Drone assist for vanguard incursion sites?

[Mosg2]

Well, I'm down to 12-14 minute Assaults. I'm working on skills to maximize my DPS application and jiggering with specific fits.

Running 14 Rattlesnakes, 1 Huginn, 1 Drake (few days from Vulture), 2 Ospreys (few days from Basilisk), and 2 Basilisks. With auto-targeting missiles and Geckos I melt through everything.

[gomeler]

PLEX is due again, so I'm back grinding incursions. Spent the last ~month or so training my guys into an armor comp that is showing some nice improvements.

5dnvZ1P.png

Hovering around 10 minutes +- 30 seconds per Vanguard Nation Commander Outpost, typical warp distance between sites was 40-60 AU. I'm using the following:

Drone bunny - Vindicator - 850 dps blasters, 0 dps drones(training sentries now), 4 webs and a sebo.
DPS - 6x Domi - 534 dps w/ fed navy gardes, 180 dps w/ blasters shooting thorium @ 8+22km.
Booster - 1x EOS - 670 dps w/ fed navy garde.
Logi - 2x Nestor - 0 dps(training sentries now).

My previous setup used 5x domi, 3x basi, 1x loki, 1x nighthawk and I was sitting around 13 minutes including warp +- 1 minute. Biggest improvement was getting enough drones that I 1 shot all frigates but most of the Schmaeel and some of the Renyn. Half of the time, the windicator follows up with a volley and clears the Renyn's before the sentries fire again, saving a little time.

xYA96ZM.png

This is missing one of the logs, for some reason a character never generated a log file. I feel like I'm connecting well w/ the Gardes, I just need a faster interface for directing the blasters. I'm also missing ~1k dps from 15x Gardes and 5x blasters, that should be online in ~3 days of training. Then T2 gardes in ~12 days, which adds another ~300-400 DPS. Right now paper DPS is around ~5600 dps, I should jump to ~6800 paper dps where it'll plateau.

I'm quite happy with the armor setup, even though fleet cost jumped from ~2500m to ~6300m due to 3x faction BS, faction webs, and T2 rigs for the Nestors. Hoping over the next couple of days I can break into the low 9 minute range for NCO's(my benchmark site).

In closing, still managing to have some fun with the new multiboxing restrictions, and really hoping CCP doesn't take this away. I'm done heavily boxing PvP, besides capital gank situations. I'm enjoying incursions, primarily as it presents a new challenge but I suspect I'll tire of it in another month or two.

[thedevilyouknow]

Screenshot?

[Tool of Society]

Yeah I even struggle with NCO times of 8-9 minute ticks when trying. You're pretty much in line with where I was at that skill point.

Fozzie is dedicated to removing fleet warp for some reason. I'm reasonably sure it's another impotent attempt to nerf bomber boxers that will instead hurt regular players like other prior attempts...

The dps graph just doesn't work for me. My logs are just messed up or something.

[gomeler]

Per my latest EFT warrior session, lasers curb stomp blasters for Domis in Vanguards. The bulk of the EHP that I shoot is Romis and Deltoles @ 20-30km. Mocking a Moa to represent the Romi, with Gamma L and Thorium L, we're talking 200 DPS vs 110 DPS @ 20km, 168 DPS vs 80DPS @ 25km, and 105 DPS vs 52 DPS @ 30km. None of the hybrid ammo choices make much of a difference, due either shooting so far into falloff, or long range ammos dealing terrible DPS. Tinkering, multifreq isn't a good choice, as the engagement range is usually 20-35km, Xray might be another contender.

6x Domis shooting pulses, it'll be another ~500 applied DPS @ 20km. Just finished the T2 sentry train, need to pickup some Garde IIs, that also adds another ~300 applied DPS @ 20km. I'm now eyeballing my Nestors real hard to see if I can safely cram some DDAs and Omnis on there to further boost DPS. I'm overtanked for sure, but it is nice being able to rep through the sansha DPS almost 2x what is needed, for whenever I am not paying attention.

Pretty confident this will be a nice boost, and perhaps one of the last boosts I'll be able to pick up. From here on out it is incremental upgrades with Drone Interfacing 5 on the DPS ships, and maybe training gunnery supports from 4 to 5 and gallente battleship from 4 to 5. Being limited to drone assist for primary damage application restricts my upgrade choices, which is a shame.

[thedevilyouknow]

cmon bro wanna see the setup

medium rails tho?

[gomeler]

cmon bro wanna see the setup

medium rails tho?

Will grab a screenshot later tonight or tomorrow.

Hadn't considered medium rails. Mocking them up in EFT, looks like they could be competitive with the large pulses.

medium_rails.png

edit: red = lazors, green = medium rails, blue = large rails. Rails firing faction antimatter, lazors firing faction gamma.

But I was already excited over all the cargo space I'd free up by only having to carry one spare set of crystals. I'm currently 50/50 ammo/lyavite, I'd love to be able to haul more lyavite with me. I typically squad warp myself to a moon when I want to log off, and only dock up when I need to repair hull damage or buy more ammo/lyavite. Saving the medium rail build, it would be something I could test this weekend.

[thedevilyouknow]

Also nice tracking at the ranges you mentioned
not sure if EFT factors in the tracking in signature radius, but yeah either way looks nice

The only issue would definitely be the ammo

[Tool of Society]

I only went pulses because most of my dps lacks large anything else. None of my dps can even use a rail gun.

So I ran tonight with a modded setup. This is a full length video from time of warp command to notice of completion. I forgot to record tonight and I didn't realize till I was about to quit for the night. Work was busy today so I took a muscle relaxer and smoked a bowl when I got home. This was my last run of the night. I ran 4 sentry domies with 3 domis using 2x gecko 2x hammerhead 1x hobgoblin with 3 drone navigation computers 1x tracking 1x optimal omni computer.

I've discovered that hammerheads are a poor choice for me to use. They are much slower than the hobgoblins while having mild to substantially higher MISS percentages on everything when compared to the lone hobgoblin. The dps alpha on the hammerheads was only marginally higher than the hobgoblins. I didn't lose a single one over the course of using them for 2 hours. I don't even know if they got shot at as none of them had armor damage.

Geckos were a few hundred M/S behind the hammerheads. Hit percentage of geckos was about on par with the hammerheads. DPS wise the geckos absolutely dominated the hammerheads. Sansha ignored the geckos totally all 2 hours.

Hobgoblins were almost twice as fast as the geckos. The hobgoblins shot more things and shot them at a higher percentage than the other drones. Did more actual dps than hammerheads on SChmaels niarjas and eysturs every site. No damage taken that I noticed during the 2 hours.

Garde IIs actually hit at noticeably higher percentages than the hammerheads and geckos. I was really surprised by those numbers.

Infiltrator IIs : Were being used by the nestors with no drone related modules. Despite the lack of any modules the nestor infiltrators out performed the hammerheads.

Gecko 4367 m/s
Hammerhead 4837 m/s
Infiltrator 6622 m/s
Hobgoblin 8062 m/s
Acolyte 11085 m/s

I noticed today that 1 hammerhead and 1 hobgoblin died both were on the same domi so I'm not sure what caused that. The mobile drones seemed to help with frigate destruction which helped my NCO times. I have some options to test out on my next chance.

I'm trying to decide if I should go
5x garde II domis with two 2x gecko 3x acolyte domi or gecko snakes.
or
screw it 7 garde IIs back to the basics

I really liked the increased damage the hobs brought on the little frigates and I'm sure the acolytes would work a little better thanks to the improved applied dps capability.

I do know that getting my fleet all warping at 2.5 AU did help site times a noticeable bit especially on the longer warps.


I think I have the correct combat log information from tonight here. I had people in local who were running the same sites as me so I had more then a few double warps. I can't quite get the scouting aspect down properly with this setup.

6rK4lM0.jpg

A5qEvvi.jpg


VIDEO



Combat log from the night before in the same site but without the 2.5 au warp and with only gardes. I had distraction issues which is why there's a large gap of nothing. I didn't post a video because nothing new occurred.

xafWExe.jpg


This is the combat log from the video I posted on the 24th which was a nice clear night. I didn't have my warp speed increase kicked in yet for this and it's noticeable. Times would of been +20 seconds or faster faster based on what I experienced tonight.

XFMF2py.jpg

Video



This has been pretty much how little I've had in chances to run lately


Any constructive comments are appreciated

[Tool of Society]

Argh messed the post up.