Rifter Drifter

At the moment I’m working pretty hard on getting the latest version of the Rifter guide together. Its taking some pretty big leaps forward from the original version and is going to include a lot more discussion about the flexibility of the Rifter. One of the things I want to do is showcase a few fits and discuss their pros and cons. This is where you guys come in. Please drop me an e-mail or leave a comment with your favourite Rifter fit and, if possible, a few words about why you like it. The sheer range of fittings I’ve seen lately is mind-boggling so I’d really like to see what kind of great stuff you guys have come up with.

New blogger 00sage00 has written a fantastic post about what makes you a savvy pilot in Eve. I definitely recommend that you go and read it.

A while ago I wrote about trying to kill ‘ceptors in my Rifter. Since then it turns out that I’m starting to get pretty good at it. So many interceptor pilots rely upon their ship’s navigation computer to approach targets or are overconfident about the invulnerability that their speed gives them. Even a standard afterburner-equipped Rifter with a warp scrambler can ruin their day in pretty short order.

Last night Joc and I had a nice little skirmish with some guys from Blood Money Bootcamp. We’d been chasing two Rifters and a Crusader around Adirain for a while. Joc’s Punisher and my Rifter kept narrowly missing the Crusader until I sat and waited at the gate to Aeschee. Eventually Joc was going to flush him in my direction (he’d been bouncing around between planet ten, a belt, and the gate). As I predicted it happened and I quickly began burning towards the interceptor with my afterburner and scrambler overloaded. If I missed the tackle I would at least not get aggro and be able to burn to the gate and jump out. I didn’t miss the tackle though and scrambled the interceptors microwarp drive. My webs were applied and my guns opened fire. The fragile ship didn’t last long and exploded as Joc landed next to me in his Punisher. We pointed the pod and I considered a ransom until I remembered that he probably had fleet mates so popped the pod to deny them a warp in. I was too late popping the pod and a Rifter dropped out of warp next to us. Joc and I both turned on him and he melted under our combined fire. A second Rifter landed as we finished off the first and he met a similar fate. We scooped the loot and headed to a safe before reinforcements arrived.

So how do you kill interceptors when you only have an afterburner fitted? Part of me wants to keep this close to my chest because I don’t want my targets knowing my tactics but all of this information is already out there so I might as well share it. The other week I had a lot of fun and was able to kill a Malediction, Crow, and Taranis all in one day. Each one required a slightly different trick.

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Last night was one of those quiet ones where its really hard to find good targets. Or indeed targets at all. During a roam into Placid the only targets that I could find were two Harpies. The first one was in a belt and I decided to engage it and find out if it was fitted with blasters or rails. I went in and settled for a 5 km orbit to make sure that blasters wouldn’t hurt me too hard. That wasn’t wise. Unfortunately I hadn’t checked the Harpy’s bonuses and I pretty quickly bailed and ran away as the optimal-enhanced blasters tore through my shields and armour. The second Harpy seemed to be rail fit so didn’t hurt me at all. His friends, however, hurt pretty hard and I ended up dying to the support squad that showed up.

This got me thinking about assault frigates in general. Since the changes to speed in Quantum Rise they’ve become a very popular ship class. This means that not only do you see a lot of them around but also that their cost has shot up. Personally I think this makes it hard to justify flying them. For the price of a Jaguar hull alone I can fully equip a Rupture and end up with a much more flexible (and insurable) hull. The question in my mind, though, was can I take any of them on in my Rifter? Click here to read more.. »

Happy New Year, New Eden. As a special present for you all I’ve updated my Rifter PvP guide based on the feedback that I got from all of the people who read it. I’m glad you’ve all enjoyed it and hope its helped people get into the wonderful world of PvP in Eve.

Rifter Guide to Solo PvP

You can also download a PDF version or go and discuss it in my Eve Online forum thread.

One of the things that my last few frigate fights have got me thinking about is the question of autocannons and ammunition. The most common fit that I have been using is three 150 mm Light Autocannon IIs loaded with Barrage ammunition. This gives me good range should my target not want to orbit at my preferred range of 500 m and good tracking despite the penalties of using Barrage ammunition. But is this the best combination? In order to investigate I started to run some numbers and here’s what I found out.

Because I’m doing this for my own benefit I’ve run the numbers based upon my own style of fighting and skills rather than a more abstract approach.

First of all lets imagine that I’m in a Rifter fitted with a microwarp drive, 400 mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten plate, and Damage Control II. In this case I use my microwarp drive to close the distance on my target and try and hold a close orbit at 500 m using a web to pin down my target. My maximum speed in this arrangement is 384 m/s so lets take the transversal velocity as 400 m/s and the range as 500 m. For the sake of this test I’ll fit my ship with 150 mm Light Autocannon IIs.

From this graph you can see that under these conditions my optimal range is 2000 m and that Replublic Fleet EMP ammunition does the best damage. So next time I engage someone should I set my orbit to 2 km and load up the EMP? Well, its not quite that simple. What happens if I’m up against an armour tanked Rifter? Lets put in the basic armour resistances of a Rifter and see how that effects the damage.

Now we can see that the most effective ammunition for a close-up fight isn’t one of the high tech ammunitions but Republic Fleet Fusion. At this speed the tracking penalties for Barrage and Hail mean that it just doesn’t do the job as well as regular ammo does.

But this still isn’t the whole story. Even if I go fast enough to dictate range my opponent may still effect the transversal velocity. And what if he has a web? Then my speed will drop right down. Will that affect the ammo I should use? Let’s have a look.

In this graph we can see what happens as the transversal velocity changes while still holding an orbit of 2 km around my target. At all speeds Republic Fleet Fusion is better than Hail, although only just when we’ve been webbed. This leaves me with one last question. Is 2,000 m still the best range to orbit at if I suspect my opponent has a web? Especially against cruisers I want to get in under their guns as much as possible. Let’s revisit our first plot but this time with a transversal of 40 m/s assuming both ships are carry 90% webs.

In this case we can see that Hail is a far superior choice of ammunition for the job, although Fusion still packs a hefty punch. Now, rather than my previous optimum of 2,000 m I can do the most damage closer in at about 750 m so I should set this as my optimum.

Thankfully when facing shield tankers this problem is vastly simplified by the fact that there is only really one choice of ammunition, Republic Fleet EMP, so this choice is already made. There are still questions about default orbits to deal with but that’s about it.

As well as my own ammunition I also need to consider what my opponent is most likely to be carrying. Against missile ships the tactic is very simple; go as fast as possible at your optimum range. It is speed not distance that will defeat missiles. Blaster boats are a bit different, though. Let’s consider a Gallente Tristan with Light Neutron Blasters II and Void ammo. With maximum skills his optimum range is 1.7 km and his falloff is just 1.3 km so if I orbit at 5 km he will barely be able to hit me while I can pound him with Barrage out to 10km and beyond. My best approach, then, is probably to use Barrage and orbit at 7 km so I can hold him in warp scrambler range. If I want to go in close I can also get in under his tracking and load up Fusion like before.

What about a Punisher? Well, fitted with Medium Pulse Laser IIs and Conflagration ammo they have an optimal of 3.8 km and a falloff of 2.5 km. In this case it is much harder to out-distance their guns, even using Barrage. Instead we can exploit their tracking, which is terrible. Load up the Republic Fleet Fusion and get in close. This is especially effective because he can only pick two midslot modules so is unlikely to have stasis webifier fitted.

Conclusion

So what have I learnt from this exercise? Well, basically that I have been misusing Barrage. Its purpose is to orbit outside of your opponents guns so its uses for my ‘orbit at 500 m’ tactic are limited. Instead I should use Republic Fleet Fusion when I don’t think my opponent has a webifier and Hail when I think he does.

There is one other question left to answer. That posed by Burn Mac in his response to my post about passive and active tanking. What is the effect of changing the size of the gun? Are big guns better?

Well it actually happens that the effect of the size of the gun is pretty minimal. When using ammunition with tracking penalties or high transversal velocities smaller guns will help you hit your target more often. You’re better off not sacrificing the rest of your set-up just to fit larger guns. Small guns and gyrostabiliser do more damage than bigger guns without one.

Of course, all of this changes when I consider what happens if I fit an afterburner and use that during combat but that discussion is for another time.

References

The formula used to calculate the DPS for the various combinations comes from Naughty Boy via Scrapheap Challenge. There is also a good discussion of autocannon tactics in The Rules Of Autocannons but I think a lot of this applies only to cruiser-sized ships and above.

As I learn how to do PvP in my Rifter one of the questions I keep asking myself is do I want an active or a passive armour tank? So far I’ve been flying around with the passive tank and doing pretty well. Once I engage the enemy all I have to worry about is keeping my guns on him and trying to minimise any incoming damage. There’s no need to micromanage my tank. This is great for short fights but for anything prolonged or for multiple engagements surely an active tank would be better. It seems to be an absolutely classic fit on the Rifter and the one that I come up against most often.

Passive Tank

To fit a passive tank on the Rifter I use a 400mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten plate instead of a more frigate-sized 200mm plate. This gives me a huge armour buffer but I need to use a Micro Auxiliary Power Core to get it all to fit. On top of this I can either fit three 150mm Light Autocannon IIs or three 125mm Gatling Autocannon IIs and a named rocket launcher. The latter giving me the advantage of better tracking against close, fast moving targets which is the way I like to fight.

With this set-up I can hold the scram and web indefinitely and use my microwarp drive when necessary to maintain range. With my skills I can hit 2150 m/s with the microwarp drive active and keep it running with the tackle gear for 1 minute 3 seconds. Plenty of time to close to my target and engage.

The biggest downside of this set-up that I can see is that I have no ability to repair myself. While this isn’t a problem fighting most small ships it has been an issue when I’ve had to fight multiple opponents either in rapid succession or together. Plus it limits my ability to operate in systems without stations.

Active Tank

The other option that I am starting to play with is a more traditional active armour tank. The smaller plate involved makes my ship slightly lighter and more manoeuvrable as well as allowing me to hit higher speeds with my microwarp drive.

The problems I’m likely to encounter here are my limited capacitor and repair ability. At peak repair I can sustain 27 DPS but even using a small, named nosferatu this limits me to 58s of repair. This actually should be enough to see me through most fights because they tend to be shorter than this. Assuming it doesn’t get swamped I can repair 910 units of armour before I cap out giving me the potential for 1585 extra effective hit points.

In order to do this I have to sacrifice a small amount of DPS by dropping the rocket launcher but this looks like a very promising fit and it is tried and tested. My only concern is that the repairer might not be able to keep up resulting in me being overwhelmed by their fire. Still, I plan on heading out in it a bit during the course of The Bet and seeing how it holds up.

Edit: I’m also experimenting with replacing the Damage Control II with a Gyrostabilizer II and dropping the nosferatu for a rocket launcher. There’s just so many options.

There’s also a variation of the active tank that I came across in a couple of frigate duels with an Heimatar pirate. Rather than using a nosferatu to syphon capactior charge from his victim he used a capacitor booster to all him to keep his armour repairer and afterburner running permanently.

Very tanky but lacking the speed to close to your victims. Still it could have some very good uses as a bait ship and I enjoyed the one time that I took it out until it died at the hands of a gank thrasher.

So, active or passive tank? What do you think?