Arazel Chainfire
The Awakened Armada
Apex United
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Posted - 2011.08.15 22:59:00 -
[1]
You seem to be missing the biggest point of flexibility. It isn't flexibility of a fitted/rigged ship, its flexibility of skill training. Lets take the tengu as an example, as it seems to be what you have fixated on.
Roles:
Mission Running
Exploration
PvP
incursions
wormholing
cloaky fun
So lets see. We train up for a tengu for mission running. We hop into it, start spewing out 495dps out to 120km (the tengu's actual damage before using faction mods, implants, faction/t2 ammo etc.) To get a similar ship, we are looking at either a drake or a nighthawk - the tengu obviously outperforms the drake, but is pretty on par with the nighthawk (you can argue it either way, but generally nighthawk is better pure t2, and tengu is better pimped, but both will serve your purpose).
So you run missions for a bit, then decide to do the whole exploration thing. Well, if we didn't have the tengu, we would pretty much be using the drake if we were trying to do all in one, or a covops ship + dps ship. Note, additional skill training, that you already have by being able to fly the tengu.
Then you decide to try incursions, the only caldari ship that is actually useful in them is the tengu, but all caldari ships are second teir options here.
Then you decide to go into wormholes, which leaves you with the drake and nighthawk again as the only other 2 effective options... and the drake can manage c2's and struggles in C3's, while the nighthawk is good in c3's but kinda useless in higher ones, but then you have the tengu that can run c3's, kinda sorta solo c4's, and is the subcap ship to use for c5's/c6's. Do note that these are some vastly different setups at each level (c3's and under use self rep and some c4's, remote rep fleet for c4's, c5's, and c6's). Do note, that if you were running c5 or c6 sites without t3's, you would be forced to use logistics ships to be even remotely effective, and you would be looking at either the cerb, the raven, or the nighthawk to actually run the sites with, not to mention needing a covops ship to probe things down.
Then you look at cloaky toys, and you see that you have the tengu, the falcon, the stealth bomber and the probing ship. Well, the tengu can manage probing very well, does a bit less dps than the bomber when in cloaky dps config when shooting kinetic, but much more with any other damage type, can kinda do the falcon's job (though not as good as the falcon does) but more importantly can manage to have ALOT more buffer than any of the other cloaky ships, which makes it alot more survivable if you go for anything other than a sudden gank.
Lastly you decide that you want to look at just plain general PvP. And you see that the HAM tengu is actually viable (unlike the HAM nighthawk), and vastly outperforms the HAM drake. It has as much damage as most of the caldari BS's, better damage application, more EHP, and more manuverability. If you go with a heavy missile fit, you still do more dps than a range fit battleship, maintain the manuverability, EHP, and damage application.
Now take a look at the other t3's and you will see similar things. Yes, none of the others is as good as the tengu in all the fields, but some are better in the tengu in some. But in every case you will see that while the t3 isn't the best in class, it allows you to compete in that class without needing to train up those specific T2 skills. So if you already have all the t2 ship skills, you aren't going to notice much of a difference. But if you are a new character, you cant do better than to train up the best generalist ship, then focus on the specialist ships later.
-Arazel
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