Destroyer Fleet Types

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Original text by Rells
Copyright Agony Unleashed

In the PvP Basic class we had everyone fit long rang guns with close range ammo. We wanted the students to concentrate more on the mid slots and other content than the ins and outs of various kinds of weapons. We taught you about the dangers of smartbombs to frigate fleets and how to defend against them. This was all good advice given the need to reduce the information to something manageable in a single seminar; however, at advanced levels there is more to PvP than we discussed in the initial course.

The reality is that very few combat ships fit smartbombs unless they either know for sure that they will be encountering a frigate/destroyer fleet or they set out to smartbomb on a gate. However, you are bound to encounter some of them if they know that a frigate fleet is coming for them. As AGONY often flies small ships in PvP, several people have tried to smartbomb us (incidentally almost everyone who has tried has lost their BS, and the only person who enjoyed some success against us is now an Agony member!) However, most of the time you will be taking your opponent by surprise, catching them in their frigates or cruisers, which can't fit large smartbombs, or in their normally fitted battleship. The thing to remember here is that frigates and destroyers only have to fear a battleship smartbomb setup, anything battlecruiser or smaller is no threat when it comes to smartbombs. Furthermore, any battleship set to smartbomb is pretty much useless for anything else.

Since most of the time we will not be encountering ships smartbombing, we can think a bit more about our setups and start considering using other weapons or ammo to increase our damage output. This means thinking abou using weapons with a range of 6km or less. What is important here is that you don't set up your entire fleet for short range, but remember the Hydra principle and try to have at least half your fleet with 'long range' setups (i.e. >6km). That way if a smartbomber warps in you will still have enough firepower to blow him out of the sky, especially considering he will have practically no tank thanks to the capacitor consumption of smartbombs.

Blasters and autocannons are devastating close range weapons, dishing out much more damage than their longer range cousins. At the same time these guns have a limited range, getting a 6km range is near impossible without precision tech 2 ammo and excellent skills. However, their hitting power can not be ignored by the competent light ship fleet commander, and once you see the ungodly damage that a close orbiting destroyer puts out with ion blasters, you will want to have one in your fleet all the time. Throughout the remainder of the article I will talk about the gun configurations in the context of hybrid blasters; however the same concepts apply equally to autocannons and pulse lasers.

When setting up a blaster ship we first want to know what the optimal range of our guns is. You should be using some variant of Ion blasters as they strike a good balance between all the requirements; the electron blaster damage is just too weak and uses too much ammunition, while the fitting requirements and low tracking of the neutron blaster make it difficult to justify. Load your blaster with various types of ammo and see what kind of optimal ranges you can get; note that this phase is just to get an idea of the orbit ranges you need to use blasters. Now it's time to undock and hit an asteroid, literally. Orbit that asteroid as close as you can while holding a circular orbit with your afterburner on. The closer you can orbit, the more powerful ammo you can use in your blasters. Set up your ship for high agility at full propulsion speed and determine your closest circular orbit; start at 500m and work your way out, adding nanofibers/inertial stabilizers and queuing up skills to train if necessary. Keep in mind that you will want to maintain a circular orbit and high speed in that orbit.

Now you should have a good idea of how to load your guns. Set your default orbit distance to your closest circular orbit. Now load your guns with the appropriate ammo that puts your optimal range right on the radius of your orbit. Keep in mind that you will need to have propulsion modifications to get to the target as quickly as you can. A catalyst with 3 overdrive modules, a 1MN Afterburner II, some EWAR module and 8 blasters can put out ungodly amounts of damage and still get to the target incredibly quickly. Remember that you should select your EWAR appropriately as well, using a 2 point scrambler or a webifier to compliment your short range. When you get in close you can engage the webber and slow down the target or put on the 2 point scrambler and let your gang mates take off a couple of the cap intensive 1 point disrupters.

Of course, there is also another pair of options for short range ships; the small nosferatu and the small energy neutralizer. Individually, these modules can barely scratch the surface of even a cruiser, but when combined with the multitude of high slots a destroyer has, you are capable of some serious damage.

As a fleet commander, you can use some tactics to keep your close range pilots from getting ganked.

First of all, have your close range people stay outside smartbombing range until you are sure that the target doesn't posses smartbombs. If the target is a cruiser, tech 2 frigate, industrial or so on, you have little to fear and can scream in to blast them. However, it might pay to have one or two ship scanners in the fleet that can scan the battleship and make sure it is safe before the close range attackers go in. This only costs a few seconds when employed by a trained pilot. While they are waiting for the scan, the short range pilots can blast the nearest drone or fire their rocket launchers if they will hit from there.

Once you have determined that a target does not have smartbombs you may want your entire gang to orbit very close to the target. This will render all turret based ships completely inert without having to worry about EWAR. In a multiple target environment this tactic lets you throw all your EWAR on the second target while the first target is being killed. Keep in mind that depending on your angular velocity as you orbit the target, your tracking may become an issue. The best way to manage this is to experiment with a friend in your corp in a heavy ship and see how to maximize your impact.

Close range tactics run a higher risk but can reap larger rewards for the intrepid pilot willing to take the chance of being podded by the smartbombing BS. However, even if a BS does warp in with smartbombs and kill a couple of ships, you will still trade some small ships for a much more expensive battleship and win in the Isk war.