Cmdr Sy
Appetite 4 Destruction
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Posted - 2006.12.04 21:11:00 -
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I am not going to post full setups until I have actually assembled one, but I can give people two hints.
1) Nos, ACs and active tanks work great on the other two Amarr ships with armour resistance bonuses.
Remember that they are supertanks first, damage second!
So long as you don't make the mistake of packing too many nos, and have the skills to back up the setups, the Punisher and Maller will happily shred anything which doesn't jam or drone them - especially another Punisher or Maller which uses lasers. The Abaddon, with its armour resistance bonus and cap-destroying RoF bonus, was going to complete the series. And just as conventional wisdom butchered hundreds of Caracal, Moa and Omen pilots, it has the capacity to backfire on BS pilots who assume that an active supertank which trades a cap use bonus for cap-less weapons while freeing up powergrid for nos and armour, is doing something wrong.
In other words, don't knock the cap-injected dual-rep, dual-nos, neut, 5x 800mm AC brigade, because it simply represents a scaling-up of a proven method.
But then the Abaddon's RoF bonus was changed to damage bonus, and this opens up a new possibility. Which brings me to...
2) Use Dual Heavy Pulse Lasers.
Save Tachyons for fleet setups, bring an injector and hope you see your two minutes of fame and not your desktop. As for megapulse, consider this:
Mega Pulse Laser II
Damage mod: 3.6 x
RoF: 7.88 s
Cap: 40
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II
Damage Mod: 2.4 x
RoF: 6.08 s
Cap: 25
OK, so the megapulse does 50% more damage. However, its cycle time is 30% longer. The real DPS advantage gained by using megapulse is a mere 16%, at the cost of 23% higher cap use over time and far higher fitting requirements. At this point, I will repeat what I said above:
Supertank first, damage second!
Don't accept a trade-off of 23% higher cap use for 16% higher damage. The ship's damage bonus is there to make dual heavy pulse setups viable on an active tank, not to make it into a megapulse gank plaform mysteriously inferior to the Armageddon. The Armageddon is better at that by design.
Incidentally your optimal and falloff will be almost the same, with slightly better tracking.
So how will the Abaddon perform on paper?
Weapon cap use will be 112.5 cap for a cycle time of 4.1 seconds without damage mods, or 27.4 cap per second. Two heavy diminishing nos will provide 20 cap per second. A heavy electrochemical injector will easily sustain the balance, along with a pair of large T2 armor reps, hardners and warp/tracking disruptors. DPS with Conflagration L will be 388.8, again assuming no damage mods and not including drones.
Resistances with an active multispectral tank (T2 hardners) will be somewhere along the lines of:
EM: 86.5%
Th: 78.1%
KE: 74.7%
Ex: 73.0%
In practice, the EM hardner will be far more usefully replaced by a damage control or heatsink (or plate), and the 7th low slot will be taken up by a 1600mm rolled tungsten plate. Either way, it should tank 600 DPS with ease, or else free up some slots by ditching active tank in favour of plated passive and more room for damage mods.
People wishing to participate in nos-fests can always replace the 6th turret with a 3rd nos or a neutralizer.
So to sum up, what the Devs said was right.
- Cap is this ship's weakness, but not in the sense of a fatal design flaw, rather an encouragement to explore one of two possibilities - ACs or a currently underutilised class of large energy turret.
- You can tank or gank but not both at the same time, assuming when they said gank, they meant Tachyon alpha strike in fleet battles and not megapulse deployment, at which this ships well and truly bombs. The tanking part is self-explanatory - active or passive, whatever works for you.
Anyway, that's how I see it. 
If you have a more original idea, share.
Or keep fitting megapulse and heatsinks. 
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