Zako Maken wrote:What’s the range on the drek? Should trig primaries burn away to break spool up or is that futile?
Depends on fit, but a brawl-fit Drek hits to between 16km and 21km with Occult (depending on zero, one, or two tracking computers), or between 40km and 53km with Mystic. The Drekavac is also hilariously mobile - an armor-tanked Drekavac is about as mobile as a shield-tanked Hurricane, and a shield-tanked nano Drekavac is very nearly as mobile as a Caracal. In other words, your AB cruisers are unlikely to kite it effectively.
It's better to use jams/TDs/damps if you can bring any of those.
Marcus Arilia wrote:Not sure, but either way next time I negotiate rules I’m adding “no precursor”.
Precursor ships do punch way above their weight if you let them spool up, but I would like to gently suggest that 1) you might learn to counter them properly, and 2) there's nothing preventing folks from bringing them - a reasonably fit one costs a little more than a Guardian even with the absurdly expensive T2 disintegrator. Also, you didn't lose because of the Drekavac, you lost because of the entire hostile comp. If we take the best hostile ship on grid, the Drekavac, and replace it with the overall weakest hostile ship on grid, the armor Hurricane, you were still at a serious disadvantage.
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Observations
What's on grid?
The first thing that popped out at me when looking at these killmails was how efficient the hostiles' comp was. A Drekavac does as much damage (at the same range) as two Sacrileges with its brawl ammo - 1379 DPS, if you include a flight of three Praetors. The other three DPS ships do "only" 650-750 DPS each, depending on fit. And that's assuming the VNI was neut fit.
Concentrating so much DPS on four damage ships means that two logi are available, and Augorors are pretty good for that. They won't run out of cap anytime soon, and can probably go 4/1 because none of the DPS ships are particularly cap hungry. Moreover, the Drekavac can actually be about half of a logi ship if its three utility highs have Centii A-type remote armor reps - I don't know if it had those or neuts, but it's one of the options for this wonderful and also probably overpowered ship.
The Uni ships on field, assuming they were correctly fit, do a total of about 2300 DPS with five ships, and one Exequror's worth of reps. The hostile ships on field do about 3400 DPS with four ships, and rep somewhere between twice as much (with 3/2 Augs) and over three times as much (with 4/1 Augs and a rep-fit Drekavac) as you do. So the math is not in your favor.
I pointed out above that if we take the Drekavac off grid and replace it with an armor Hurricane, they're still at an advantage. This is true. They still rep at least twice as much as you do and do about 2900 DPS instead of the 3400 DPS they otherwise would - it cuts their DPS advantage by half, but they could outlast you even if they did
less damage because of the huge logi advantage.
Questionable fits and poor skills
I'm not trying to call anyone out, but the ANI you lost had the wrong lasers fit - meta focused medium pulse lasers, instead of meta heavy pulse lasers. This is weird, because the ANI is not exactly stingy on grid or CPU. In fact, a day-1 alpha has enough fitting skills to equip the WHC Light Armor ANI with meta heavy pulse lasers - you just have to train the minimum skills to online the modules. The result is that even with all Vs, the ANI you lost could only do about 70% of the DPS a correctly-fit ANI would do.
This is not on you. In the process of forming a QRF, the FC should generally be able to count on fleet members having fitted the correct modules. However, when someone in one of my fleets derps like that, I generally make a note to have a chat with them afterward, or to have someone else chat with them afterward.*
*
Actually, in my corp, we link the killmail in fleet and laugh at the person responsible for a good few minutes. But that's because our expectations are different from the Uni's because we're not really a training corp. If I'm FCing a joint roam or something like that, then I have a trusted person in the offender's corp do some quiet backchannel education.
Someone who's familiar with the WHC's light armor doctrine, on seeing the large disparity between hostile DPS and your DPS, might point out that your doctrine focuses on longer fights, with very strong tank on your DPS and neut ships and enough neuts to add considerable pressure to enemy ships. However, the AB props on your DPS ships, particularly on the already sluggish Prophecy, mean you have only a small chance of holding down enemy logi if everyone starts at 0, and no chance at all of catching them if they start at range.
The WHC light armor doctrine is not well suited to engaging hostiles that get to choose a warp-in distance, as their logi will always warp in at range and you will never catch them.
It should also be noted that with extremely limited exceptions,
faction cruisers don't beat battlecruisers. In small numbers, a gang of HACs
may trade well against BCs; it's a question of whether your logi + superior resist profile lets you outlast their logi + superior DPS. This is consistent with the normal way of things in EVE: to fight T1 ships a size up from you, you usually need T2 ships, and you will be ISK inefficient if you lose but will have a higher skill cap to exploit in order to win.
A brief aside:
The fact that T2 battleships really are specialized and pose no real threat to carriers or HAW dreads, while the above holds for subcap engagements, tells you a lot about the current state of capital balance.
We can therefore generalize that unless you're ganking a ratting battleship,
the WHC light armor doctrine is not well suited to fighting ships of a higher tech level or a larger size in similar numbers. It's somewhere between okay and good against similar numbers of T1 and faction cruisers, which should guide folks who are looking to arrange "fair" fights in the future.
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Action Items
If you're going to arrange fights, be aggressive about it.
Uni FCs very rarely insist on the kinds of terms that would make an engagement actually reasonable. If you're going to fight on a wormhole, do it in a way that gets both sides to start on an even footing. (Either insist that they jump into you, set up at zero on their side and jump back to your side if they warp at range, or otherwise make it as even as possible.) This prevents your opponents from warping at range and using MWD battlecruisers to control range against your AB cruisers, which I suspect happened in this engagement.
Similarly, negotiating a fair fight does not allow for letting battlecruisers fight faction cruisers. Note as well that Precursor ships are generally balanced to be less tanky and less specialized, but doing more damage, than a T2 ship of their size, and currently are at a slightly higher price point.
Provide counseling and education for line members.
As mentioned earlier, this is not necessarily a task for FCs. However, many FCs also have campus-level positions as educators, and if not, then there should be someone else at the campus level whose job it is to help line members fit their ships correctly, not make obvious mistakes, etc. If this isn't happening, the Student Advocate should be notified and the FC may be well advised to gently and respectfully educate while the campus leadership get their act together.
Improve your familiarity with Precursor ships.
Precursor ships aren't going anywhere. It's not obvious that they're overpowered if one recognizes that their balance point isn't "T1" or even "faction" but something more like a T2 ship focused on raw DPS/reps and utility highs at the cost of tank. But you should recognize that balance point and plan appropriately.
As an exercise: Put a Vedmak in Pyfa, fitting it as a useful member of a WHC light armor and/or heavy armor gang. Consider what role it would play in the gang, what ships you might substitute it for, and whether it would be better to fit neuts, smartbombs, or reps in the utility highs. Feel free to hit me up on FCC slack with your results or concerns.
