Difference between revisions of "Talk:Level 4 mission ship fits"

Revision as of 16:41, 29 December 2008

New Article

Well, we need a new article, and the main one is locked, so I figured we could start writing it here. Here's a draft, but feel free to edit it like an article. Herschel Yamamoto 22:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Level 4 missions are a unique challenge for an Eve player, and they demand a unique approach to ship fitting. This is an article about how to go about fitting a ship for level 4 missions generically - there are proposed fits linked at the bottom of the page, but the main purpose of this article is to explain why things are done a certain way, not to pass along cookie-cutter setups.

Level 4 Missions

Main article: Level 4 Mission Guides
In order to understand how we should fit ships for level 4 missions, we must first look at what a level 4 mission consists of. Level 4 missions frequently feature upwards of a dozen battleships, swarms of frigate- and cruiser-class ships, sentry towers, and every type of electronic warfare in the game. They feature far and away the highest concentrations of NPC rats anywhere in highsec. Easy missions can be done by most ships, but the difficult ones often require management of how many ships are attacking you("aggro management"), because no ship can survive the amount of firepower that would be aimed at them if every NPC ship was firing.

Many missions also feature follow-up waves of enemies after a trigger condition, usually destruction of a particular battleship, is met. These missions require some care, as the number of enemies after a trigger or two can overwhelm a player who could handle one wave easily. If you don't know a mission, read the guide on how to do it properly, because there are many traps for the unwary.

Basic Fitting Techniques

There are two basic schools of thought on how to go about fitting ships for level 4 missions. The first method emphasizes building a large, capacitor-stable tank, usually with 2 Large Armor Repairer II or one X-Large Shield Booster II, several Mission Specific Hardeners and enough capacitor to run it indefinitely. This school treats damage as secondary, focusing on surviving to kill enemies at leisure.

The second school tends towards building a less solid tank in order to increase DPS, in order to both complete missions(and thus earn money) faster, and because additional DPS may kill enemies fast enough to lower the damage received to the point where less of a tank is necessary.

Both of these make sense in some contexts. The first school is generally preferred for solo, casual missioners who care about never losing their ship. The second tends to perform much better in gang contexts, where the several hundred extra DPS can often melt rats and tanking duties can be split.

As well, some ships clearly lean one way or the other. For example, the Dominix is very difficult to fit with large guns, and prefers to do most of its damage with drones. Since drones have no DPS-increasing module, it is impossible to increase the DPS of this fit, and thus it goes to the tank school, which it fits for very easily, being able to mount a cap-stable 2-LAR tank with a pair of Auxiliary Nano Pump I rigs. Conversely, a Raven is very difficult to fit for cap stability, requiring three Capacitor Control Circuit I rigs and five Capacitor Flux Coil II to be even nominally stable. Most players thus prefer to fit a Raven for a "pulse tank", that can only run its shield booster in pulses, and fit two to three Ballistic Control System II to increase DPS dramatically.

In all cases, you should look at what your ship is capable of and how you prefer to play and determine which style is preferable. Don't feel locked into conventional setups, feel free to experiment to see if you can find something that fits your play style better.

Dealing with threats

(this section could use a better title) Most level 4 mission fits are aimed primarily at tanking and destroying battleships, because those are the primary threat in most level 4 missions. However, there are other threats that need to be addressed in many missions, and this table provides a guide to those:

As well, a note on killing small ships. Most battleship-sized guns are terrible at killing cruisers and frigates, and thus the task ought to be left to either smaller guns, which most ships don't fit, or small and medium drones. For many ships this isn't a problem, but for the Megathron and Armageddon, with exactly 125 m3 of drone bay, it can be since they must either sacrifice the peak DPS of heavy drones or the ability to kill smaller ships easily. In gangs this can easily be worked around by having allies kill them, but in solo combat you will almost inevitably need to use medium drones and sacrifice DPS. The only real alternative is to fit a Web or two in order to slow the targets down to where you can track them, but after the Quantum Rise web nerf this no longer works very effectively.

Other

We need anything else?

Suggested Fits

(I'd link these to the articles, but those pages don't exist yet, so I'll link to the ships instead)

Amarr

Abaddon
Paladin

Caldari

Raven
Raven Navy Issue
Golem
Drake

Gallente

Dominix
Megathron
Kronos

Minmatar

Typhoon
Maelstrom

That look good?

Looks good

Busy now, but I'll add some stuff to it later. Some things I would like to see covered: meta 4, t2, and faction guns. SP constraints for new player - low electronics/engineering skill (fitting constraints), cap stability problems due to poor cap skills, etc. Hardener usage, such as why you would want to fit more than one of one type, why it's crucial to fit a certain number/type of hardeners for hard missions, racial "holes" - i.e, armor tanking ships weak to explosive (angel) and shield tanking weak to em (sansha). --ISD Salpsan 22:25, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposed changes

After some discussion on our IRC channel, YARR has devised a rough plan the future of fitting guides:

This page would see a complete overhaul and become a guide to the basics of fitting for level 4 missions. New pages for the fittings of specific ships will be added, and linked both from this page as well as the item database entry. i.e, lvl 4 mission fit guide -> Raven (Fitting guide) <- Raven (raven idb page)

The sheer quantity of possible fittings makes it unreasonable to place all of this information on one page. There is too much material to read, and not enough room for ships with different load outs. We have determined that this page is better suited as a general guide than the ultimate source of information for every single ship capable of running missions.

We discussed placing fits on the item's Database page, but as evidenced in ship fit forums, this information can take up a lot of space. Each ship can have potentially dozens of fits, all of which could be valid in certain situations. If too much information was present on the page (ie, a dozen fits for the Raven), it would be prohibitive towards its purpose to inform.

By providing a fittings page for each ship, players gain the freedom to add their own fits without having to remove or modify other fits in order to have theirs displayed. These fittings will be moderated to prevent the addition of not useful or poor setups (IE, laser Ferox).

A new category of Ship Fittings will be added to aid navigation.

We'll be working out the details and implementing these changes in the near future. For now, feel free to discuss these potential changes and provide feedback. --ISD Salpsan 10:14, 29 December 2008 (UTC) and ISD Othismos 10:24, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I would like it if you could leave the page as is. If not add in a few formatting dealios to clean it up. Then when the time comes to link the page to the fitting pages. You make a notation-link to the pages in the article underneath the appropriate ship.

This page can't really be left as it is, for the reasons discussed above. It is too long and tries to do too many things. Disagreements about the setups are what have caused this flame war, and these changes aim to deal with it; there are multiple possible fittings which are valid in different situations. This page needs to become a general reference guide to prevent redundancy and confusion. ISD Othismos 18:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The fitting pages should have a voting-comment area just as battleclinic has in play. That way good setups are near to the top of the page and bad ones are somewhere not so visible.--Jason Edwards 10:59, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Agreed in principle, but that's basically the function of the discussion page. Use that space to talk about which ones are best, what the page order should be, and all that stuff. Herschel Yamamoto 17:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Also could I have the ability to edit the page in order to further improve the page. I still didn't complete everything. My next step afterwards was to give a rough estimate of the total cost of each of the ship fits.--Jason Edwards 10:59, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Figure it out, save it on your computer(or put it in here), and add it to the new pages when they're ready. Herschel Yamamoto 17:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Placing new content would be best on the new pages. The chief reason for doing this is to create room for more than one kind of setup per ship. In addition, we don't really have the ability to give one person the power to edit any particular locked page, I'm afraid. ISD Othismos 18:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I like this solution. Makes the whole thing work a lot better, without getting into as many edit wars. You need our help implementing it? Herschel Yamamoto 17:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)