Category Archives: Fitting

Navy Doctrine Fits

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There have been a few criticisms coming out of the recent live event, which saw a bunch of people leaving high sec to attack a target in NPC Nullsec. Most of them were people whining. Some were more valid, mostly focusing around in game organisation.

This post flows from one of the latter.

One of the biggest differences you’ll find between a Fleet from a large, well organised alliance, and a scratch fleet drawn together from randoms, is that the alliances fleet will contain ships which are far closer to each other in fit. You’ll have your DPS ships having similar ranges, everyone in the same kind of tank and so on.

That’s difficult to manage with a scratch fleet, as there’s no central source saying ‘Fit your ships this way.’

A side issue is: Newbies and noobs have this tendency to fit their ships badly. Newbies can break themselves from this, generally with the help of their corporations, and sometimes sites such as Battleclinic, or Eve Uni’s fittings.

However, it’s a bit difficult to send players off to look at third party sites, from the tutorials.

What would be good, in my very humble opinion, is if the Navies of New Eden (read CCP) were to publish some Doctrine fits. Tying it into ISIS would be great, though possibly a trifle excessive.

Then, when there’s a live event being run by one of the Empires, there can be a link to the doctrine fits, which may help shape the randoms into something a little more cohesive.

The moment that CCP release the SSO, I’m planning on sticking together a Doctrine storage system, for those groups without dedicated IT resources, which could be used. But something basic from CCP would be good. We don’t need a fit for every ship, but it would be nice to have the basics covered, both the T1 version, and the Navy version. Possibly some core T2 ships too.

Then you can add doctrine fits for some other things. Such as exploration fits from SOE, or fits from ORE, which fit a decent tank on the miners.

Teaching players to fit ships isn’t a simple thing. Examples go a long way.

Ship Fitting for Beginners – Part 1 – Tanking

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There have been many words written on how to fit ships in EVE Online, but not so many written by me. So here are mine.

I’m not going to tell you ‘This is how you fit a ship.’ No-one can tell you that. There are no rules to follow which will give you a good ship. EVE is like that, which is one of the major selling points for me; no ‘right way’. But there are guidelines which can lead you to fit your ships in a ‘not bad’ way. There are many more bad ways to fit a ship, than there are good ways. And so, here are my guidelines; you’ll find some of them in the Rules of EVE page.

Tanking

Tanking refers to how you deal with damage coming at your ship. Almost all ships need a form of tank. The only one I can bring to mind that doesn’t, is a ship fitted for a suicide gank in highsec. Don’t think about combining them. There are very few places where this makes sense. Mixing your tank cripples your ship.

Here’s where it gets complex. You have a number of choices to make. First, pick one of the following.

  • Shield Tank: For ships with: A bonus to shield tanking, like shield resists or boosting. And for ships with more mid slots than low slots. Generally the fastest of the lot
  • Armour Tank: For ships with: A bonus to armour tanking, like armour resists or boosting. And for ships with more low slots than mid slots. More hit points, but slower than shield tanked ships
  • Hull Tank: Real men Hull tank. Or people who don’t have a choice. This probably isn’t you. Combat ships do not hull tank unless piloted by morons.

Next, pick from one of the following:

  • Active tanking : For people in PvE, and possibly frigate PvP. Other classes generally won’t last long enough for the repairs to make a difference.
  • Buffer Tanking : This can be used with all tank types. The idea is to increase the raw hit points you have using  shield extenders and armour plating, and to increase your resists to make those hit points worth more, using modules such as Adaptive Invulnerability Fields, and Energized Adaptive Nano Membranes. This is standard for PvP. In PvE, you’ll end up paying a lot for repairs, or refitting after missions with a repper.
  • Passive Tanking : This only applies to Shield Tanks. It is similar to a Buffer tank, but also covers increasing your shield regeneration rate. Great in PvE. Not so worth it in PvP

There are also other minor forms of tanking, which take more skill to use. I’m not covering them here.

  • Speed tanking: Travelling fast enough, close enough, at the right angles to make you hard to hit.
  • Signature tanking: Being so small that you’re hard to hit.

Now, most ships are easy to pick which to use. Take the Punisher, for example. It has more low slots than mid slots. And it has a bonus to armour resists. Other ships are a trifle harder. Some can be tanked either way. Spend time with a Fitting tool, such as EFT, Eve HQ or pyfa They will save you time and isk. Battleclinic isn’t a bad idea. Just bear in mind that bad fits end up there.