How do you tell whether to equip short orlong-range weapons?

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Gergoran Moussou
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How do you tell whether to equip short orlong-range weapons?

Post by Gergoran Moussou »

Like which ship bonuses work better for which type?

Example: For turrets, is a tracking bonus more beneficial to increasing the advantage of short-range turrets or mitigating the disadvantage of long-range turrets?

And I have no idea when to use which type of launcher (unless a ship has bonuses specific to one type of launcher, such as the Amarr CovOps frigate having a rocket launcher bonus in the unlikely event that I would ever want to use that ship for fighting). All that I can think of is that for medium-sized launchers, rapid light is for engaging smaller targets, and I have no idea when I would use HAM's.
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Edhin Delphiki
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Re: How do you tell whether to equip short orlong-range weapons?

Post by Edhin Delphiki »

These are excellent questions! I would first give this a read as a primer on some ideas on fitting:

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Fitting_ships

This will cover some of the higher and more general questions you may have. At the bottom of that wiki entry, I would also recommend reading through each of the further reading related content.


Warm Regards,
Edhin
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Durnik Risalo
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Re: How do you tell whether to equip short orlong-range weapons?

Post by Durnik Risalo »

For me, this is one of the quintessential questions of Eve Online. I'm sure you can get near as many opinions as the people you ask.

However, for turrets, each weapon type/group (i.e. energy beam/pulse, projectile ac/artillery, hybrid blaster/rails) have tracking somewhere on a near continuous scale of good-moderate-marginal for a given range (optimal/falloff). So, as I'm sure you know, it is a question of the aggregate of your hull bonuses, skills, and modules against opponents aggregate. But just importantly (in my opinion) is your fighting style (either as a specific ship/hull, or generally across all ships/hulls). Do you like brawling, skirmishing, kiting, or sniping? Also, how the fight actually unfolds also plays apart (i.e. can you actually impose/control the fight so that it turns out you are fighting as you intend (brawl, skirmish, etc) and therefore putting your opponent at a disadvantage).

So, TLDR: it depends on how you intend to fight using the tools given (combat attributes). Personally, I like to skirmish/kite, so I like longer range weapons and manually fly my ship to reduce/increase range and transversal/tracking as needed.

Maybe this doesn't answer your questions, but hopefully it helps a little.

PS - for launchers, I like to fit the missile size to my expected targets: lights/rockets against small hulls, heavies against medium hulls, and cruise/torpedoes against large hulls. You probably know that already. When you use the wrong missile-size to target-size you lose damage (or have missed damage capability).

Keep in mind, for both turrets and launchers, that you have two damage stats: dps and alpha/volley. Personally, I think people focus too much on dps. I generally like to increase alpha/volley rather than dps (but I'd never say that dps is never important). For example, if you are fighting someone that has strong active shield reps, but you can punch down to armor (meaning that you do, lets say 20 damage to armor each volley, then even though they are fully healing their shield eventually you'll win -- assuming you can stay alive, but on the other hand if you had low volley but high dps there is a chance they could rep through your damage). After saying that, there are times where brute dps force can win the day -- it depends on the actual fight situation.

PPS - As a choice between launchers and turrets, I like to use launchers against smaller ships/hulls and turrets against larger ships since although transversal is universal (i.e. applies to both you and opponent equally) you have control over your ship so you can somewhat adjust transversal. Missiles have a quasi-static damage cap whereas turrets have no maximum damage cap. So, with turrets, the larger the ship the more damage you should do (although, it might be a very small increase).
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