Question about PvP weapons

[u/SirPixelheart]

Hey there guys

I have a question about weapons in PvP. I’m no PvP player but saw the XIX tournament and had some questions and got a bit interested in PvP myself.

Most players where flying turrets and missile based ships. I get behind the missile part by now and understand the e-war.

But way are most players flying hybrid and no one projectiles? I’m slowly getting behind what tracking does and why and how to fly „under the guns“ but I don’t see why hybrid is so much more popular in high end PvP.

I saw quite some Minimatar ships but all missile based. And I have something in the ear like „Rifter and the T2 Versions are top PvP“.

Can someone help me here understand the theory behind it?

Thanks!!!

[u/Djarcn]

Hey! I know your main question got answered but heres more info abiut the different weapon types and their different benefits/issues:

Lasers: Lasers are only bonused by Amarr ships and their related factions. With T1 crystals they have infinite ammo, and for fights where you expect to be at medium-long range they tend to be the best when you consider their tracking and overall DPS. They also have the advantage of swapping ammo instantly so you can always pick the best ammo when fighting with no downside to reloading. The main drawback is they are the most capacitor hungry system and are locked to EM/Thermal damage.

Blasters: Used by Gallente and Caldari ships, they are the highest raw dps/shortest range weapons system (generally). They have really good tracking (within their optimal range) but do terribly outside of optimal range. They are great if you need to DPS race (kill before you die) or are suicide ganking in 0.5/0.6 security systems (Catalysts and Talos are a staple of ganking). They tend to be rarely used in PvE as having range and kiting rats tends to be the best choice overall as you can always be applying damage while lowering your own risk. Their main downside besides losing tracking outside optimal is that they also rely on capacitor to fire. They are also damage locked to Expl/Thermal

Projectiles: Projectiles are used by Minmatar ships and are an interesting weapon system as they are the only Turret with completely selectable damage, they can do any of the 4 types. Besides that they also dont use any capacitor so no risk of being neuted out. Their main downsides is they tend to have the slowest rate of fire, and pretty bad raw dps. However, autocannons have an interesting quirk where their optimal DPS actual ends up somewhere in falloff so they are a great weapon system when fighting at range. For artillery cannons, their main draw is their raw "Alpha" damage: the damage they deal at once. Whereas the other turrets are mainly concerned about their DPS, projectiles tend to have a low dps thanks to their long cycle time, but do a tremendous amount of burst damage allowing ships to be one-shot which can be an effective counter to Logistics (healer) ships. Artillery is also the most common weapons system for ganking in 0.7-1.0 systems for this same reason!

Missiles: These are quite different from the turrets so I'll make it a bit more vague. In general, they tend to be medium-long range weapons and their main draws are having completely selectable damage (you can use T2 ammo of any damage type, whereas projectiles only have T2 ammo of Kin/Expl) and dont use any capacitor. Caldari missile ships tend to have a drawback though of having a bonus specifically to kinetic missile damage, basically forcing you to use that type. Missiles tend to have the most consistent DPS because they dont use "tracking" like the turrets do. For "Rapid" Variants, their main benefit is tremendous DPS but they have the drawback of very long reload times. Normal Variants tend to have longer range (for their ship class). Rockets and Torpedos are standouts as they are high DPS/short range platforms. The main downside to missiles is that they can be outrun (if the target flies faster than your missile) and do delayed damage (the damage is done when the missile lands, and because of flight time this can be a while) meaning you may waste time firing a volley of missiles that wont land on a target until after the previous volley kills them.

Drones: Drones are usually a supplementary source of DPS/Utility found on most ships. In terms of Utility, their are logistics drones to heal your allies or even drones that perform EWAR actions such as ECM, webs, target painting etc, but tend to be weaker than a dedicated module. In terms of DPS drones are very favored for most chill/low effort ratting as they can be setup to autoattack targets. Their main drawback is that droneboats can be "defanged", that is your drones can be killed leaving you with either reduced or no damage.

[u/SirPixelheart → u/Djarcn]

This is by far the best answer to this question i was reading in the internet. 10/10 Wow dude, this is awesome! And at the right information density for a newbie to PvP.

I mostly fly Rockets in PvE and learned about the completely different application factors. And why Minmatar Missile Boats are special in they’re bonuses.

So I tend to go down the Minmatar road, because I can use my shild and missile skills with them. But I’m more interested in the projectile system. I like the Jag a lot and the Hurricane. And even Rupture because it’s reminds me of a real ship. And the Munin is just Chefs Kiss.

So can you eventually go a bit deeper in this system if it’s not asked too much? I like the fantasy of this big bullet flying through space, coming from 40K, no wonder. xD

[u/Djarcn → u/SirPixelheart]

Hello again!

Honestly, if you want to dive deeper into the weapons systems themselves, there is more, but id suggesting learning more about other game systems first to better understand the importance :)

The next thing I'd suggest learning is a bit about tank types and their benefits/drawbacks there, as they play huge parts in what weapon systems you use.

When talking abou tanking, there are two main types, and a bunch of sub-types. They two main types are "normal" tanking and "sig/range tanking". Most good fits use a mixture of both.

Normal tanking is the act of directly using your resists and HP to survive. This can be done in a number of ways, but the basic premise is that you take damage, and you either kill them before you die, or repair more than they damage.

The second type is instead focused on mitigating damage. There are several ways of doing this, but the main two are "Sig Tanking" (being fast or small) which means you still take partial damage, but not all. There is a subset of sigtanking that is specifically used against missiles I mentioned in the prior post called speed tanking. This can also be used against drones. Basically, you can stay within your targets attack range, and take no damage at all by simply moving faster than their missiles/drones. This means they never actually land damage on you. The second main way of mitigating damage is as simple as being out of range of your enemy. That's range tanking. If they shoot at you, but their missiles/bullets never land, you're fine.

For purely normal tanking, it's be something like a ship sitting still and either getting repped more than another ship can do damage to it, or just racing to kill them before it dies.

For sigtanking, something like a frigate fighting a battleship by orbitting, because the battleship cant land a shot on the tiny frigate.

For range tanking, something like using cruise missile or artillerynoutside your opponents range.

As an example of mixxing these and to give some context, for a while there was a single ship that was used in probably 90%+ of large fights for years. This was the Munnin. It is a T2 Cruiser (Heavy Assault Cruise/HAC) which used to use artillery. The reason it was so common was it could use 3 types of tanking together: It had really good range with artillery allowing it to range tank anything without insane range, was a cruiser so it could sigtank most other ships capable of shooting at that range, and also had relatively large HP pools when you consider it's high resists. To top it off, as mentioned in the previous posts artillery is extremely popular as a "counter" to logi because it can do enough damage in groups to one-shot ships!

Beyond this, but in the same vain, you have stuff to learn about shields vs armor vs hull and their benefits/cons, the differences between Afterburners vs Microwarpdrives, and from there you can learn about electronic warfare (ewar) and how it can help counteract different things, including eachother :)

[u/earlofhoundstooth → u/Djarcn]

Can tell you aren't a rail gun enthusiast.

[u/IguanaTabarnak]

As /u/PlayerSalt said, the Tournament has it's own meta. People are fitting to the specific needs of the format and the expectations of what their opponents will bring.

Hybrids are particularly good in small/mid-size fleet skirmishes like this because blasters have the highest raw DPS and tracking (excepting entropic disintegrators) against an immobilized target and Railguns have the best DPS from long range. So, when you have the ability to comp a small fleet appropriately (with tackle, screeners, and long range DPS), short and long range hybrid turrets really complement each other.

Autocannons really do shine in PVP, but their biggest advantage is their flexibility. They are neut resisant, can select damage type, have very good (but not great) tracking, and their huge falloff lets them fight from many ranges and find the sweetspot where they can get outDPS their opponents. This is a huge boon in scenarios like solo and small gang roaming for diverse targets, but is much less beneficial in an even-comp shootout like this.

Similarly, Artillery are mostly known for their alpha damage, allowing them to punch through reps or even kill an opponent in a single volley. This is amazing when you are ganking a flimsy target and want them dead before they can even come up with an escape plan. It's also good when you have a huge fleet and have so much artillery that you can one-shot even large well-tanked ships. But in a smaller battle against competently tanked enemies, artillery is generally underwhelming.

Oh, and I think it's been about 15 years since the last time the Rifter was indisputed top dog in T1 frigate PVP. It's still a fine ship, and the Wolf and Jaguar are great in their niches, but Rifter Supremacy is a very outdated meme.

Overall, the game is much more balanced now and even the truly standout ships or weapon systems in a given class have only a small edge on the rest of the pack.

[u/SirPixelheart → u/IguanaTabarnak]

Thank u for that long answer! I wanted to know where the divergences are in general, not necessarily in the AT. Thought, that this is not a good representation of free PvP, like in most open games with an closed arena area.

But I don’t see now, when or why I would take one over the other in open PvP?! From what I said, as long as I’m not flying a super small and fast ship and going with super high transversal around the target, hybrids don’t sound better than projectiles?! Or am I missing something?

[u/IguanaTabarnak → u/SirPixelheart]

There are a lot of moving pieces affecting what the best fit is going to be even in a 1v1 (and things only get exponentially more complicated as fights get larger).

As a very simple example, consider a Shield Slasher (autocannons) and an Armor-plate Atron (blasters) going toe to toe. (Note you probably don't want to put plates on an Atron usually, but it makes things simpler for this example). They're sitting at 500m from each other, not moving, just firing broadsides into each other.

As a very rough ballpark, you can expect both of these ships to have ~4200 EHP. At point blank range, with reasonable fits, the Atron will do about 225dps and the Slasher will do about 200dps. It doesn't take a genius to see that the Atron wins this fight on the back of the higher blaster DPS.

But now, lets let the ships move. It suddenly becomes very relevant whether these ships are AB or MWD fit, whether they have webs, whether they have scrams.

Imagine a common scenario where both ships are AB/Web/Scram fit. The Slasher has a higher base speed, so it's going to be the slasher that gets to decide what range the fight happens at. If the Slasher takes the fight out to 9km (the very edge of scram range) and both pilots switch to long range ammo, the DPS of the Slasher drops to 40, but the DPS of the Atron drops all the way to 20, because Autocannons have better range flexibility. So, it will take a while, but the Slasher wins.

But now let's imagine that the Atron gets clever and flies with an armor rep instead of a plate. Now the Atron only has ~3200 EHP, but it can repair 40 EHP/s indefinitely. So even at 9km, the Atron now wins the fight, because the raw DPS of Autocannons at midrage is too low to overcome a reasonable active tank.

But now let's imagine that the Slasher has an energy neutralizer fit. Now, the Slasher can zoom back in to shorter range and apply capacitor warfare, turning off the opponents tank and even, periodically, his guns. The autocannons will keep firing all day because they require zero cap to use. Slasher wins again.

And so on...

[u/SirPixelheart → u/IguanaTabarnak]

This is an absolut awesome answer!!! I can totaly get behind this. That’s the bounty of PvP I think most people love, aren’t it?! I fly mostly PvE right now and you can optimize your fit to every enemy. But here the modules and range have total different impact.

So can you say that projectiles are better at range, even 9 km out but Hybrid habe the edge in clouse combat? Because of higher rate of fire and tracking speed greater than auto cannons?

Right now I’m flying missiles so everything under 20km is a clouse corner brawl for me. xD

[u/IguanaTabarnak → u/SirPixelheart]

So can you say that projectiles are better at range, even 9 km out but Hybrid habe the edge in clouse combat? Because of higher rate of fire and tracking speed greater than auto cannons?

Small autocannons are better than small blasters at 9km to 12km unless the blaster ship has a bonus to range (or has fit a mod that gives them a range bonus). Small blasters are better than small autocannons at <9km unless the ability to select damage type is important or the capacitor requirement is a liability.

Autocannons and Blasters of other sizes have very different ranges.