Drone assist for vanguard incursion sites?

[Tool of Society]

Well, my problem is the 50 drones assigned limit. I switched from Rattlesnakes to Dominix running 2 Geckos and a Berserker. The damage and application is great.

I'm going to try shield Rattlesnakes with sentries and see how it is. The instant application is nice but the tracking is non-trivially worse.

I saw you with domis moving way earlier today. I have no idea what character you talk on but I'm Kinete Jenius.

I've noticed that all the drones have basically the same delay in response to an attack from the DDD. I've been using infiltrators on the nestors lately because of the lack of hull based tracking bonus. At 3450 m/s in OTA/NMC situations the infs generally arrive shortly after my second frigate is popped by the gardes. Garde and infiltrators both experience a response delay to the DDD engaging a target. The infiltrators generally miss their first attempted shot.

[Mosg2]

Yeah, sentries still have a cycle time. It's another reason I don't mind using heavies as long as they more 3k m/s or more; while they're traveling their guns are cycling anyways.

The Ishtar is the perfect ship, but the damn 50 drone limit gets in my way. If you're doing Vanguards though then they'll work perfectly for you; you should seriously consider training into them. With the hull bonus they get it's pretty easy to have them hitting out to 100k with sentries or running heavies cruising along at 5k m/s.

[Tool of Society]

The ishtar will take 72 days for V which gives me a loss in tracking with gardes. Optimal range isn't the issue for gardes because in VGs nothing spawns outside of 70 Km anyway and even then they are within 55 Km by the time you get target lock anyway. If I went heavies that's an additional 26 days of training. So best case scenario if I stopped all the DPS's training and focused solely on ishtar it would take 97 days and my current plans for other activities would be put on hold.

I don't particularly feel like putting my plans on hold for over 3 months so I can lose tracking with sentries and maybe do slightly better with heavies. Just a personal issue right now with going ishtars.

A shiny fleet from a well known group contested me last night and lost. They basically warped in right after I finished assigning drones. I doubt heavies would of had the chance to hit much.

Currently I'm thinking about switching to two DDDs and splitting the garde dps. Tests have shown that three domis with gardes with a paladin DDD is enough to instant pop a frigate warping in. With one DDD there is no effective way to split dps Splitting TPs on one DDD just seems to confuse the drones resulting in a marked drop off in dps.

[Mosg2]

I keep forgetting how stupid long of a train it is into HACs :/

[Tool of Society]

I keep forgetting how stupid long of a train it is into HACs :/

Indeed it's rather inconvenient. I do intend to get training on them at some point in the future. I just need to get some other more important skills finished first.

[gomeler]

The ishtar will take 72 days for V which gives me a loss in tracking with gardes. Optimal range isn't the issue for gardes because in VGs nothing spawns outside of 70 Km anyway and even then they are within 55 Km by the time you get target lock anyway. If I went heavies that's an additional 26 days of training. So best case scenario if I stopped all the DPS's training and focused solely on ishtar it would take 97 days and my current plans for other activities would be put on hold.

I don't particularly feel like putting my plans on hold for over 3 months so I can lose tracking with sentries and maybe do slightly better with heavies. Just a personal issue right now with going ishtars.

A shiny fleet from a well known group contested me last night and lost. They basically warped in right after I finished assigning drones. I doubt heavies would of had the chance to hit much.

Currently I'm thinking about switching to two DDDs and splitting the garde dps. Tests have shown that three domis with gardes with a paladin DDD is enough to instant pop a frigate warping in. With one DDD there is no effective way to split dps Splitting TPs on one DDD just seems to confuse the drones resulting in a marked drop off in dps.

I thought about splitting DPS across two drone bunnies but I feared it would gain me little while adding even more complexity to the setup. Maybe some creative use of VideoFX to treat both drone bunnies as one unit could work. It would likely be more efficient for the frigates, as I know not all of my Gardes fire with each frigate I alpha.

[LordsServant]

Or just use vexor navies?

They're kinda like an ishtar lite - 5% bonuses instead of 7.5%, but much easier on the training time and not an issue in terms of isk.

They actually tank a bit better than ishtars as well, ESPECIALLY armor tanked. Might be a better overall choice tbh, depending.

[Tool of Society]

Or just use vexor navies?

They're kinda like an ishtar lite - 5% bonuses instead of 7.5%, but much easier on the training time and not an issue in terms of isk.

They actually tank a bit better than ishtars as well, ESPECIALLY armor tanked. Might be a better overall choice tbh, depending.

Why would I want to take a loss in tank and dps?

[gomeler]

Or just use vexor navies?

They're kinda like an ishtar lite - 5% bonuses instead of 7.5%, but much easier on the training time and not an issue in terms of isk.

They actually tank a bit better than ishtars as well, ESPECIALLY armor tanked. Might be a better overall choice tbh, depending.

VNIs aren't too shabby. With a similar fit to my armor Ishtar setup fit, it has comparable tank , better sentry DPS and identical sentry drone tracking. Optimal + falloff take a hit, however I'd say most of my damage happens inside of the ~30km optimal the VNI gardes feature. Really only the Maras + sniping the initial frigates are the times I reach out to 50-60km.

Only problem w/ the VNI is the resists are slightly lower while the raw armor hitpoints is slightly higher. Both however have inferior armor buffer, inferior DPS, and inferior tracking compared to the armor Dominix. I need to start recording my runs to see if the warp speed and deceleration differences would be that big of a deal. I should be sitting in armor Domis this weekend and armor Ishtars in ~2 weeks.

[Tool of Society]

VNIs aren't too shabby. With a similar fit to my armor Ishtar setup fit, it has comparable tank , better sentry DPS and identical sentry drone tracking. Optimal + falloff take a hit, however I'd say most of my damage happens inside of the ~30km optimal the VNI gardes feature. Really only the Maras + sniping the initial frigates are the times I reach out to 50-60km.

Only problem w/ the VNI is the resists are slightly lower while the raw armor hitpoints is slightly higher. Both however have inferior armor buffer, inferior DPS, and inferior tracking compared to the armor Dominix. I need to start recording my runs to see if the warp speed and deceleration differences would be that big of a deal. I should be sitting in armor Domis this weekend and armor Ishtars in ~2 weeks.

Your fleet is only as fast as the slowest member. For me that is my paladin which is 2.2 AU. My domis beat that with one hyperspatial velocity optimizer I rig. So I'll need to figure out a way to change my fleet if I want faster warp times.

Recording my runs has been a major eye opener.