Arty Alpha Fleets

[RoemySchneider]

yes, but the guardians are already dead. the bs can't hit you so the lokis are the only dangerous (and juicy) element left on the field before you can rake in the BS kills completely unharmed. 80 zealots deal ~34,000 dps with faction xray - and why wouldnt you go closer (16-17km) with arty BS shooting you -.-
that's a combined pulse-laser-'alpha' of ~94k. 1600mm guardians sport way less than that, even when dressed for the occasion with 1+1 active hardeners after receiving the intel about an incoming zealot fleet. and should there still be a few misses due to zealots being too fast for their own good, the guardians will die for sure with the second cycle <3seconds later -.-
no logi can react in that time, especially with armor RR.
should the loki do the same and even sport 1.1mil laser-eHP with double 1600mm, it still dies in 30something seconds. a lot faster if you add some stabberFI to the mix. indeed during that death by a thousand papercuts, you might just get two zealots webbed enough to 'alpha' them.

shit is really going to hit the fan once aHAC fleets realize they don't need to bring amarr jammers anymore as they can just kill the guardians in under 5 seconds flat - 80x unbonus'ed minnie jammers with their 4.something jam strength should work well against 10-20 lokis; the webbing subsystem makes them end up with only 13 ladar.

ofc all these time values apply only in a lag free (or time diluted) environment vOv

[Dodgy Past]

A Maelstrom alpha fleet will have Huginns providing tackle, which handily have a fraction of the EHP (50k against Scorch or thereabouts), making it completely possible for Zealots to nuke the tackle and then run rings around Maelstroms, which have an EM hole.

Barring the fact that the Huginn's should be well out of range of the Zealots.

Personally not that sure why Zealots are being discussed though since the fact they're not being brought to fleet fights is pretty damming evidence that they've been successfully countered.

I do like the fact that for current fleet fights you need to bring a range of ships that rely on each other to be effective.

@ Roemy have you ever been in a fleet fight using BS and T3s? Because when we were using them with Hellcats we considered it to be good news whenever the enemy FC primaried a T3 since it was going to waste their DPS until they realised they'd have to switch... and you're arguing with a guy that's using them day in day out to win fights.

Look through the recent fights and see how often Loki die? We leave primarying them till we cleared some of the logi off the field because even the NC has a shot at keeping theirs up.

[RoemySchneider]

you must've skipped two posts


zealots aren't being brought largely because of the shitty performance of <2.5sec cycle time during lag, the still-strong presence of drakes-with-unlimited-MWD-plus-recharging-BS-like-tank and the high quota of losses when trying to bring in 100+ zealots through a gate that's letting half the fleet time-out and prevent them from turning on their speed tank. dumb buffers actually have a slim chance of being alive after the tenth relog -.-

aHACs were invented during a time when RR-BS with mostly 'short' range weapons (lolrailguns) were (still) popular. and although everybody thought they'd be a good idea against missiles, it turned out that lag didnt cap drakes out after <70km and added some dozens of invisible shield rechargers to each of them.

arty fleets exist largely due to the drake, but they usually come with a sizeable bunch of drakes as well.

once lag gets 'fixed' - or CCP surrenders to it by introducing time dilation (although i'm fairly certain we'll experience similar lag on top of that) - it'll take care of the unlimited cap and the asynchronous shield recharge. throw in the overdue nerf to tank and/or heavy missiles' explosion radius (why is the long range weapon more precise...?) and we can have something remtoely resembling a paper>rock>scissors game

[Shin_getter]

If you are brining a lot of ships then arty bs isn't that great to begin with, if it weren't for the lag messing up with cycles. If you bring 80 hellcats it'd one salvo most things on the grid too, and it has far better tracking and cycle time, totally nullifying the advantage of artillery outside of range.

[Garst Tyrell]

[quote=Shiroi Okami]

stuff

So basically you want scorch to outrange artillery. Yeah that sounds like a really good and balanced plan.

If you put as much effort into thinking about counters to arty blobs as you did crying about them you'd be on to something. Like I said on the first page, just because your logi blobs don't work against them does not mean arty is invincible or overpowered, the onyl reason arty is seeing such use is because logistics is inherently overpowered[/quote:3vmauand]

quick make this into personal attacks. hows angel fotm going for you?

the point which you so completely missed is that scorch is t2, t1 arties...is t1. If you want to make use of the racial benefits of a weapon system, you should have to train and specialize in them even if training only takes a month or two for bs skills. Get rid of all this t1-almost-as-good-as-t2 nonsense

[Tafkat]

quick make this into personal attacks. hows angel fotm going for you?

the point which you so completely missed is that scorch is t2, t1 arties...is t1. If you want to make use of the racial benefits of a weapon system, you should have to train and specialize in them even if training only takes a month or two for bs skills. Get rid of all this t1-almost-as-good-as-t2 nonsense

...and scorch is ammo for short range guns, while 1400s are top-tier long range guns. Of course they should be comfortably outranging scorch, even with T1 ammo, for much the same reason that T1 mega beams and tachs should and do.

[Shiroi Okami]

quick make this into personal attacks. hows angel fotm going for you?

the point which you so completely missed is that scorch is t2, t1 arties...is t1. If you want to make use of the racial benefits of a weapon system, you should have to train and specialize in them even if training only takes a month or two for bs skills. Get rid of all this t1-almost-as-good-as-t2 nonsense

...and scorch is ammo for short range guns, while 1400s are top-tier long range guns. Of course they should be comfortably outranging scorch, even with T1 ammo, for much the same reason that T1 mega beams and tachs should and do.

Exactly.

And as far as angel fotm goes yeah, genos is obviously flying massive dramiel gangs all the time and nothing else, so its going great, ty

[Laevateinn]

You simply can't remove logistics ships from an enemy fleet with slow damage over time when his 15+ logistics mates will keep him alive, and even if you do, that's a huge amount of time wasted. The sheer number of logistics in large fleets makes this unworkable, and CCP won't be able to change it to anything else. The alpha battleship is a good counter to this, removing logistics with co-ordinated alphas.

If it's not co-ordinated, if there's no webbing or target painting (Artillery has a 400m resolution, the standard Guardian has <90m), if there's no fleet behind to support the battleships, they die in a fire. If they didn't need the above, then they would be OP. Can the same be said of a Hellcat, Fist or Thundercat (Tengu) fleet?

Its a difficult fleet to pull off, but it's the ideal counter to fleets with dozens of logistics ships backed up by T3, T3 commander alts and carriers.

[Lithia Tsanov]

Counters to atry-badon fleets....

1: Move
2: Shoot the logi's
3: get closer