I'm sorry, despite the good effort, this is NOT the way to go with the rebalance.

Dictors need 3 things to work properly to make them unique and useful for their price.

1. Get rid of Warp Interdiction Spheres and make 'dictors and hictors the only ship able to field Mobile warp disruptors. Hictors would keep their highslot point. This frees up their fitting quite a bit, and makes them invaluable ships to have in null and wh space. Hictors are as valued as they are because they not only perform a unique and extremely valuable role (supercap points), they also have the fitting and toughness to be useful in a brawl. Making Dictors the "smaller" versions of these also keeps in line with the skill progression they have, just as you have been doing with Assault frigates and HACs.

2. Drop a high slot (or two) for fitting slots.
If Interdictors become the only ships that can field Mobile Warp disruptors, they don't have to fit the warp interdiciton sphere launcher, and can balance their fitting a bit better. The inherent problem with destroyer balancing is that CCP is still actually stuck on the tier system, in respect to slots for ship classes to a degree. Since the destroyer falls between the cruiser and frigate size classes, but it also has an in-born role with its inception, it suffers from slot misappropriation. Interdictors are not t1 destroyers, and thus do not need a full 8 high slots for direct offensive power. Dropping one or two highs and keeping the missile or gun limit on each to 6 would allow ships like the flycatcher to finally, FINALLY be freed from the horror that is having a single lowslot. It is beyond awful that dictors got balanced into a corner like this, and is one of the many reasons that they are underused in direct pvp situations outside of popping bubbles for camps.

Then please explain, o wise goon, why dictors must be so underpowered to use the all-important interdiction sphere launcher? Also, I said nothing about removing the Hictor's ability to use the Warp Disruption FIeld generator.

I can definitely agree with you on that last point, and towards the end I said if they don't remove dictor bubbles from the game, they should at least drop the fitting reqs a bit so the ships don't get penalized for CPU so much for using them. Would you think it'd be good if they rolled at least part of the firing rate bonus into the ship, left a utility high on all of them, and buffed HP, resists, and gave extra slots? I'm just frustrated at how pathetic they are in actual combat. I mean, if you have one camping the gate, it should at least be able to contribute to the fight if you catch something with your gang you know?

Can someone tell me which is the objectively best one? Flycatcher looks un inspiring for a first glance. it's slow and has low dps.

Because unlike a HiC they dont need to stay on field for their bubbles to function. They have a completely different style.