So I’ve got 2 Omega characters. Main is flying a T2-fitted cruise Raven, alt has Gal Cruiser and Gal Battlecruiser 4 and can fit T2 medium rails or blasters. Drone skills for the alt aren’t fantastic atm, so sentry sniping myrmidon won’t work.
What I’m thinking is switch the Raven to torpedoes to hammer battleships and battlecruisers faster, and put the alt in a cruiser or battlecruiser to snipe everything smaller with rails. Maybe a Brutix with Spike or something and have him burn out to long range. Or would it be a better idea to fit the alt for close range blaster work and just anchor him on the Raven until needed?
If or when a duo is good or not for you, only you can answer that. In the end, you will be the pilot for both, and I wouldn’t want to assume, what kind of ship you would like to fly or not.
There are so many possible combinations you can try out.
Whenever you may have a bit of time, train Gallente battlecruiser to level 5, so you can fly command ships. They have close to the firepower of t1 battleships.
With Kronos I stopped dual boxing L4’s… 2000 dps at that range and alt just slows me down, and all of that in T2 with just faction damage mods… Well, technically I do still use an alt, but it’s one of my characters as mission puller in frigate who can warp around faster, turn in mission, take the next one and I meet him on the gate… Also no worries about rejecting loads of missions, on that alt I don’t care about standings.
That being said, when I did box, Machariel can do 1200+ DPS, is super fast with MWD and then paired with Rattlesnake or Eos, basically anything that can do drones and has some bonus on either drone damage or drone HP makes a good candidate. So rattlesnake works with most ships as decent alt. Eos if you want to run links as well.
Since you already had BC, not that long to get skills for Rattle and see if it works for you. Anything else is too much fiddling with targeting to be enjoyable experience.
I think I want to stay away from drone boats. I’d save on ammo for sure, but it seems like every time I put out my drones, the NPCs immediately switch to shooting them up and it’s getting on my nerves. That’s why I’d rather just have my alt deal with small stuff with a smaller ship while I tear through the bigger ships with torpedoes.
I could fly a Golem if I wanted but that’s an expensive ass ship just to use for running missions.
Thats why Rattlesnake is good, you assign sentries on your main. Rattle gets bonus to drone HP so they can take few hits.
So your problem right now is the use of missiles, I know some people like them, but in my opinion, it’s the worst weapons system for missions. Looking at most other Marauders and Pirate BS, if you split guns in 2-4 groups, you can usually blap 2-4 frigates every 4-8 seconds… You also blap cruisers super fast, usually 1 or 2 volleys max from all weapon groups, and most battleships are under 20 seconds.
With that in mind, many L4’s you would have issues with targeting before anything else, things just die so fast that you need to work out different overviews on your clients, for example one by range, other by distance and keep locking in order they blap stuff. I found it too finicky and too much work.
With rattlesnake, you land on grid, deploy sentries and assign them to your main, he does all the targeting, shooting, etc. If you play at least a little bit zoomed in, you can notice when enemies are shooting near you and not at you, usually meaning they are targeting sentries. For smaller stuff, you might be able to kill them right away, for battleships you might want to switch clients and pull in drones and redeploy them. But still way more easier than different ordering of targets on overview and moving mouse all the time between clients to target different stuff.
Maybe you should try Golem (or Rattlesnake, it will be cheaper) and Noctis fitted with t2 salvage modules and tractor beams. There are only a few l4 missions where marauder is more comfortable, also all of them can be soloed by t1 navy battleship. So Noctis in second window will grow your isk income.
Well, I’m officially canning the idea of using torpedoes. The range is terrible, even with Battleship 5. Might as well use blasters at that range. I did play around with a Rail Rokh a little yesterday, using a MJD to jump out to sniper range of the rats and it worked better than I expected. Even the little frigate rats were quick to deal with. And it’s a passive tank, so that’s one less thing to manage. I may just stick with this.
I’ll think about the Noctis. I tried using a salvager Catalyst a few times but it took so long I figured I was better off just going straight to another mission. It’s a little pricey, but I guess it wouldn’t take long to pay for itself.
Torpedoes only work with certain hulls - and then only in certain missions (usually in conjunction with a micro jump drive). The damage application is only marginally better than cruise missiles - but you usually end up sacrificing a lot more to get any kind of decent range with them.
I’ve been thinking of messing around with the abyssal stuff too. I’ve got a Cerberus that I’m not using for anything, since Faction Wars seems to have shifted so heavily to frigates and destroyers since I last played.
Yeah, that was my experience when I tried it. I could get them to fire out to snipe range if I really wanted, but then I’d do less damage anyway than my Cruise fit does with 3x ballistic controls.
2 x Dominix, both with Sentry drones. 1 boat should have a weapon at least. To aggro mobs.
The other Domi I equipped with Armor + Shield rep. To rep drones if needed and the main Domi in hairy situations. Both are cap stable, 1 large armor repper, kin/therm armor hardener, Reactive. Rigs, Nano pump I, Large sentry damage Aug. 2 x Drone Links. For extra range. Works great for Serps and the other faction that deals Kin/Therm, forgot the name.
Assortment of drones, Sentry, Heavy, Med, Small. For different situations.
2 marauders feels too easy. I have a Paladin + Vargur for EM and Golem + Khronos for Therm/kin mobs. For Explosive I run Rattlesnake + Raven Navy issue, both Cruise. Torps are viable for some missions. Golem is a torp boat for me, range 70km. The other torp boats I have are 45-55klm range. Long range ammo costs a lot, I don’t want to use it. And it is less damage. I prefer to use normal torp ammo. Not that cheap either and low supply where I live. Usually have to make it myself.
If the alt can fly a BS, I would stick them in a Scorpion, possibly with the 100km jump thingie. Cruise missiles. Drones can handle frigates. Cruisers and BCs are easy enuff to hit with Cruise missiles. Target painters of course. It wont be much DPS, think one of my alt pushes out 500 DPS. So like a BC.
You could also fly around in 2 x BCs, afterburner. Of course you will be spending a lot of time just getting in range but should be easy to tank. I have 2 command ships for that. I get bored of flying around and waiting to shoot.
You can get a Gila and easy take on L4s. Also Strat Cruisers are easily able to handle L4s. So you don’t need to do them multiboxed if you don’t want to (don’t have to split the loot).
A good combo would be a Gila and a sniping ship. Sniping with one while the other uses drones and missiles from a closer range pulling most aggro.
I haven’t really looked at T3 cruisers or destroyers for anything yet. I’m just coming back from a long break and T3 wasn’t a thing when I last played. Bad enough getting caught on up all the changes to the T1/T2 stuff I used to fly.
Is there a particular cruiser that stands out for missions? I can fly Gallente, Minmatar and Caldari and have (nearly) maxed missile and hybrid skills. I have tried using a Cerberus and while it’s more fun to fly than a Raven, the tank gets overwhelmed sometimes. I actually lost one the other day after I managed to aggro the whole friggin room.
You need to speed tank with cerberus. Its long range make it very suitable for that. Don’t passive tank it, as it increases the sig and therefore reduces the speed tank.
Definitely not a poor man’s ship. I see enough of them flying around lowsec, so I guess I should figure out what they can do before I have to fight one.
you can fit them T2 and remove like 500M.
The important thing is the ratio speed/sig, which is the evasion of the ship, and then the resist profile.
You can see the DPS is the same (with same modules) , tengu has more evasion but cerberus has better kin/th resists. cerberus needs targeting range/rig since base is too low for HM and IIRC HAM are too short.
That is expensive for a Cerb. For level 4s solo, you have a lot of options. Some do cruisers like HACs and T3Strategic, others use Battlecruisers, Battleships or even Marauders.
Just remember, you can always run the mission and then if you are close to destruction, warp out, repair and go back in to mop up the rest. I’ll leave the recommendations for others to leave for you. But for a T4 mission solo, one of the key things is having the TANK to survive and the DPS/Alpha to knock them out.
and IIRC HAM are too short.