Megvolution
Hi All,
Have been somewhat quiet due to the removal of three wisdom teeth… ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch…. and thats just the billing!
Anyways managed to jump online yesterday and blast through a few missions with a corpie and had a lot of fun. Now there were a couple of things that came to light in yesterdays destruction:
1/. Dual boxing is still a bit of a PITA
2/. Garde IIs are great but have limited range
3/. Garde IIs have difficult tagging frigates orbitting below 10km
4/. Having an auto-targetter is a very good thing while dual boxing or when fighting jammers
5/. Having an additional 3 targets you can lock is a beautiful thing…
So, my previously posted Navy Megathron fit is about to undergo something of an evolution to help with all of the above. Going to rip out one CCC rig and pull out one cap recharger and the drone control range aug. This should free up enough grid to upgrade the omni-directional to a federation navy and install an additional one, along with the auto-targetter II. The other major install is a large hybrid locus coordinator II.
Cap stability will drop from 3 minutes to 2, but it will be stable at around 60% if you’re not running the large armor repper and AB. It will be cap stable with the AB running if you add energy implants. Drone control range drops to 60km with skills at V. In practical terms for PvE, I very rarely needed to send light drones out past that range.
The good news? Well this fit pumps out just over 700 dps AND applies it out to a little under 43km (with a 30km fall off). Your drones do 300dps alone and will hit out to just under 50km (with 12km falloff). In other words this ship will apply 1k instant DPS consistently out to 50km. Drone tracking also increases significantly, from 0.045 up to 0.059. All the better to hit cruisers and frigates with 🙂
The other thing you can do with this fit is hit one target for 700dps and another for 300 without needing to split your weapon grouping. And relatively jam proof because your drones will quite happily NOM away despite you being unable to kill stuff.
Provided you set your target back to 10, as soon as the rats aggro you, you start locking up to 10 of them back again. One less thing to worry about when dual boxing. Given the Federation Omni’s are well below a 100 mil at present, well worth doing methinks.
Will let you know how it goes.
FS
H
Aggressive Logistics 
How are you finding NPC argo on your drones now that Retribution has been released?
I’ve found I need to keep an eye on things more than I did. Drones are no longer fire and forget as they used to be (once you have the aggro).
I’ve lost two lights in about 15 or 20 missions, but that was dual boxing it with lots going on. It is a little harder to manage, but not stupidly so.
May potentially be because the Garde IIs have a bigger sig than light drones? And between them and guns, I don’t have much cause to use the lights.
Gut feel is sentries get hit less though…. more testing may be required…
I’m wondering the same as Evehermit. Isn’t it supposed to be a bit like sleepers? I used to have a Navy Dominix that was my mission boat, and with maxed drone skills I just basically let the drones out and could take a short nap. Now I imagine if empire rats are anything like sleepers, the price of T2 drones is about to go up…hmm, market speculation anyone?
No where near as bad as sleepers… thank god 🙂
Could well believe lights will go up in price as they’re the most fragile. Coupled with a little inattention… POP…
OK some more info… I tried the L4 roadhouse mission as a solo boat and still had major problems once the webbing frigates got under the guns.
They also aggressively changed targets on taking any damage. A problem that had been masked with dual boxing right from the word go and having both ships in fairly close proximity. Killing stuff so fast would also have help hide the issue.
So, there is good news and bad news. You can use the change in aggro to your advantage to pull rats away from one ship towards another if managing optimal is a problem. Thats the good news. The bad is they very definitely will hit your drones as soon your drones hit them.
Which is pretty much a goodbye to said light drone no matter how quickly you react. I lost two in that mission alone. Take back what I said about not being as bad as sleepers…
I had a bit of conjecture prior to retribution whether you may need a larger ship plus a smaller to take care of the frigates, i.e battleship plus an assault frigate in a mission. Missile boat with a strong active shield tank would probably do it. We had a Tengu in fleet that was taking care of business.
Either way, certain L4 missions where there are multiple webbers plus heavy DPS incoming could be VERY dangerous indeed…
Good – and somewhat worrying to know!
We had over 3000 dps on the field that afternoon. No wonder the problem only surfaced when I tried the new fit (which, apart from those sodding frigates, works REALLY well).
I can see L4 missioning no longer being a solo enterprise. Never been a missile tech as such (though one alt has very good skills) so cannot comment on the cruise and siege launchers and how they may work in Retribution.
Even a massively tanked Raven or Golem isn’t going anywhere if it can’t kill the frigate doing the warp scramming… is it time to try out a Nightmare with Megapulses and tracking enhancers…??
Hmmm… and this might be a key to why I wasn’t losing drones before as well (or at least going from losing one or two in 15 or so missions to losing one or two per mission). EWAR. Specifically target painters in my case.
Have a look at the comments in the latest Freebooted posting.
Good info, thanks!
teehee… maybe just my overblown sense of self importance but I see all this as a complicated way of saying you actually need me 😛
Grumble grumble….. maaaaaay bee…..