Hi all
So I have been doing a lot of L4s lately in a Vedmak and thought I’d share some of stuff for anyone interested if they’re looking for a new ship or just something different to do. I focused on L4s because they are good and well established known difficulty benchmark based on which any player can gauge themselves for other content as well. Thoughts, opinions all welcome, just keep it civil.
My setup is as follows
Character skills: All level 5 except Disintegrator Specialization which is at level 4.
Relevant Implants:
‘Squire’ Capacitor Systems Operation E0-605
Ogdin’s Eye Coordination Enhancer
‘Squire’ Capacitor Management EM-805
‘Lancer’ Gunnery RF-905
‘Noble’ Hull Upgrades HG-1005
Boosters: None
The fit, total fit + ship cost 734 Mil as of this time, so not too bad, well under 1 bil. Implants not included in ship costs as its a general turret boat set of implants that I use on many different ships and not Vedmak specific.
[Vedmak]
Reactive Armor Hardener
Entropic Radiation Sink II
‘Meditation’ Medium Armor Repairer I
Entropic Radiation Sink II
Dark Blood Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Entropic Radiation Sink II
Thukker Large Cap Battery
Tracking Computer II
Dark Blood Cap Recharger
Federation Navy 10MN Afterburner
Heavy Entropic Disintegrator II
Small Remote Armor Repairer II
Small Remote Armor Repairer II
Small Remote Armor Repairer II
Medium Nanobot Accelerator II
Medium Nanobot Accelerator II
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Salvage Drone I x5
Infiltrator II x5
Tracking Speed Script x1
Occult M x1794
Mystic M x807
Nanite Repair Paste x154
1st off, its a very fun ship to play with. Its not optimal ISK / time wise, but it does still OK and its just a blast to play. Awesome ship mechanics, awesome animations, its one of the very few ships where I actually play zoomed in, in the 3rd person view just to see the ship and the fight and what it does etc. the animations are done well, the way it fires, how it goes into and comes out of warp etc. reminds me of driving a muscle car or a sports car.
As far as its capabilities go, I was able to do every L4 in the above fit except the Angel Extravaganza bonus room. I had to warp out on it. In contrast, I can do it in a Gila with some fancy flying, and in Loki and Tengu with ease. I most likely would be able to do it if I blinged it heavily and / or used boosters, but I did not want to go down that road as I wanted to see what this ship can actually do.
If blinged and with boosters, or maybe just faction specific hardeners, it may be able to do Anomic Base burners, especially ones vs EMP and thermal dmg types, but as it stands now its just too expensive for me to test and I’m too lazy to go try it out on Sisi. So if someone else wants to, go for it.
The disintegrator is a very interesting weapon. I initially started using 3 different ammo types for it, the T1 long range, Mystic M and Occult M. The long range T1 ammo was just way sub par and I dumped it. Overall I settled for using Mystic and Occult, roughly about 40% Mystic 60% Occult per large mission doing full clears. I ended up using the Mystic ammo on frigates, destroyers and some cruisers at range around 20-30 km, while occult on anything where I got close. Ammo is expensive and for large missions and full clears expect to use total of around 1k-1200 rounds.
I also initially started with some smartbombs for extra DPS, doesn’t work out well at all due to their very limited range. And I tried out a faction web, doesn’t work out well either simply because web ranges are just too short + a lot of small targets die in 1-2 cycles anyways so taking the extra time to web things is just way too impractical and unnecessary, far better off with extra tracking.
Thing of note, you do need the extra tracking, even with its already high tracking its not enough. A single missed cycle on disintegrator resets your DPS to base, so you need to make sure it sticks like glue, takes some practice.
Vedmak is a fast ship, if you orbit too tight or too wide and dip in / out of orbit, your disintegrator will miss and reset your DPS. If you get too much transversal, likewise. I found my orbit preference to be 5000 and 7500 m and transversal not to exceed 650 in order to reliably maintain disintegrator contact. If I hit 700+ transversal or got too close or too far on orbit, it would miss a cycle. This is with 67.82 effective tracking.
I went with AB over MWD because Vedmak has a super low sig for a cruiser, only 110m so I wanted to take full advantage of it, as well as I didn’t want to gain even more transversal while orbiting / maneuvering.
Its a very cap hungry ship, and I do mean very. Battery and recharger or full set of rigs is a must unless you have pocket logi feeding you cap non-stop. Cap boosters are a no go, the ammo already takes a lot of cargo room and you’ll find yourself re-docking mid mission for more booster charges so its just too impractical.
Tank leaves something to be desired. It has a pretty borked resistance profile with basically 2 holes in it instead of 1 like most ships making it difficult to fit while maintaining decent DPS. Its armor bonus is too small for the loss of so much shield.
The extra high utility slots can have their uses. You can fit anything you want in it, its good to have at least 1 small armor rep for drones though. I have fitted 3 of them, on some missions I just set the drones to agro and let them lose, following them and targeting and repairing as needed, I was only shooting at medium and large targets.
DPS is fairly high with Occult ammo at shortest ranges. With my setup it shoots up to 13 km. On a fully spooled up disintegrator once you get pass shields you can get some really big hits. Pass that Mystic shoots up to 31 km, but it does a lot less, overall I’d say maybe 60% of what you can do with Occult. There is one more ammo type that shoots pretty far, but its so dinky its completely pointless to use it at all, might as well free up the cargo space for more Occult / Mystic.
Overall I highly recommend giving Vedmak a try for anyone that’s looking for something to break the monotony and have some fun. It does fairly decent at L4s and will do fairly well in any equivalent level difficulty content. It is a very fun ship.
There are some spots I wish it would improve. We still don’t have faction entropic sinks, still don’t have rigs for precursor turrets. I do not know if they are or are not in the works, or maybe there are T2 or full faction Triglavian ships in the works, who knows. To me it seems the biggest issue with this ship other then building materials is its lack of tank, mainly that screwed up resist profile. It would have been much better if it had just 1 big hole like most ships vs 2 mid size holes.
The 2nd thing I found lacking is the powergrid. Outside of niche fits and niche roles where you are in fleet and have someone else feeding you cap, you have to have a cap battery or rigs or something or you just won’t be able to function. And when you do equip those, then there is not enough powergrid left for other stuff. For example, I would have loved to fit 1 mid size T2 smartbomb + 1 mid size T2 remote rep, but can’t. Had to scale down to small due to that lack of powergrid.
Also its side role bonusses, they should have included a nosferatu instead of neutralizer bonus in there, or in addition to. Would have worked out much better for this ship and made perfect sense from lore, role perspective etc.
Hopefully we’ll see some more people around in Vedmaks for all sorts of things.
.