A few days ago, my alt in EVE Online, Etha Preve, finished enough training to fly the Amarrian stealth bomber, the Purifier. After grouping with a friend who had just gotten the skills to fly his own bomber (a Nemesis), I knew I’d want one on my alt to help with level 4 missions.
There’s this time in Level 4 missions where you’ve taken down all the lesser ships with drones, and all you have left are slow, lumbering battle cruisers and battleships. These seem to take the most time, because I am usually ALSO in a slow, lumbering battleship. The ships are gravy for stealth bombers. They can stand out of missile, beam and gun range and just lob missiles and torpedoes into the fray. If they get aggro, they can move out of targeting range and cloak. As a fleet member, they are first-rate damage and, with sensor dampeners, can even take on missions by themselves, using their small signature radius, high flight speed and ability to jam enemy sensors to dance outside of firing range, making their entire lack of any defense less of an issue.
I bought the Purifier, stopped by Dodixie for a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, and then headed into my base in Aunia and parked it.
The real work was about to begin.
As a pilot who has trained for Amarr ships all her career, Etha had very little in the way of missile skills. There’s no point in sitting at the edge of a fight lobbing missiles if they don’t hit their targets.
It was time to plug the numbers into the EVE Fitting Tool.
I started my hunt for good fits over in BattleClinic. BattleClinic is THE go-to site for help with EVE Online, if you want a good overview for what is really happening in the game. They are also the #1 destination for sample ship fittings. EVEMON ties directly into their database.
I started with a fairly recent fit that depended upon speed and stealth for its power, and was advertised to be able to solo as well as it performed in a fleet.
It’s important to consider the BattleClinic fits ONLY as starting points. For one thing, they tend to use unrealistically expensive modules or require very advanced training. My alt is still relatively new – just over 6 million skill points – and has a ways to go.
Since I mean for this stealth bomber to pair with my Ishtar, and the Ishtar will fit a target painter, I was able to dispense with that. Since I NEVER plan to let this ship get within range to use the warp disruptor, that went. Nonetheless, I added a Monopulse Tracking Mechanism and a Small Tracking Diagnostic Subroutines to up the chance to hit. I replaced the MicroWarpdrive with an Afterburner as this is a mission running/plex set-up, replaced one of the Nanofiber Internal Structures (add speed) with a CPU Co-Processor because… I needed more CPU. Flip the cap booster with a cap regenerator and it was done – a fit that Etha could put on her ship with the power skills she has trained.
Missiles good out to 40km; I have not seen many NPCs fire effectively from that distance (though they do try). I have also not seen many NPCs with a velocity greater than 500m/s, so at 711m/s cruising speed under afterburners (which this ship can run full time), it should be impossible for any ship to get close enough to do serious damage, especially if the Ishtar is doing its job and keeping aggro and killing stuff with drones.
I mentioned before that, as an Amarr pilot, Etha had little training in missiles. I took all the skills needed from the list EFT provided and plugged them into EVEMON.
Some of the skills only need level I training, but I go by the philosophy that every skill should be trained up to at least III. It doesn’t take THAT long in most cases, but brings big benefits (or at least, doesn’t hurt).
Eleven days until this thing can be taken out to its first level 4 mission. Those torps and siege missiles are NOT CHEAP. If I’m firing a thousand ISK at something, I want it to HIT. So training comes first. I can wait. Patience is the prime characteristic for the EVE pilot, after all :)
There’s few things that I like as much as getting a new ship and thinking of all the things I could do for it. When I come up with a fit all my own, and take it into the black and see that it works – that’s a great feeling. Few MMOs let you have the freedom to be as creative as you like. And few MMOs have the amazing community to provide the sort of tools you need to really make your mark in the game.