Continued Flagellation of the Ossified Hippocampus
This post is so necro, it’s in danger of being labeled cretaceous. It’s about the ships I predominantly fly: Gallente.
They need some love. No seriously, they really REALLY need some love. Sure they have some great points. Lets list them shall we?
Drones, drones and more drones. Gallente ships often have bonuses to drone damage and durability which is great. Generally coupled with good or excellent bandwidth for the ship size.
Blasters. These things do staggering good damage up close. Good tracking. Very poor optimal and falloff however.
Railguns. Good balance of optimal and falloff. Tracking isn’t the best however, and damage is average. Biggest issue however is that you cannot tailor your damage in any way shape or form. Kin/Therm it is. Or Therm/Kin. Take your pick.
Command ship/warfare link specialty? Information. I really don’t need to expand on this: just check the market for prices and compare the other implants.
Recon/electronic warfare bonus: signal damping. Actually, this can be pretty good in certain situations, but situational it really is. The extended warp scram is very useful on occasion.
Ship/speed agility – meh. And whacking on multiple plates only makes things worse. Coupled with the very poor range of the blasters means their effective usage is diminished even further.
Dual tanking is a possibility, but generally speaking a lack of grid coupled with cap issues means you’re always either compromising the size of the guns you fit and/or your resists. And while T2 sentries are good, mobility is useful in reducing damage coming in. Using heavy drones (which is a good proportion of your DPS) has an inherent delay through their travel time.
Their carriers and super carriers are pretty damn spectacular from a DPS perspective, however those are often out of reach of the casual player.
All in all: Meh. Mostly because you have to seriously compromise almost everything else to do one thing really really well.
This is more of an overview than the serious analysis/data crunch that others have done in the past. But yeah. Love. Need love nao pleze!
Fly Smart,
H
P.S Suffering marauder envy atm as well. Sigh.
Aggressive Logistics 
Nano Megathron. Win.
@Vivi – Hmmm… One webber can ruin your day, and you’ve already compromised your tank. Unless you’re also looking at a shield tank…. Hmmmm. Disposable throwaway gank machine + insurance?
Dude! Where did you dredge up that title? Beating a bony seahorse? Maybe some reference to the seat of emotion and memory? Necroposting? Is there something you haven’t been telling us H?
OK, so personal issues aside, you do kinda have a point.
Lasers have that lovely optimal, scorch and quick change thing going. Missiles have selecta damage and “easy mode” covered. Proj are finally back into balance. Hybrids do maybe need a little love, but only a little. I was surprised with the proj how little it took. Maybe give blasters a fraction more tracking and rails a smidge more damage. And possibly reduce the grid on blaster and the CPU on rails a little.
Gang links, yes info does suck, but you are not restricted to the bonussed ones and T3 are better boosters anyway (proteus is actually good), but the Gal command ships are a bit sub par.
Do not *ever* complain about your EWAR. Minmatar gets… target painters. Yay. Not everyone can be caldari. Mutter mutter mutter.
Actually, it should have been hipparion not hippocampus for the horse component. But ye olde brain cells threw that one up instead. So I am entirely responsible. Blame my arcane and devious brain out clevering itself.
Minmatar have both TP and web range bonus btw. In combination with a small gang/SB and recon fleet, that can be devastating. So, plplplplpppp!
Re the guns themselves, probably the easier tweak would be to the ammo… but when the best tank/gank fit combination for your tier three battleship is blasters/active shield and the ship gets a bonus to armour rep, you know something ain’t quite right!