[Fleet] Dragalwars dive into Pure Blind

[Decklin Quark Reiger]

We took our first ever Dragalwar fleet out today, with the following as our mainline ships, based on Apothne's idea:

The fleet doctrine is designed to apply damage well from 60+ km range, out to a maximum of 80km (depending on drone control range). The drones move *fast* in order to minimize the amount of time it takes to apply our initial damage, and also to minimize the time it takes to swap targets (a consistent down-side to drone doctrines) or to recall drones and run away if needed. In this way the Dragalwars work as a long-range skirmishing doctrine which are similar to the Talwars that they're named after.

Where they differ is that the Dragalwars have logi support, and so are able to stay on grid longer than Talwars can. They also aren't so reliant on killing their targets in 1-2 salvoes, since the sustained drone dps is higher than the sustained light missile dps, and are a little less reliant on having a critical mass of 30+ DD ships in order to be effective.


Dragoons:

Spoiler

[Dragoon, Dragalwar]
400mm Steel Plates II
IFFA Compact Damage Control
'Refuge' Adaptive Nano Plating I
Drone Damage Amplifier II

5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Drone Navigation Computer I
Alumel-Wired Enduring Sensor Booster

Drone Link Augmentor I
[Empty High slot]
[Empty High slot]
[Empty High slot]
[Empty High slot]

Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I


Hobgoblin II x5
Acolyte II x5
Warrior II x5


Nanite Repair Paste x30
Targeting Range Script x1
Scan Resolution Script x1
ECCM Script x1

Inquisitors:

Spoiler

[Inquisitor, Dragalwar]

400mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates
IFFA Compact Damage Control
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Small Capacitor Booster II

Small Remote Armor Repairer II
Small Remote Armor Repairer II
Small Remote Armor Repairer II

Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I


Light Hull Maintenance Bot I x1


Nanite Repair Paste x25
Navy Cap Booster 400 x20

I chose to go to null sec, since that's where Talwars shine best, so I asked for a dictor for support as well as 2 fast tackle, ideally interceptors.

Our fleet composition at undock was 9 Dragoons, 3 Inquisitors, 1 Heretic, and 2 intercepters, plus myself in a Magus. The Magus was meant to simply provide a bit more tank for myself as an FC, so I would be less likely to get headshot, while also giving boosts to the fleet. For this fleet, I chose armour resistance boosts. The previous day, we had flown the oversized MWD Myrmiddons, and I noticed that when the FC / anchor had a speed boost, it exacerbated the problem where lower-SP pilots couldn't keep up with the anchor (more on this in a bit).

Ann'Dra Padecain - Inquisitor
Atticus Vex - Dragoon
B'aldrick Aivoras - Dragoon
Breeze One - Dragoon
Budda Sereda - Heretic
Decklin Quark Reiger - Magus
DonkeyPunch Udan - Malediction
Gatt2111 - Malediction
Kora K - Dragoon / Dragoon
Laser Skaron - Inquisitor
Porsche Amarr - Dragoon
Trillian Ituin - Dragoon
Union Pivo - Malediction / Condor
Walleye Null - Dragoon
Zeerse Solaris - Dragoon
Zeon Alabel - Inquisitor
ashahara - Dragoon


We had a wormhole connection from Amoen to Pure Blind.

(17:37:37Z) Amoen
On the way to our wormhole, we bumped into this cyno magnate, and quickly killed him:
Magnate +2.15m

Around this time we were joined by our 3rd interceptor pilot.

(17:54:26Z) A8I-C5
There wasn't much between our wormhole exit in 5-9WNU until we got to A8I-C5, where we caught a ratting VNI.

It was interesting to note that although the Dragalwars don't have a true 'alpha strike' there is still a significant burst of damage as the drone ball reaches the target.
Vexor Navy Issue +177.68m
Mobile Tractor Unit +7.99m

(18:05:14Z) DK-FXK
Our scouts reported that a gang of Caracals from the Banderlogs Alliance was nearby also roaming the area. We had two skirmishes with them. The first time, our warriors quickly vaporized the Kitsune which was jamming our Logi. Our fast tackle had to warp off from the Caracals, and we weren't able to trade effectively, since we had no way of holding them on grid, and didn't kill them fast enough to stop them from warping off, so we disengaged.

Kitsune +68.55m
Dragoon -15.68m

(18:10:37Z) DK-FXK

We tried again against the Banderlog Caracals, now that our logi wouldn't get jammed. Again our warriors vaporized their Stiletto before he could even warp away, but unfortunately two of our own intercepters got caught by their Vigilant with its 90% webs, so we lost this trade:

Malediction -46.76m
Capsule -0.83m
Malediction -178.73m
Stiletto +45.12m

We disengaged by aligning off together and warping away. We were down now to 9 drone boats, 1 Heretic, and 1 interceptor.

During this engagement, I had (mostly) manually adjusted my own speed to be less than maximum, so that the Dragoons could keep up with me, but even so there was a noticeable difference between the various Dragoon pilots, based on their skill training. I did make a note of this, and tried to take it into account in future fights, but there were times when I forgot, and we ended up a little more spread out than I would have liked. For me this was one of the biggest challenges of the doctrine.

(18:23:46Z) DO6H-Q

We started heading in the direction of Horde space, hoping to get some fights 1-2 systems out from their staging system. I still wanted to try to fight the Caracals, since we theoretically out-ranged them, and Caracal's sustained damage isn't great. With this in mind, we set up a camp in DO6H-Q on the gate from U-INPD. We managed to catch their Ares scout unawares as he came through:
Ares +53.55m

After this however, our scouts reported that the Caracal gang was no longer heading our way, and had gone back a different direction.

(18:31:13Z) DO6H-Q
We continued to wait on this gate for a bit, waiting for a few of our pilots to return from reshipping. Here I made a mistake by not getting eyes on the other gates in system, to see what else was coming from other directions. All my 'vision' was focused on the way we had come, to make sure it was clear for our pilots returning. So, when we spotted an Orthrus on d-scan, headed our way, I called for us to catch him and kill him in the bubble, without realising how much support he had. Here, our Heretic got caught uncloaked, and we lost him quickly. The bulk of our gang was aligned off towards the sun, and logi indicated that they weren't holding. I called for individual pilots, who were getting low in armour to warp off, while we tried to continue our drone damage on the Orthrus. However, the Orthrus pilot warped away once he was in armour since we didn't have him tackled. I warped the fleet away shortly afterwards, having lost one of our logi, and two more dragoons.

Heretic -159.87m
Dragoon -12.74m
Inquisitor -14.18m
Dragoon -13.58m
Capsule -0.01m

From here, we knew we couldn't return back the way we had come, since the gate was now controlled by the MC pirate cruiser gang, so we took the long road back towards Black Rise via Mantenault.

(19:09:07Z) Vlillirier

On the way home, we spotted a small Mjolnir Bloc gang including a Cruor, Merlin, Cormorant and Catalyst. We killed the Cruor and Merlin, but lost our Condor and Malediction in return:

Condor -3.78m
Cruor +53.6m
Merlin +2.55m
Malediction -62.88m

From there, we made an uneventful trip home.

Stats
ISK Destroyed: 411,197,772.44
ISK Lost: 509,038,083.91
ISK Delta: -97,840,311.47
Efficiency: 44.684%

Overall, I like the doctrine - it's got a nice mix of ranged damage with some survivability from logi, and we were actually able to skirmish not *too* badly with other skirmishing cruisers. The challenges for me seem to be:

1. Keeping the whole fleet together while we kite away from our targets. Lower SP pilots will inevitably lag behind. I need to figure out how to handle this. One idea is to have an interceptor burn 120 km ahead of us, so that the slower ships can warp to that cepter at 100 when they are lagging behind.

2. Holding tackle on targets that are 60 km+ from the fleet, so they don't just warp away. I think this could actually be solved by simply having more dragoons in fleet, so that the dps from the drones hits hard and fast, without giving the targets much time to react and warp away. Failing that, I guess it's just part of the nature of long-range skirmishing doctrines. So we should also have our own pilots be prepared to warp away when they are in danger. This was something that I mentioned part-way through our skirmish vs the MC cruisers, when logi reported that we weren't holding. Talking about it in advance would probably be helpful.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for now - what other thoughts and observations do you guys have?

-Decklin

[Porsche Amarr]

Good fun, smooth fleet and a new doctrine tested. Thank you FC Deklin!

[Zeerse Solaris]

Here is the thread of the other Dragoon based doctrine I've seen, although that one is brawly.

https://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtop ... 3&t=100937

On the doctrine, I think the navi computer would be suitable for low sec with the many fast kiters you see there, but we didn't gain much benefit from it in null, so for null replacing it with some utility ewar (I fit mine with a sensor damp) may have been better.

You could also mix up Algos with the dragoons, they are slightly faster and less tanky but that might increase pilot numbers where Gallente Alphas haven't cross trained yet.

If numbers are larger, it may be better to mix up drones more, we had 3 different types of damage drones, but maybe some could have hornet-EC, or if in low the warrior-SWs combined with a navi comp might be able to catch and slow down kiters.

As to this fleet it was fun. we had some cat and mouse with the locals, got some nice kills.

[Budda Sereda]

@Decklin: some thoughts from my side:

We probably should not engage another kiting doctrine... Those Orthruses have similar range and apply well to small ships...

Lesson learned:

flying a dictor, especially when fleet (and logies) are 50km from you:
when you sit on the gate you probably should not try catching points on opponents, but instead just bubble the gate and jump through if primaried.

[Decklin Quark Reiger]

*bump* I've added the narrative above

[Decklin Quark Reiger]

@Decklin: some thoughts from my side:

We probably should not engage another kiting doctrine... Those Orthruses have similar range and apply well to small ships...

Lesson learned:

flying a dictor, especially when fleet (and logies) are 50km from you:
when you sit on the gate you probably should not try catching points on opponents, but instead just bubble the gate and jump through if primaried.

Yep - both good points.

I didn't realise at first what else was coming with the Orthrus. If it had just been him, our logi could have held, but as it turns out he wasn't alone, and our Dragoons aren't *that* fast.

and yes, definitely bubble and cloak in the dictor - it's a ship I haven't had much opportunity to fly yet, so I'll take that lesson as well.

edit: I would probably still engage other kiting doctrines, depending on the situation. It would require us to outnumber them, though, with enough dps to kill a ship quickly before it warps away, while our logi sustain us. This could be a winning trade for us. However, the gang of pirate cruisers was definitely not a good match

[Budda Sereda]

edit: I would probably still engage other kiting doctrines, depending on the situation. It would require us to outnumber them, though, with enough dps to kill a ship quickly before it warps away, while our logi sustain us. This could be a winning trade for us. However, the gang of pirate cruisers was definitely not a good match

Agree with 'outnumber'

[Breeze One]

Was a fun fleet, and a nice trial of something a bit new! These kind of skirmish doctrines are always kinda fun for me.

That said...I had a few thoughts on the Doctrine

One is the drone travel time. I know it was said before that the drone travel time should be around the same as a Talwars Missiles...but that assumes your drones are just traveling the distance from your ship to the target. When the enemy is spread out all around you, switching targets means your drones always end up traveling twice the actual distance, from one target on one side of the grid, to the other. It took us a while sometimes to apply our full DPS (particularly when going after a second or third target after the initial one) as drones trickled in from all over

Related point...I know one of the nice things about the doctrine is the sustained DPS...but I’m not sure how helpful that actually is. As you mentioned, quite a few times targets just warped out when taking damage, due to our inability to lock down targets. That’s normal for a skirmish Doctrine - we have the same issue with Talwars. But Talwars get away with it a bit because the Alpha strike means you aim to kill something before it can warp. Lower Alpha from the Drones, means we need longer to kill something, which means greater likelihood they escape. Sure, maybe we could do more with Dictors/Ceptors for locking stuff down, but the better sustained DPS over the Alpha strike just seems a bit of a false positive to me

That being said, to some degree I think we just suffered a bit from lack of numbers for engaging Cruiser sized targets (probably with XLASBs which could tank our sustained DPS quite well) We probably would have performed about the same with a similar number of Talwars so...

Another point of comparison with Talwars btw - just like with missile skills on Talwars, we not only have the skill differential with player velocity, but also drone speed and control range. We were fighting quite often right at the edge of my drone control range. Not sure how big an issue that was with reducing our DPS.

Btw on the Magus speed point btw, I did notice a lot of targets called which were just outside our (my) drone range, which I suspect was due to the faster Magus being a few km further ahead of the gang most of the time (and therefore closer to the target). Just something to bear in mind.

Fun fleet!

[Walleye Null]

I had a LOT of fun and thought it was really funny when we had tons of drones circling the warp gate. I definitely learned a lot and I really really appreciate you going through the slideshow at the beginning of the fleet. You are very clear in your instructions and found it easy to follow along to what the fleet was doing.

[Decklin Quark Reiger]

Was a fun fleet, and a nice trial of something a bit new! These kind of skirmish doctrines are always kinda fun for me.

Yeah I definitely enjoy the trial manoeuvering.

That said...I had a few thoughts on the Doctrine

One is the drone travel time. I know it was said before that the drone travel time should be around the same as a Talwars Missiles...but that assumes your drones are just traveling the distance from your ship to the target. When the enemy is spread out all around you, switching targets means your drones always end up traveling twice the actual distance, from one target on one side of the grid, to the other. It took us a while sometimes to apply our full DPS (particularly when going after a second or third target after the initial one) as drones trickled in from all over

Yep, for sure - this is why I'd be hesitant to replace the drone navigation computer.

... Lower Alpha from the Drones, means we need longer to kill something, which means greater likelihood they escape. Sure, maybe we could do more with Dictors/Ceptors for locking stuff down, but the better sustained DPS over the Alpha strike just seems a bit of a false positive to me.

Hmm, good point, especially since we can't really hold targets down, we kind of need to rely on the element of surprise when the drone mass hits.

Btw on the Magus speed point btw, I did notice a lot of targets called which were just outside our (my) drone range, which I suspect was due to the faster Magus being a few km further ahead of the gang most of the time (and therefore closer to the target). Just something to bear in mind.

Yeah, I was mostly burning away from our opponents, trying to kite them and make them come to us. So the fleet was mainly closer to the targets than I was, and although I did call targets that were initially (barely) within drone control range, they tended to pull back again. Looking back on it, I realise I was probably kiting a bit too far away. My intent was that once the drones did engage, they could continue to pursue their target even after the target was past drone control range. Something for me to practice when anchoring, along with reducing my speed further.

Fun fleet!

Excellent

[Decklin Quark Reiger]

I had a LOT of fun and thought it was really funny when we had tons of drones circling the warp gate.

Ha ha, excellent that's something we can do in null sec that we can't do as easily in low, since we'd continuously take gate gun fire.

I definitely learned a lot and I really really appreciate you going through the slideshow at the beginning of the fleet. You are very clear in your instructions and found it easy to follow along to what the fleet was doing.

Fantastic - mission accomplished!

Welcome to PvP fleets, and I look forward to seeing you out in the future.

[Apothne]

Sustained engagements with RLM ships is prettymuch worst case scenario of these and Talwars. If you want a little more LR tackle i'd reccomend getting one of your higher SP pilots to fly something like this:

Spoiler

[Keres, Dragalwar]

Damage Control II
400mm Steel Plates II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II

5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Warp Disruptor II
Warp Scrambler II
Phased Muon Scoped Sensor Dampener
Phased Muon Scoped Sensor Dampener

[Empty High slot]
[Empty High slot]

Small Anti-Explosive Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I

Also, if you are FCing from a Magus I'd reccomend rolling a multiple-link setup rather than just one, probably a 3-link version.

Thank you for testing the doctrine ♥