it sounds like you need to find a balance of DPS and tanking. Once you remove the logistic ships then you can take out the DPS boats which means you’ll need a tank more than optimum DPS.

Have you tried parking it and unleashing some TII sentry drones?
Ditch the OTLII and run a navy variant.

Ditch the DLAII in your high slot, you should not need that on such a small grid. This will free up a high slot for another gun. Since the Ishtar has no racial weapons bonus use whatever you have the best skills in obviously.

Have you considered using TII capacitor rigs? This might free up a medium slot.

Why not try a MWD? Use that 50% decreased sig bloom to your advantage.

My thoughts on an older thread.

Cheers

16

This set for T3 (exotic, electrical, plasma) and T4 exotic.

[Ishtar, Ishtar lowCost]

Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Imperial Navy 1600mm Steel Plates
True Sansha Medium Armor Repairer

10MN Y-S8 Compact Afterburner
Medium Cap Battery II
Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 400
Federation Navy Stasis Webifier

280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S
280mm Howitzer Artillery II, Quake S

Medium Anti-Explosive Pump II
Medium Trimark Armor Pump II

Wasp II x5

Drones, guns and ammo change due to weather.
Fly safe.

17

OP, your tank in low slots is wrong. you only have an explosive hardener, no other resist, except the ADC. You have no resist on other damage types. As said by others, fit EANMs.

18

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