[samroski]

Am finding it impossible to get through the shields of battleships using 5 heavy missile launchers on a battlecruiser.

Is there any way one can destroy a battleship using a battlecruiser, with no external help? (and with skills that are not all at level 5)

[samroski]

An update on this.

I tried with a Drake and Ferox- but could not get through the shields of the battleships at Tvink. Possibly a little later in the game when I'm dealing out more damage with heavy missiles.

Decided to try a battleship. Managed to scrape enough for a Scorpion. Set it up for passive tanking, with 4 torpedoes, large smart bomb and afterburners (tried the MWD but it was too fast ), and put all the drones that I had (and never used) in the bay.

After a ten minute assault with all the above (during which I accidentally destroyed 6 of my drones with the smart bomb) I managed to get through the shields of the battleship. This was after I had tried assault with various combinations of torpedoes and learned that these ships were sensitive to basically only one kind of torpedo.

So it appears that at present I am going to need at least a battleship to destroy battleships. The major disappointment was to find out that my torpedoes were traveling only 15km, instead of the 60km that my heavy missiles were. Thus the need for afterburners. And the need to get cruise missiles. I love the way in which in Eve you keep thinking that I'm happy with what I got, and then the need for something else crops up.

[Dark0ne]

Sorry I didn't notice your original post!

Get EFT (Eve Fitting Tool), fit out your drake how you currently have it fit and copy it to the clipboard so we can all see it. I'll tell you where you're going wrong (if you are) and provide you with some fitting pointers.

On a side note don't use a Scorpion for ratting/mission running! They don't have bonuses to damage or missiles and they're primarily for PVP (one of, if not THE best Electronic Warfare ship in the game). If you want a PVE battleship as Caldari then you definately want a Raven.

[samroski]

Dark0ne, on Jul 26 2008, 04:48 PM, said:

If you want a PVE battleship as Caldari then you definately want a Raven.

I was saving for a Raven when I realized that these ships sell for the same price as you buy them- so as soon as I touched 50 million ISK I bought the scorpion, and as soon as I make another 35 million I plan to sell the Scorpion and get the Raven. This is GREAT. I love it, as it lets you try all the ships.

Will get EFT and post the information.

[samroski]

Have got EFT- and after a while managed to install my character and fit the Drake. But I just could not copy the info. In the meantime I hit the 80 mil. mark and bought the Raven. So the issue now is of fitting the Raven.

I at once fitted it with torpedoes and set out to destroy the battleships at Tvink. I managed to get through the shields but with the combined firepower of the battleship and 6 or 7 frigates the shields gave way, and I warped out with some armour damage. Was using a passive tank- which I like as I do not want to worry about turning on a booster or paying any sort of attention to the shields other than note that they have hit 20% and it time to exit.

In stark contrast to my philosophy, I next tried a set up with an XL shield booster, ballistic control, but this was a disaster as well. Though I managed to destroy the battleship, but the capacitor recharge rate was crap thus no boost the last few seconds (again had not hit the small targets to keep the test similar), and I escaped with half armour damage, but having got the battleship.

This experience reinforced my philosophy and I have now done the follwing set up: (cannot copy, thus the image)



I did reasonably well with this, but the shields gave way when about 25 frigates attacked me. I need serious help with setting up my ship. Keep in mind that I know zilch about jamming/electronic warfare (and most other things)

[Theta Orionis]

Getting into a BS doesn't require a lot of skillpoints - flying a battleship well does. What are your shieldtanking skills, capacitor skills and missile skills at?

Battleships are generally terrible at killing small ships - if you're facing a lot of small ships in your hostile encounters it might be worth bringing along a corp mate in a frigate killing ship, or start the encounter off in a small ship, kill the frigates, then switch ships.

One thing you might try is fitting damage specific shield hardeners (I don't use them since pretty much all my ships are armour-tanking, so can't give any more specific advice on what types, sorry!)

How many ships are you trying to tank? Are you getting aggro from one spawn, or from several?

[samroski]

Have been playing only 3.5 months (first 10 days I did not even know that skills had to be trained- just thought that new ones need to be trained once and then it would depend on the in-game use)- so long way to go with the skills...

There are multiple spawn sites in this area- usually only one is triggered off- but if 2 or 3 are set off, then tanking becomes a problem. Each spawn area consists of about 8-10 frigates, and some spawn sites have one or two battleships as well.

Massive killing/salvaging operation here over the last few days helped me get the money for the battleship. I was doing very well in a Drake and Ferox here- passive tanking. Have no idea about damage types and hardeners- so am at a loss. T

he small ships are a pain- I tried drones and a large smart bomb and both were great- though have to be careful ALSO very importantly the capacitor recharge rate is zilch with all the shield power relays- thus afterburners and smartbombs have VERY limited use. With not being able to use afterburners after a while I had great problems closing in on the battleships (using torpedoes).

My passive tanking philosophy which gave satisfactory results on the Drake/ferox does not appear to work that well with the Raven.

The requested skills:
Samroski

Attributes
Intelligence: 19.44
Perception: 18.36
Charisma: 11.88
Willpower: 18.36
Memory: 18.36

Electronics
Electronic Warfare
Electronics
Electronics Upgrades
Frequency Modulation
Long Distance Jamming
Long Range Targeting
Propulsion Jamming
Sensor Linking
Signature Analysis
Survey

[samroski]

There is a limit to the number of images in a post. 10 I believe

so here are some of the others skills (Samroski)

[Theta Orionis]

I'm afraid I don't know very much about ravens, or caldari ships in general, but I would recommend the ship setups forum on Scrapheap Challenge. This thread discusses PvE raven setups.

Damage types depend on the rat (both damage done and damage type most susceptible to) - so which hardeners you'd fit would really depend on what type of enemy you're facing - and also which missiles and drones you'd be using.
There are also some useful sites for mission runner, which may have some additional information - http://eve-survival....=MissionReports and http://eveinfo.com/missions/4/

Training up energy management and energy systems operation will help with cap for an active tank.

Even though I'm not too familiar with missiles, I noticed that you don't seem to have any BCUs fitted - you might want to fit those to increase your DPS.

[Dark0ne]

In EFT click on the little down arrow next to the ship icon in the "current setup" box at the top, then select "copy to clipboard".

My level 4 mission running and ratting Raven is below, although for ratting I swap the Cap Power Relay for Inertia Stabilisers:

[Raven, Cruise Ratting]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Capacitor Power Relay II

X-Large Shield Booster II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Heat Dissipation Field II
Ballistic Deflection Field II
Ballistic Deflection Field II

'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher I, Wrath Cruise Missile
Small Tractor Beam I
[empty high slot]

Capacitor Control Circuit I
Capacitor Control Circuit I
Capacitor Control Circuit I

Hammerhead II x5



This setup gives 38,500 effective HP, 510 DPS (with my missile skills) and my capacitor can last for 3m 3s with the shield booster on.

First of all the Raven is not a passive setup ship. The Drake is good for passives because it has bonuses to shield resistance and has a good shield recharge time, where as the Raven doesn't! This means you need to go for modules you have to activate because they provide more resistances and better survivability.

First of all get used to using active shield hardeners -- i.e. modules that you have to activate in order to work that offer boosts to resistance to damage types. In my setup that's the Heat Dissipation Field II and Ballistic Deflection Field II. Each module offers protection to only one damage type except the Invulnerability Field module which offers protection across all 4 but with lesser results. As you know there are 4 damage types in Eve. The rats in Eve do 2 of these 4 damage types depending on what "faction" the rats belong to. When you look at the mission information you can see what rats you'll be against and can then fit your hardeners accordingly depending on what faction you'll be up against. How do you know what factions do what damage?

http://eve-survival....=MissionReports
Bookmark this site. It contains information on all the missions available in Eve and tells you what damage the rats deal and what damage you should be dealing. It also provides you with handy information on how to complete the missions easily.

http://eve.grismar.net/rats/index.php
Bookmark this site. It contains defensive and offensive information on every rat in the game -- just enter the name of the rat into the search and it'll all come up.

You dont want to fit more than two of each hardener because they have diminishing results (the more you fit the less effect they'll have). But essentially hardeners stop you taking so much damage right from the get go. On that note because you're going to be using active hardeners don't get any more of the shield compensation skills because they only really buff passive shield hardeners.

Ok, that's hardeners sorted.

The XL Shield Booster is a must, but as you said your ship runs out of cap pretty quickly because it eats so much juice! The first thing you want to work towards are the Capacitor Control Circuit rigs...they're quite expensive at 15m a pop but they offer a 15% recharge bonuses with no drawback. They're important, because the low slot cap rechargers called Capacitor Power Relays offer 24% recharge rate but have a 11% drawback to the HP recovered while shield boosting -- so if you use too many your shield boosting becomes useless. Many pansy mission runners in Eve focus on making their ships "perma-tanked"...that means they can run all their modules without ever running out of cap. Unfortunately these setups aren't optimal; they'll nerf your DPS meaning you don't finish your missions very quickly and they can cost a lot too. Instead I go for a more offensive approach; you want to be dealing as much damage as possible so that the rats die quicker and you make more isk per hour. With my setup the capacitor lasts for 3m 3s which is plenty of time; you don't need to run your shield booster permanently anyway and you can just turn it on and off again as necessary.

A pointer incase you don't know; ships have an "optimal" stage at which cap and shield recharging is at it's fastest. This is around 40% - 50%. If you go under that or over that then the recharge time is slower, so when you're boosting you want to turn it off, if you can, when your cap hits 40% so that the cap is recharging as quickly as possible. Once you're up to 60% - 70% cap you can turn your shield booster on again if you need to and just rinse and repeat.

Next; frigates and cruisers! Cruise missiles are OK against cruisers but are a bit crappy against frigates; this is because of the signature radius of ships in Eve. Essentially small ships avoid damage from big guns because they are small. This is combated by the skill "Guided Missile Precision" but I wouldn't recommend getting that higher than level 2 any time soon. Therefore in missions you combat frigates with Drones. A Raven has enough space to hold 5 medium drones that can tear through frigates pretty quickly, meaning you can be shooting the big ships with your missiles while you send your drones to deal with the frigates. They're a must for any L4 mission runner.

Cruise missiles, I'm afraid, are also a must. As you know Torpedoes only have a range of about 20km so you are spending a lot of time trying to keep up with the enemy rats just so you can hit them; all this time they're hitting you with whatever they have and ruining your tank. Missile Launcher Operation V is a beggar to get, but it is handy too atleast.

As far as skills go you want to stick with your learning skills. Try to get them all to level 4 (except charisma) as well as the advanced skills to level 4 too. You also want cybernetics IV too so you can get some good implants. I'm not sure if you have any implants or not, but they're a quick albeit slightly expensive way to get your base attributes enhanced. I have +5's in for optimum learning speed, but +4's or even +3's are better than nothing.

If you dont think your Raven can cut it just yet then don't worry, stick to the L3's and your Drake (don't do L3's in your Raven because your Drake should be faster due to the lack of BS's in L3's) and get those skills trained up.

My skill plan for you would be:

Learning skills to 4/4.
Cybernetics IV (for +4 implants. They cost 15m each but they are WORTH IT!)
Energy Management IV (more cap)
Energy Systems Operation IV (more cap regen)
Shield Compensation IV (reduced cap need for boosters)
Shield Management IV (more shields)
Drones IV (4 drones should be enough)
Scout Drone Operation III (means your drones can go out further)
Missile Launcher Operation V (UGH, but necessary for cruise missiles)
Cruise Missiles IV (no reason not to get this to IV, more damage is GOOD)
Rapid Launch IV (you fire faster, you do more damage, GOOD)
Warhead Upgrades III (more damage, GOOD)
Guided Missile Precision III (atleast your cruise missiles will do OK damage to frigates then)
Caldari Battleship IV (means more damage, GOOD!)

That should set you back a few months, but once you've got them in the bag you'll be the golden boy of mission running in your cruise missile Raven.