One of the things that I’ve noticed about the recent Quantum Rise upgrade to New Eden’s systems is that its made my Rifters even more ferocious in combat. Fitted with an afterburner, stasis webifier and warp scrambler they are mean little beasts more than capable of dealing with other frigates of a similar class and not beyond taking on cruisers.
Their small signature radius and high speed means that they can dominate range against other frigates and so minimise the damage that they take while being almost impossible for cruiser-sized guns to track. The fact that stasis webs no longer bring you to a complete halt has made them much more viable solo ships. Cruisers fitted with webs are no longer instant death. The downside is that fitting an afterburner means that it can be harder to close down your targets but overheating pushes my speed up enough to catch most targets. To be honest, if you don’t get them with an afterburner they were probably on the ball enough to get out before you’d reached them with a microwarp drive. Plus there’s the fact that the afterburner gives you extra capacitor and you can run it throughout combat rather than having to micromanage things.
All in all Quantum Rise seems to be a real boost to small ship combat and I’m absolutely loving flying my Rifters. Flashfresh and The Bastards seem to be having similar amounts of fun. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be publishing my Rifter pilot’s guide for all you budding Rifter pilots out there. Watch this space.
Oh, and I killed a Thrasher yesterday but our killboard is broken at the moment so I can’t show the kill.
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November 23rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I agree, the new patch has made smaller ships much more viable..which is good in my opinion since that is what I mostly fly anyway!