Originally by: Jacinto Naysmith

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Edited by: Jacinto Naysmith on 24/02/2006 12:50:21
Edited by: Jacinto Naysmith on 24/02/2006 12:45:59
I purchased a moa with the intents of using it for PVE and PVP (Got sick of flying blackbirds), however after playing around with it for a couple days I sold it to a corpmate. It seems to me that the fundamental problem with the Moa is its badly paired bonuses and hardpoints. It has a +10% hybrid optimal and +5% shield resistances per level, and has 5 rail/missile mounts. This makes it suffer from the typical "jack of all trades, master of none" problem, and this is coming from some one who's a huge fan of flexibility in combat.

The optimal bonus and ship description show that it was clearly intended to be a long range rail gun ship. With Scout 250mm rails, cruiser IV, Sharpshooter III, some range mods and iron ammo I got around an 80-90 km optimal range. For PVP, I'd hardly call that "Long Range" and you're going to be doing pathetic DPS while you're at it. In PVE the Caracal can achieve similar range, without sacrificing any DPS and not having to worry about a target warping out before the missiles hit. While I don't have a whole lot of gunnery skills, compared to heavy missiles the 250mm rails loaded with antimater did pathetic damage, had a fraction of the range, and were harder to fit at the same time.

Now to complain about the second bonus, +5% shield resistances. If the ship is being used as its intended ("long range") then this bonus is fundamentally flawed. By staying far away you are attempting to keep out of the enemy's weapons range, thus taking away the need for a big tank. A Hybrid (or specifically Railguns) damage bonus would have made it a lot more useful at its intended role. Even with the tanking bonus, focusing on tanking with it in PVP isn't do able. Similar tier cruisers will be able to chew though its tank. Additonally the ship is not particularly small or fast, so battleships will be able to chew through it without much trouble (even more so if there are a couple target painters on it).

If you load it up with Heavy Missiles which do more damage and in general have as good/better range then railguns... why not use a Caracal? It gets bonuses to Missiles, can fit more of them, and is significantly cheaper to build/buy at the same time. If you slap on some blasters, then you're basically just using a makeshift thorax without the MWD and damage bonus.

I think CCP needs to take a good look at the Moa to make it a viable PVP and or PVE ship, as it stands it has no real role that I can think of that other ships can't perform significantly better and for a lower pricetag. Being one of the ugliest ships in the game doesn't help it either.

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