On January 14 2011 04:31 happyft wrote:A Basic Guide to FittingBeen noticing some ...
special fits on our roams. This
wiki is pretty good, please read it. I wrote this up so we don't have to keep explaining how to fit your ship to every new person who signs up...
I'm still a really new pilot, but let me see if I can distill some of that into something more compact. The type of ship you want to fly is determined by what kind of role you should be playing. There are a few basic roles for low-sec roams: DPS, tackle, e-war, and remote repair. There are flavors of each, but I'll get into that later.
Generally you want to specialize in one of these 4 roles -- because bonuses compound, a fleet's efficiency is optimized when a single ship is geared towards a single role. (i.e. Putting gyrostabilizers on a blackbird would result in both crappy DPS and crappy e-war)
In order to fit your ship to a specific role, you need to understand what kind of mods go into which slots, in order to know what the tradeoffs are in selecting one mod over another.
Highs are for DPS and RR -- weapons, energy transfer, and shield/armor repair. Here, your trade-offs are your ability to hit small targets (tracking/explosion velocity and size), range, and DPS.
+ Show Spoiler [Fitting a Drake] +You're trying to decide between fitting heavy assaults, assaults, and heavies on your Drake. Fitting HAMs will max your DPS, but greatly reduce your range with pretty suboptimal ability to hit frigates. AMLs will minimize your DPS, provide you decent range, but maximizes your ability to hit frigates. HMLs will give you decent DPS, max your range, but with poor effectiveness against frigates. Ammo also has similar kinds of trade-offs between range, DPS and sometimes tracking. What combination of everything you decide upon depends on what kind of fleet you're in, and what your FC wants -- always ask if you're not sure.
Mediums are for tackle, shield tank, cap booster, ewar, and propulsion -- webs, warp disruptor/scramblers, microwarpdrive/afterburner, target painter/ecm/remote sensor dampener, shield extender/hardener/booster, and cap boosters. Your trade-offs are your EHP, ewar and tackle. (I consider propulsion to be mandatory in any fit)
+ Show Spoiler [Fitting a Caracal] +You have 4 mids to work with after using 1 for MWD. If you're solo pvp'ing or playing heavy tackle (as opposed to frigates which play light tackle), you'll have to use a web and scram, and put 2 large shield extenders for the remaining 2 slots. If you're running a HAM Caracal (apparently you can get ~400dps on that?), you'll want to put shield hardeners like invulnerability fields instead of tackles (you won't have enough power grid to add on more shield extenders), so you can maximize your EHP, so you can stay in the fight as long as possible to keep up your DPS when you're primaried.
+ Show Spoiler [Misc] +I know I know, why would you fly a pvp Caracal, ok shut up I get it =P
Lows are for armor and hull tank, speed, and DPS -- armor plates/hardeners, bulkhead/damage control units, nanofiber/overdrive, and gyros/ballistic control units/etc. Your trade-offs are speed, tank and DPS.
+ Show Spoiler [Fitting a Rupture] +This is pretty straightforward ... if you want to kite someone, you need 2 nanofibers for speed and agility. If you're armor-tanking (in the case of the rupture, this has a lot more EHP than the shield-tank variant), you fit armor plates. And generally you want at least 2 gyros, and with 2 tracking enhancers as well to maximize your DPS.
+ Show Spoiler +There are also low mods that increase your grid at the cost of CPU, CPU at the cost of grid, and increase your shields at the cap and vice versa, and a few other variants. You use these in pretty specific kinds of custom builds, or pve.
Lastly, I really want to emphasize these last few points, because I see at least one person making one of these mistakes on every single roam for the past few days.
Fit cruiser-sized modules on cruisers, frigate-sized modules on frigates, and battleship-sized modules on battleships. So do not put 4x 200 mm armor plates on a Rupture. Do not fit standard missile launchers on a Caracal. Do not fit medium shield extenders on a cruiser. (Yes, I have seen you guys do all of these)
Always try to
use the highest meta you can reasonably afford. There's no reason you should be flying with the worst mods, when higher metas provide you with more DPS/range and cost less cap/grid/cpu (except t2s). Seriously. Don't fly with meta 0s. Generally meta 3s are good.
Don't leave slots unused, and use all your grid & cpu. If you've got free lows, but no grid/cpu, then put nanofibers/overdrives there. If you've got free mids, but only CPU leftover, then put in a shield hardener, a target painter, something. If you've got free highs but only CPU, then put a salvager, or a small nos/neut.
Always have some kind of tank, especially if you're a tackler. Consider how much DPS is coming your way, and whether you can last 30-45 seconds of it. If you're in a rupture/caracal tackling a Cane, you'll need 15k EHP at the minimum (15k/500 dps = 30 seconds). If you've only got 1k EHP in a frigate, you're not tackling anything, because you'll be dead in 5-10 seconds.
Okay! This was longer than I expected. But hope this helps.
(waits for the flames from the vets, haha)