Pookoko
Sigma Sagittarii Inc.
128
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Posted - 2015.10.20 11:52:21 -
[1] - Quote
I have Kronos, Golem and Vargur across a few characters. I can't comment on Paladin as that is the only Marauder I've never tried.
Normally I mission with 4 characters, running two missions concurrently with two characters per mission. The deadliest combination is Golem + Vargur, without a question, as Golem can shoot rage torps to BS rats (you need good TP & missile support skills) and Vargur will just annihilate anything cruiser size or below with awesome tracking and the least 'wasted' damage.
If I had to choose one ship to run variety of missions, I would go for Vargur. The reason is that most big L4 missions still have quite a lot of cruisers and frigates, and although you may kill a BS rat a few seconds faster with a Golem than a Vargur you'd be spending considerably more time taking out the cruiser rats in a Golem (even if you 1 volley them, ROF is slow on both Torps and Cruise). If you want range, then cruise Golem is nice but for me personally I didn't feel it was an upgrade from a CNR, especially considering tank normally isn't an issue and with rigor rigs and the ship bonus cruise CNR has no problem with damage application even without TP bonus (and at the long ranges that cruise missiles can hit to, it's well outside of TP optimal).
It comes down to personal preferences, but I would compare them as following
Torp Golem : WOW damage, pleasure in seeing huge chunks of HP disappearing from fat ships per each volley.
AC Vargur : swats BC and below ships left and right like flies. Your busiest task during the missions will be target locking as the rats get taken down so fast. BUT when you're hitting BS rats, you will not be hugely impressed in a way that you get when using torp Golem.
Now a few general advice,
1. Fit MWD, not MJD. You don't need to 'range tank' in a Marauder and there are still quite a few missions where you need to travel 20~40km to the next gate. You can do this relatively quickly with well placed MJD usage but it doesn't compare to rushing with MWD while keep shooting stuff.
2. For both Golem and Vargur, medium sized deadspace shield booster is completely sufficient and will cut down on need for micromanagement. Both ships will run perfectly fine with cap booster & XL shield booster, but medium deadspace shield boosters are not that expensive & it's just one less thing to care about. Depending on how much cap you want, Pithum B-Type or Gistum B-Type are both relatively cheap and gives sufficient tank (if you want to save a bit you can go for c-type, but the price difference isn't that big).
3. If you are going for Golem, especially if you are going for Torpedos, you really want all that missile support skills trained to V along with some decent skills for TP amount & optimal. This is one advantage of Vargur in a sense that with its tracking bonus and tracking computer you can track things well enough with support skills at IV. Another advantage of a gun boat is that you can control the transversal to improve your tracking (if necessary), but with missile boat you really need the support skills to help you out on this one. (This is why Mach was such a good ship for my low-sp Minmatar alt years ago, because it had good enough fall off & tracking & damage with less than perfect skills. For missile boats, having maxed support skills make such big difference that flying with anything less than V doesn't give that great impression).
4. Kronos
This was my first Marauder, as Gallente has always been my favourite faction ever since I started playing EVE. You want to fit this with blasters, and mostly you'd be using it with null and bastion to get that extra fall off range. If you are going against some Serpentis BS that like to sit at 50km range, even with tracking computer/enhancer & bastion + using null ammo you will be doing considerably less damage than what it says on EFT. In most of the missions you will be using null ammo because of range issues, so the DPS from Kronos isn't actually much better than Vargur in most practical scenarios.
BUT! If you are sitting on top of multiple BS rats (via MJD or MWD or whatever), and blast them through with void ammo, it is very satisfying.
AND it has Police skin now, which is the only reason I'm thinking about going back to missioning for a while. :p
PS: Although I've never flown Paladin, I did a lot of missioning in Gallente space with Nightmare. Lasers work perfectly well vs Serpentis, but personally I didn't think it was good enough vs. Angels. Difference may not be as big as some people make it out to be, but when I'm flying a pirate BS or Marauders I want 'great' performance, not 'pretty decent'. If you have enough raw damage, lasors are pretty decent vs. Angels too. But it's not 'great' in a way that Vargur's fusion ammo or CNR's Nova missiles are.
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