Breaking the Rules, Sacrilege?

Hi there, it’s time for another Apothne™ EFT dump of fits that are probably not that great, but interesting nonetheless. With the notable exception of logistics ships, there is a rule that is taught to PvP newbies early on in their career, usually through the new player suggesting a fit that gives 3l3t3 p33v33p33rs eyes cancer. That rule is:

DO NOT FIT PASSIVE CAP MODS TO YOUR PVP SHIP. USE CAP INJECTORS.

Cap Rechargers and Relays are for the weirdos who do PvE content. Injection (broadly speaking) gives you more cap when you want it to, in one nice big lump at the click of a button. If you’re being hardcore neuted and your local reps turn off, you can pump your injectors, get a huge boost of cap and activate all the modules you want before the next neut cycle hits. (This is also a big part of why neuting boats are taught to stagger their reps, but I digress).

large capacitor batteries, which you would expect to be battleship class, actually fit rather well to cruiser hulls

With the advent of the cap battery changes in March, this rule may in fact have become obsolete. The key here is that large capacitor batteries, which you would expect to be battleship class, actually fit rather well to cruiser hulls while still leaving plenty of room for fitting other modules without the need of specific fitting modules or implants. This is especially true in the case of the Republic Fleet Capacitor Battery.

One advantage is that you are far less beholden to the cargo capacity of your spaceship vessel, which broadly speaking is all over the place already as a result of power creep without a large balance pass. For example, the Eos has a 400m3 cargo bay. This is the Gallente Command ship, a T2 Battlecruiser. The Svipul, a tiny flat T3 Destroyer, has 430m3 of cargo space! MrHyde has details of the full extent of the weirdness and lack of consistency in cargo capcacity across hulls, so I’ll leave the full details of that for him to write up.

Thus far, I’ve personally seen it on the Imperium’s Caracal doctrine as a replacement for injectors, which is easier for new players to manage their cap with one less button to remember to press. I’ve also seen it on a collection of solo ships, my own versions of which I’d like to share with you here.

The first example I saw was on a Deimos, which was fit something close to this is memory serves correctly:

The choice of double regular rep vs regular + anci is a personal choice. Typically, one favours the anci for burst tank, but personally given the cap stability with the choice to use a battery instead of a injector, I would try to outlast my opponents potentially more burst-focused local tank, until they run out of paste/injectors. If you’re planning on fighting lots of opponents, the anci is probably a better choice. For a true 1v1, the double rep may be better using your overheat to compensate for that burst.

The local tank bonus on the Deimos is great – you end up with a decent local tank and a crapton of DPS, making a really solid solo ship. That said, what are the disadvantages of choosing a battery over a Injector? What are the limitations?

The cap penalty from an MWD goes a long way to undoing the bonus from the battery

Well, firstly, you are far more susceptible to being neuted out. As you can’t use the tactic I mentioned earlier to pump in cap and get some rep cycles off, you’re just straight up dead when caught by a neuting ship. Further, you can’t really use a MWD. The cap penalty from an MWD goes a long way to undoing the bonus from the battery, meaning we are restricted to (appropriately sized) afterburners, which broadly speaking means we can’t solo in 0.0 where a MWD or oversized prop is mandatory for the scale of PVP we’re discussing here.

Having seen the Deimos, I wanted to see where else I could take this fitting ethos. Well, I need a cruiser that can local tank well, has plenty of powergrid, ideally capless guns and ideally spare utility highs for NOS. What did I end up going for? The Sacrilege. The Sac recently got a little buff from the game design team with a drone bay expansion to help it’s previously poor DPS. It’s still not mind-blowing, but it’s reasonable.

Whenever I’m experimenting with my EFT-fu, I start as cheap as possible to see if the fit works conceptually before moving on to the pimp. This fit has some cool aspects but is somewhat underwhelming. She has both capless guns shooting selectable damage and a NOS to assist our cap when neuted by another cruiser or several smalls from a few frigates. The resist bonus is not as strong as the raw local tank bonus on the Deimos, but still helps us up to a healthy 550 DPS tank before heat/links/drugs.

The next step is to apply affordable (~ish) and reasonable (kinda ~ish) pimp.

The faction EANMs (40m each) and scram (50m) may be a little much, but we’ve only increased the cost by 150-200 mill or so, with extreme results. The less restrictive faction reps (30m each) allow us to fit a full T2 NOS, and the T2 rigs (25m each) have a drastic result. We now tank 740 DPS, or 940 if we overload. The downside of the faction reps is that they are a little more cap heavy. A good substitute is Corelum C-types for about the same price which are much lighter on cap, rep a tiny bit less, but do cause you to go 1% over on PG. This fit is now in a place I really like – great tank, solid DPS, good ability to control range. We’re pretty much done, but we have forgotten drugs, a must-have for ships like this. Standard Exile takes you up to 880/1130OH DPS tank, and it’s absolutely worth throwing in some Crash to help that damage apply better.

This is pretty much where my wallet stops me. I used to own a links alt for fleet work (before I melted him down for precious brain goo), and personally when I fly solo I don’t like going through the effort of multiboxing, but (for now) links are AMAZING. Applying links takes up all the way up to a 1370/1750OH DPS tank and I daren’t even speculate on what that will be when we get armour Crystals from the research labs of the pirate factions as announced at Fanfest. I could go into all sorts of implants and compare, but I think that’s enough for today.

Have you been using cap batteries to replace boosters on your ships? I’m super interested to see what people are coming up with after all these module rebalances. Feel free to post them in the comments or tweet them to me @CallMeApoth but for now, see you next time!