Ohk, so I have looked at the pyfa preview for the new ships- which seem to be mostly accurate except of course for the damage calculation.
So I went and looked at some of the health values for battleship rats, and it turns out typical “Effective” DPS you’ll get from most battleship rats is going to be in the 300-400 range (that’s accounting for the fact that it ignores resistances). So ~ 2100-2800 effective dps when hitting 7 things, plus another 300-600 or so from your guns/drones.
I then looked at each of the hi end ratting activities, since thats where battleship rats pop up, to carefully consider what Ratting this ship is good for.
Wormholes - Not Viable, the range of the Breacher pod is 12km, and the rats has 6+ webs in most spawns, even with 25% web resistance you’re gonna be slowed to a crawl and never get in range of most things.
Abyssals - Only the destroyer can go into abyssals, and most rats in abyssals are actually rather small and as a result the DPS is dramatically less than most T3Ds; though it does murder the Karen and the Dronelord
Missions - While this ship would be great at clearing out the battleship spam present in most missions, the value of missions is not in the rat bounties (you’d have to be doing frankly ludicrous amounts of damage for that isk/ehp to become relevant). But when it comes to blitzing missions that have you bashing a big target, your breacher DPS caps out a 1k and your guns+drones can do ~500-600. Sounds like less than a Marauder, right? Well, against the 0 resists structures that is true- but there’s another mission type that usually isn’t blitzed where that 1k DPS is actually pretty incredible, the ones where the only objective is to kill a Carrier. Against a carrier that 1k true DPS is closer to 2k, or even more- and the rat carriers actually carry a fairly hefty bounty to them. With this ship you could easily include the carrier kill missions (or that one mission that has you killing Freighters) and see your average isk/hr actually increase! It is capable of tanking damage and neuts to a similar degree as Marauders, especially taking into account its way smaller sig and ability to move.
Anoms - Since their damage is proportional, these ships naturally suck at killing the smaller rats in low and hisec anoms. In Nullsec, they can outperform Marauders quite easily- but they cannot approach the damage values of the Thunderchild in Rock havens, and are too slow to cross the big gaps of Gas havens in a timely manner to apply their pods. They are a great way to kill the special capital rats that spawn in those sites, however- so having one on hand on an alt wouldn’t be a terrible idea.
Escalations - This is where these ships shine. Gated pockets with tons of big rats that you have to kill to turn on the gate, and in the higher end ones even capital ships. These ships can tank on par with marauders (~1.7-2k shield boost depending on how you build it with decent neut resistance surviving up to 80 gj/s for 3 minutes) but have Battlecruiser speed and sig. They don’t stack, so your ideal strat is gonna be to just bring one of these along with your main in a rauder or a carrier or w/e you’re esc’ing in to give yourself a massive boost in damage output- those fancy new sanctum 10/10s and titan escalations sound juicy to me!