Any use for polarized HAM launchers? Polarized weapons make your ship a glass canon. I’ve heard of polarized stealth bombers since the hope is if no one shoots you, your EHP is irrelevant and I’ve heard of polarized weapons being used for structure bashes. HAMs on the other hand… well I just can’t see a use case where you’d be using HAM launchers and think “Well my EHP doesn’t matter much here”
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You answered your own question:
So if you come across a scenario where you don’t care about your resists, like station or POCO bashing or if you’ve got a lot of logi, then you have an option.
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If I’m bashing a POCO that doesn’t shoot back, wouldn’t a stealth bomber with torps be better than hams? The problem for polarized HAMs lunchers in my opinion is that I cna’t find a use case where I don’t care about EHP, but stealth bobmers arne’t just better.
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You sit with your small gang on a gate, suddenly 3 Caracals and 3 Drakes are jumping on you.
99% of the time you will primary the Caracals. Unfortunately for you they are brick-tanked and go full overheat on the Invuls from second one. The Drakes are Polarized HAM Drakes with a 1.000 DPS+ each. And before you know what is going on you have lost 2 ships and it’s actually a 4 vs 6 instead before you have even killed the first Caracal.
Before Polarized Launchers existed we used the combination of Abaddons + Harbingers, nobody calls an Abaddon primary if Harbingers are on the grid. But the Harbingers were brick-tanked 150k eHP beasts while the Abaddons had 4 Heat Sinks + 2 Tracking Computers with barely any tank. And shredded the opponents before they realized they cold have killed an Abaddon much easier than a Harbinger. It’s about luring the opposition into a wrong decision and gain an advantage that ensures the win if they realize the mistake too late.
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Sure, if you have the skills for them.
Polarized are T2 modules, so you can’t just train Torps to level 1 and use them.
Wait… why? The first heat sink gives you lots of extra damage. The next few give… a lot less extra damage. Did stacking penalties not exist when you did this? Or to put it another way, I think swapping a module that trades 25% of your EHP to get 6% more DPS is usually not worth the swap against something shooting back at you.
But you did mention that no one ever shot at the Abadons so I guess your idea worked. Can I see your favorite kill when doing that? This sounds pretty funny. Even if there was a 1 out of 30 chances an Abaddon gets primaried, you’d probably be better off with membranes or plates but I guess it worked. I’m surprsied you didn’t lose a battleship due to miscommunication. In my old corp, one out of every 4-10 recruits on their first fight just blindly attacked the closest target. I’m surprised you didn’t run into these.
I remember one time an FC ordered us to stop shooting at a Harbinger and shoot a curse when he realized the Harbinger’s model has small weapons after our first 3 volleys (3 guys continued to shoot at the thing and they later said they were webbed and that was the only thing in optimal range since the webbers and the new primary were not in optimal range)
I forgot this
Sure, but 100 DPS are 100 DPS. And if your only goal is to kill quickly and gtfo (we were in Lowsec, so we had to make the kill we wanted and then leave, else the gateguns would have slowly teared us apart.. we didn’t bring Logi to most fights, mainly ambushed people with hit&run attacks and surprise engagements)
Most kills from that time are corrupted anyway, you don’t see the fits any more and you can’t filter by time.
Example: https://zkillboard.com/related/30002056/201003032300/
All our BCs were brick-tanked, while the Battleships were raw-DPS machines. We could engage similar sized gangs and usually when we killed the first 3-4 ships quickly they just ran. But thats hard to show on a battle report when you don’t lose anything, so most of the opponent’s ships are not visible. Be aware: Thats all stuff from 15 years ago, combat has evolved a lot. To use the combination of Brick+Glasscannon requires the effect of surprise and is very situational.
The idea of a Brick BC is still around. At least I assume that Harbiner I mentioned was a brick. We didn’t kill it to see the fit but if they were using small blasters, that PG must have gone into something else. I still don’t understand why some of our own BCs still shot it instead of just shooting the webbers since a Harbinger with small weapons is basically ignorable. Sure doing some damage to a near useless Harbinger is better than 0 to your primary target, but hitting the frigate with webs is probably better than hitting a Harbinger with small weapons. A Harbinger with small weapons is basically a glorified warp in point. So i think the enemy sued a varaition of your old idea
brick tanked booster with small guns to get on killmails?
Sounds like a FC boat. You can wreck a fleet by headshotting them and taking out their FC. There’s a reason CCP gave FCs the Monitor.