Here's the armada of ships I intend to use, all of them cheap and non-faction. The relative lack of bling is a big safety factor as blinged out ships, particularly carriers, attract gankers.
2 Dominix:
The basic idea is just to drop sentries and run a remote armour repper. The new NPC rat AI is such that they particularly hate "healers" so this should keep all the aggro focused on the Domis. The offline cloak is for when I want to go plexing rather than run anomalies.
The Garde IIs have an optimal of 68.4 km and tracking of 0.082 both of which are really good for a battleship ratter. By keeping them 20km apart it should mean one can easily pick off frigates attacking the other one.
If one ship is getting hit hard then the other Domi(s) can rep it.
I'm considering dropping one of the reppers for a heavy nos. One of these Domi pilots is also my main pvp character so he won't always be there as I'm prioritising pvp.
My third ship is going to be a Typhoon:
This demands a much more active playstyle than the Domis but is very high dps and can merrily chase down the battleships, letting the Domis wipe out the smaller stuff. Its painter helps the whole fleet do more damage.
This guy is also my explorer so instead of ratting with him I can have him in a cov ops scanning for sites while the Domis rat.
Damnation:
This guy's only job is to sit afk in a POS running gang links. It's armour tanked just in case it somehow finds itself in pvp. It adds armour resists, reduces sig radius, reduces armour repper cap cost and duration for the whole gang.
No ratting gang would be complete without one of these:
It's based around the new salvage drones. They can be a bit finnicky - you have to launch them with no targets selected and tell them to salvage to get them to work properly. Still it's pretty awesome to drop your noctis in a sea of wrecks, set the drones off, alt tab for half an hour and come back to see just cans.
This pilot also flies a pretty mean Heron for those minigame sites.
Argh I always released salvage drones when I was still/already shooting rats so had to target each wreck individually and select one or more drones to salvage it.
ReplyDeleteI did notice that very occasionally the drones would salvage without being told but I was never able to find out why...
When working in my vargur, I shoot a couple of ships and then launch 5 salvage drones. just highlight the flight and right click on 'salvage' without having any wrecks targeted. So long as there are wrecks within range, they will quite happily salvage them all.
ReplyDeleteAt various points during the fighting, I'll tractor in the cans as I go. Quite often the field of reds (sleepers, rates) is eliminated with less than a minute to bring in the rest of the cans and finish salvaging the last wrecks.
T2 salvage drone would be nice, as they sometimes get stuck on officer rats or t2 ships (if you pop one of those by and by)
I thought about a marauder but I like the laziness of the drone boat and I think with the reppers drawing aggro the domis get the old school semi-afk ratting effect.
DeleteA golem might be better than the typhoon but that particular pilot is minmatar specialised. It's nice too to be a little less attractive to gankers.