Quite frankly, I'm not sure why it was removed. The Drake and Hurricane both outclass the Harbinger by a fair margin.

Have you tried moving your guns around your slots? Every ship now has as many turrets as it does high slots, even if it doesn't have that many hardpoints. Your module locations influence where your guns show up.

If this doesn't fix your problem, I apologize. Best of luck.

^^ that is how i do with my pvp harbs. so it has 4 and 3 rows on the side and 2 underneath. looks muuuuuch better

Justify it however you like, but the ability to pick your battles is a fundamental factor behind game balance. The Pilgrim is quite obviously an inferior combat vessel to the Curse, but the cloak lets it choose its engagements in a way that still gives it a niche. This is why the Curse gets a range bonus and the Pilgrim does not.

The fact that a Harbinger "would win hands-down" is quite irrelevant, because it can't force the engagement. And against any opponent which it can engage (read: Battleships), it loses outright.

hmm, well I guess i'll take another go at it. If you can actually make it look correct than I was doing something wrong.

open fitting and put in 3 guns, empty slot (or neut or whatever) and 4 guns and looks right.

The ability to pick your battles solo is more important when roaming alone, fair point, but that doesn't make it outclassed in general. The same poorly worded arguments are made about the hype being a bad fleet bs. So what if it is? It is not designed to fill that role.

If not being able to catch the target automatically made ships worse than their opponents, covert ops frigates and nullified t3's would be the best pvp ships in the game.

My argument merely questioned the value of winning a fight that you can't make happen.

We've essentially got four scenarios:

1. I can force the engagement and will win if I do so.
2. I can force the engagement, but it would be suicide.
3. I can't force the engagement and if my opponent does I will lose.
4. I can't force the engagement but would win if I could.

You've postulated that the Harbinger engagement is type 4. As I explained earlier, I'm not convinced that's the case. If that is the case, it's going to be irrelevant, because the Harbinger doesn't get to force the engagement and the fight doesn't happen. In game balance, we generally ignore type 4 matchups because they represent pilot error. Someone screwed up and they should die in a fire for it.

Similarly, most covert ops engagements are of type 2. They can choose to fight almost whoever they please, but it's generally going to be a losing battle. An intelligent pilot won't engage, so it's not generally going to happen. We can ignore these matchups, because they are uncommon and represent pilot error. Someone screwed up and they should die in a fire for it.

Essentially, it's the balance of type 1 and type 3 engagements that determine whether a ship is good for PvP. It's really not a hard thing to understand -- if you can get fights you can win and avoid the fights you can't, you're in good shape. The problem is that people ignore this and try to justify bad ships on the grounds of engagements that should never happen.

You proposed to me that a ship able to opt in or out of an engagement was automatically superior ("outclass," was the word you used) to it's opponent. I just took that to it's logical conclusion, which happened to be absurd. I'm glad you recognize that much.

Actually, I was speaking more to the fact that the Hurricane has more effective hardpoints, easier fittings, better mobility, better neutralization, superior tracking, capless guns, and the ability to select damage type. But we can throw on the ability to choose fights to that, sure.

I love how you're justifying the Harbinger by saying it just needs a tackler. I think I've been hearing that about the Retribution and Coercer for a while, now, too...

Your entire premise was based on the latter point, but feel free to mewl on about tertiary points, which coincidentally don't hold water in a harb on cane engagement where the cane can't simply duck out.

Yes...tertiary. Funny, I thought those sort of stats were generally relevant when deciding whether a ship was fit for purpose or not.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure why it was removed. The Drake and Hurricane both outclass the Harbinger by a fair margin. Even with an 8th hardpoint, the Harbinger would still only have 10 turrets -- which is precisely what the Hurricane has.

Please position that last turret that is on the back top side to the empty left side underneath the face of the harbinger. It looks stupid when there are seven guns.

Fit for what purpose, exactly? Beating a standard shield/neut cane? A standard armor harb can do that, easily. Provided it gets the engagement, and I already provided you that caveat. Fit a cap booster, neut problem solved. Head to head, the cane does more dps, hits the cane's em hole, and has much more ehp.