As a faction warfare pilot on the Gallente side, I frequently come across Hookbills. These present a signficant problem to me - I normally fly Gallente frigates, mostly with blasters. When I am dual-webbed or webbed and tracking disrupted, I generally die horribly. In addition to this as the majority of these ships are armour tanked or afterburner fit, they can't catch kiting Hookbills. This means that any Hookbill dooms me as I don't know how to fight them properly.

I am restricted in terms of what ships I can bring. I want to be able to fight over novice plexes, which restricts me to tech 1 and faction frigates. I would fly an AF or dessie but then the Hookbills won't engage me and I can't enter novice plexes. The Daredevil and Dramiel are out of my price range and I'm unlikely to be engaged if I'm flying a Daredevil.

Currently I am thinking of the Comet and the Tristan. My drone skills aren't stellar so I would prefer to use a more turret based ship. I was thinking of using an AB/Scram/Web fit Comet with a speed mod and repper. Unfortunately I don't think this is enough to plow through the dual webs of the Hookbill to get into blaster range. The three drones I have are incapable of breaking the Hookbill on their own.
I was thinking of using a similarly fit Tristan. My issue with the Tristan is that I'm not sure if its drones alone can break the Hookbill's tank before it dies. There is also the problem that the drones can be killed in short order by the Hookbill.
I would also like to maintain a reasonable target selection outside of the Hookbill whilst remaining 'engageable'.

What do you suggest?

Perhaps an Incursus with railguns. Stay out of web range. You are screwed if they disrupt you, but it might be worth a try.

You cannot kill a Hookbill you can only run and hope they grow bored with chasing you before they catch you... otherwise they will find you no matter where you hide no matter how far you run they will follow you and they will catch you. The Hookbill is a fierce, violent, bloodthirsty creature that knows only how to kill.

But in all seriousness when it comes to t1 and faction frigs the Hookbill is freaking bad ass, however maybe you can fit up a worm similarly and use ecm or light drones to give you the edge? i mean the hookbill would out dps you with launchers alone but even t1 lights give you the edge at gallente frig 5 and at caldari frig 4 you have the edge in tank. Of course i dont know how much worms are going for these days may be out of your price range.

The HB is a nasty frig to be sure but they can be killed.

As with most frig combat a lot is how you setup the fight.

If you scan them at a novice and you know they are often kitey fit then don't warp in with an AB blasting brawler.

However if you setup a hero tank MWD brawler incursus there is a decent chance that you can catch them, shutdown their mwd and melt through their tank. Nothing is certain for sure but the rebalance has given you more options than ever before to be able to counter fit things now with a much greater chance of success than before.

I was trying to be ridiculous...geez does no one understand insanity here?

You cannot kill a Hookbill you can only run and hope they grow bored with chasing you before they catch you... otherwise they will find you no matter where you hide no matter how far you run they will follow you and they will catch you. The Hookbill is a fierce, violent, bloodthirsty creature that knows only how to kill.

An incursus is a very versitile ship.

You can fit them to kite or brawl quite easily. In a pure kite setup you can match or exceed the speed of a HB and in a brawl you can out DPS/tank them. The main thing is that you need to know how they are fit before hand and what their common tactics are.

But thats generally the same as most frig combat.

I personally like the rail AB brawler for the incursus. It will allow to hit out to long point range with long range ammo and comfortable hit scram kiters with navy AM. but it does require some manual piloting to ensure that your tracking you target ok.

Also bear in mind thet generally in term of power navy frigs are by design more powerful than T1. but if you know what they are flying and counter fit your incursus you'll be able to murder them and force them to re-think or re-fit their HB's

But in all seriousness when it comes to t1 and faction frigs the Hookbill is freaking bad ass, however maybe you can fit up a worm similarly and use ecm or light drones to give you the edge? i mean the hookbill would out dps you with launchers alone but even t1 lights give you the edge at gallente frig 5 and at caldari frig 4 you have the edge in tank. Of course i dont know how much worms are going for these days may be out of your price range.

Fly a 10mn hookbill, or a 10mn worm. Both work well to vounter hookbills, otherwise cruor, slicer. But imo the easiest way of doing it is a dual dampening lml condors, should rip a ab hookbill a new one quite easily!

I don't think I can afford to use the Worm. This brings the Tristan to mind though.

[Tristan, KILL IT WITH THE FAT MAN]

Drone Damage Amplifier II
Damage Control II
200mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
1MN Afterburner II

Light Ion Blaster II, Null S
Small Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Light Ion Blaster II, Null S

Small Ancillary Current Router I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I

Hobgoblin II x5


That's just a fit I have hanging around. A rail fit would probably beat up the pesky Hookbill fairly easily. With a minor tweak 125mms can go on there and hit out to HB range. And if they drop into neut range bad things will happen to them. This has more tank than the other fits I had, though not quite as much as the Hookbill. The drone damage is higher than the rocket damage though, and of course if the guns can be applied the Hookbill might well explode.
Kiting Hookbills still can outrun the drones, but then if I fit rails I can try to splat them out there. I think it would still lose to a kiting HB but it would put up a significantly better fight.

I dont know what the Tristan's drone bay is but if you can throw a set of Ecm drones in there knock him out a couple cycles swap them for the lights lather rinse repeat (but this is coming from an Ecm pilot so yea)

Unfortunately even a full flight of ECM drones aren't going to be able to jam a Hookbill often enough for me to really consider it - Caldari ships have the highest sensor strength and what with the sensor compensation skills it's going to happen even less often.
The Tristan's drone bay is 40m3 - so 1 full flight with three backups. I was using warrior IIs, but I cut them out of the post because I reached the character limit.

Yea i tend to forget when i use ecm drones its usually with a couple others usually dumping a full flight... well while we've brought up ewar perhaps sensor damps?

Someone else suggested a condor with light missiles and dual sensor dampeners. I'm going to try that, and it has the advantage of having a good target selection outside of the Hookbill, which is what I want. I need to train into it first though.
The Hookbill has a good targeting range as well, so I'm going to have to test how effective the dampeners are. When it says -50% targeting range, does it halve the targeting range?

yea but if irc stacking is applied so 2 of them end up as a weird number and i was actually thinking you should try the Electronic Attack Ship (Keres i think) or its t1 variant. They dont pack as much of a punch but with the juicy bonuses you can do some really mean things. IE 36 km Long point

-42% and -42% - first stacking penalty takes it down to like 85%, so not much. That's like 37% off of 58% of their initial targeting range. According to my math that damps a max skilled HB down to about 15km targeting range. If I heat point and hang at 20km or so that should work with a Condor.
Doing it with a Maulus seems like a decent idea. I might try it - but the HB can still kill my drones.
Is there any way to set orbit to like 17km or 18km rather than just 15km or 20km?

lml hookbill will have a TD, Thus an incursus/rail comet are not ideal


Fit a fast comet with web scram and an MWD

(You will be at a disadvantage against most other things but you will munch kiting hookbills)

If you fit a brawling ship that operate ~3km then you need to accept that you will die in a fire if a kiting ship gets you.

AB + Scram is not the best way to fly a frigate.

Griffin?? torture him slowly with your dps

A maulus with double damp and good ewar skiills will damp a HB down to ~10km targeting range.
I don't know how fast the Hookbill can go, though, so don't nail me on anything i say now:

With a 200mmrrt Plate a maulus will currently go ~3000m/s before overheat and rigs and have 1100 armor. You can go up in tank by fitting a micro aux power core and go 400mm, this will give you ~700 raw armor hp more, but drop your speed by almost 250m/s.

So, depending on the speed the hookbill achieves, you can either increase tank with trimarks etc, or try getting more speed than the hookbil. Or get drone speed / hitpoints and increase the survivability of your hobs.


You can go ith 75mm rails or autocannons, depends on your style. But all in all, i'd say from the gallente lineup, the Maulus is your best bet.

Guide to winning eve frigate fights:

AB + Scram is not the best way to fly a frigate.
You must be able to hit to 10km with at least 70% of your DPS to even think about going into FW.
Learn to slingshot.
Understand that a frigate worth 500k will struggle against a frig worth 14mil.

Pick something to excel at and do it. If you fit a brawling ship that operate ~3km then you need to accept that you will die in a fire if a kiting ship gets you.

However i am sympathetic to your cause, baring in mind that hookbill pilots with AB/Web/Scram/TD are the scum of the universe and couldn't pilot a real ship to save themself.

Also, i've found hookbill pilots with AB's carry stabs quite a lot. It's pathetic.

It would work but who's gonna engage a Griffin? Not worth the pain in the arse to anyone.

Try a rail Comet

{Rail Comet}
Damage Control
Small Armor Repper
Adaptive Nano Plating
Magnetic Field Stabilizer

Afterburner
Scram
Web

150mm Railguns

Drones and rigs are whatever you want them to be. Against the standard dual web Hookbill you can win the engagement tho theyll most likely still escape, and against the single web / td Hookbill, you can hopefully control range enough to get as close as you can and do as much damage as you can, don't get too close however as you don't want to end up in a tight orbit with him where your rails won't track.

Do not bother with blasters against a scram range Hookbill unless you're in a ship with some huge falloff advantage / 90% web or something.

Edit: Also the sensor damp Maulus is a good idea although it might be tough with so few drones, which he will no doubt shoot and kill.

There are so many fitting variants for hookbills, due to 5 mids, that you cant simply say this will win. A ab daredevil will die to a dualdamp mwd kiting hookbill, a mwd/scra/web dd will die to a ab/dualweb/td hookbill. Every rocket af/t1 frig will die to a kite bill aswell,arty thrashers will die to ab ones and so on. Theonly ship that can beat the hookbill not matter the fit is a avtice 10mn ab fit, if the oponnent is rocket fit you can either kite him or sig/speed tank him, if hes lml fit you can permatank him while doing enough dps to kill him.