Oh, it's a cliche, certainly, but like most cliches, based on a very evident and often repeated truth, which at the end of the day is how cliches come about. The fact that we're bored of hearing it, doesn't make it any less true. In this case, it's the one about falling off horses and needing to get straight back on again, lest imagined fear paralyze you and prevent you from ever riding again. Or something.
My particular horse in this instance is the Agent 4 Combat missions in EVE Online, and my fall was detailed previously - the destruction of my pimped out Dominix-class Battleship, est. value 150 million ISK. (Worth noting that this is the first Battleship I've ever lost in EVE, in around four years of play! I'm usually far more cautious, and/or timid, than that!) This has rather left me without an reliable income of the magnitude I've come to expect from my EVE sessions, as the next biggest ship in my personal fleet is in the Battlecruiser class, and while some Grandmaster Missioneers report various success using these half-size mini-battleships in some of the easier Agent 4 combat scenarios, I remain dubious of my own ability to pull this kind of stunt off. Battlecruisers are mostly limited by their inability to fit Large weapons - litteraly Battle
Cruisers, so have far lower DPS, and typically lend themselves to passively tanked setups - a sphincter-tightening way to play that I'll explain another time.
Luckily, my cash reserves just about stretched to a new Battleship, and a bit of minor trading boosted that to the point where I can afford a basic set of equipment too. which helps. A change is as a good as a rest, and this time I've gone for The Other Missioning Ship, the Caldari Raven. The Raven is actually the single most popular ship for these agent missions, with the Dominix being more of a specialised choice, and generally in second place. Crucial differences include an almost total dependency on Missiles as primary weapon system (Cruise Missiles and Torpedoes, specifically), instead of the Dominix's drone-cloud, and a design that suggests Shield Tanking, rather then the Armour Tanking I'd been doing previously.
These two new categories of skill make the whole experience almost like swapping from, say, a Magician, Necromancer, or other Pet Class, to a Wizard, Elementalist, etc - a long-range nuker DPS class instead. In EVE you can be everything you like, provided you've put in the required hours training the new skills you need, and I used to fly Caracals and Kestrels a lot in the distant past - Missile Cruisers and Missile Frigates respectively - both of which use similar skills to the Raven, if on a smaller scale. So while I'm currently much better in Dominixes, I'm not a helpless newbie in a Raven, although still a lot of room to grow and improve over the coming weeks.
So with all that in mind, I fitted up and rolled a new Agent 4 Mission, which turned out to be the Serpentis version of Vengeance - perfect! A meaty mission with several stages, quite a few BS enemies, along with the lesser cohorts, and a big fast super-tanking 2.5 million bounty enemy at the very end, and the ideal testing ground for my new setup. Fitting out a Raven is a bit of a no-brainer really:
High: Cruise Missile Launchers
Mid: Shield Boosters, Extenders, Hardeners and Boost Amplifiers
Low: Missile Damage Bonuses, and crucially, Power Diagnostic Systems -
NOT the usual Cap Power Relays, as these hurt shield boosting.
It was reassuring to see that it has enough drone bay for 5x Light and 5x Medium drones, so I'm not completely throwing away my extensive skill training in Drone control, and with missiles that big, and quite low "size-compensation" missile skills, my drones become a vital Point Defence system, good vs the smaller scrambling frigates. The shield has about 12.5k HP, compared to the Dominixes 8k of armour, and it's nice not to have the constant red shield gauge you have to get used to with an Armour Tank, where the shield is largely for show anyway. Armour doesn't heal itself on it's own either. In a shield tank ship, the armour becomes another 'emergency' layer of HP, like the structure, allowing for a far more leisurely exit if need be - more "Terribly sorry old chap, but I've just remembered that I have a pressing engagement elsewhere! Toodle-pip!" when the shield fizzles out, rather than my more customary "AAAH! ON FIRE! GTG!!1" when the armour melts away and the 0% Resistance Structure catches fire. If you're
lucky in that situation, you only have to spend an hour parked outside the starbase with your 5x Large Hull Repairers furiously trying to put you back together...
The ship performed well, and I see right away why they're pretty much the only choice for regular Agent 4 work by all and sundry - simple, effective and durable. My own mid-skilled 6x Cruise DPS was comparable to the battery of high-skilled 5x Sentry Drones I'd been using previously, but of course, I can then add 5x Medium Drones
as well, making reasonable work of the enemy BS rats. Apparently, I'm to use Torpedoes for those, for a much faster kill, but one downside of the Raven is that the launchers are fixed - to swap from Cruise to Torps, I'd have to come away, dock, refit and return - all a bit too much hastle for me. Torpedoes aren't much use against the Cruisers and Frigate targets, compared to just spamming out another wave of Cruise Missiles. Their damage is reduced vs small targets, but that just means you need
more of them!
The Raven is satisfyingly noisy too. Fighting in a Droneboat is a quite silent affair - they whisper away to the target and circle making quite muted pew-pew noises, then later, a bang. Raven is a different story and the whole mission is one cacophonic symphony of detonation after detonation - you really do get a
feel of huge firepower in one, which is nice. On a practical level not relying on the drones is actually quite a relief for me. EVE has a persistent history of the drones not quite behaving as they should, most notably a recent habit of the drones causing premature aggro on the next clump of enemies, and either getting picked off, leaving a Dominix quite toothless, or causing you to have to dock them to transfer this aggro to yourself, making you need to tank two spawns at once. Missiles don't have this problem, and although my drones are still important, leaving them safely docked for long periods during a mission is no longer an issue, relegating them to the secondary weapon system they're probably more suited to be.
Like Drones, missiles can be chosen by damage type, making it easy to tailor your assault to the enemy at hand. Also like drones, missiles aren't subject to all that complex radians per second trigonometrical nonsense, which although clever, is also a bit of a pain to consistently manage well. It speaks volumes that neither of the top two missioning ships is a hybrid, projectile or laser boat. The vast quantities of missiles one gets through can get expensive, compared to turret use, but mission bounties more than cover the costs, and the smart thing to do will be to buy in Cruise Missile Blueprint Originals in all the flavours, and make my own out of reprocessed junkloot.
The Raven has something of a poor reputation in PvP, mostly I think, because you can see the missiles coming for many seconds, and leave if needed. NPCs aren't that smart, so it works in missions, and that suits me fine. This is my moneymaker, and as long as it does it's job, I can play with other 'toy' ships and exotic fittings later.
In some ways, it's a shame to end up in the same ship as everyone else, but I guess they're all in it for a reason; it works, and works well. The missions was a complete success, and require no warp-outs, which all bodes well for the future, and a subsequent Sansha's 'Massive Attack' went swimmingly too, making me wonder why I hadn't flown a Raven much sooner. More training ahead, and I really must remember to actually insure the ship this time...