WTB: PvP Battleship

As plans move forward and ISK is gathered, I’m planning how my contribution to corp PvP will take shape. While my plan to be an interceptor pilot and do some serious tackling is in place and ready to go, the fact remains I’ll need some sort of PvP battleship at some point. There are many options.

1) Rokh – This is my current mission running ship so outfitting a new one for PvP would be fairly straightforward. There are problems however. The Rokh is basically built for ranged sniping and the PvP I plan to participate in is often the up close and personal knifefights where the Rokh definitely is not ideal. I’ve considered a Rokh outfitted with blasters but its not built for that purpose and its awfully expensive to outfit incorrectly.

2) Hyperion – A peer of the Rokh, this ship is more designed for blaster fighting and is one of the most feared ships for small gang PvP right now. Damage bonus, decent drone bay, powerful armour tank; it does up close what the Rokh does from a distance. However, a few problems. I’d need 6 days of training just to sit in the sucker and I have the armour tanking skills of a wet paper towel. And its just as expensive as the Rokh.

3) Raven – Less expensive than a Rokh or Hyperion, decent shield tank, and I can outfit it pretty nicely. Not super impressive in the damage or speed department, but an all-round adequate ship for PvP or ratting.

4) Megathron – The mega is a downstep from the Hyperion so has similar advantages and disadvantages: has damage and tracking bonus, is cheaper, but is mainly an armour tanker once again and requires significant training.

5) Dominix – A favourite for small gang PvP due to its very cheap price, flexibility due to massive drone bay (375m3!) and drone damage bonus, and easy to tank since it doesn’t rely on its turrets to do damage as much as other options. Downside is that again it requires training to Gallente BS and I don’t have armour tanking skills either. And its ugly as sin.

6) Ammar/Minmatar Battleships – Even more training required as I don’t have cruiser skills there yet for these races, and Ammar ships also armour tank. As well they use different weapon systems altogether. So out.

7) Scorpion – For the first time, a battleship that is not about direct damage. This vessel is cheap and has huge boni to ECM skills. I’d need about 13 days to make my EWAR skills uber but I can get into this ship and start jamming people today. Damage is not great with 4 cruise launcher or 4 heavy rails, but in small gangs damage can be dealt by others. This ship is all about the lockdown. With a 75m3 drone bay I can fit some nice ECM drones to assist the lockdown.

In the end I settled on going the EWAR route for the Scorpion. The price and capabilities combine to make it perfect for what I want. And the EWAR skills I train up are also going to be useful in Blackbirds and Recon ships.

UPDATE: I wrote this yesterday but an internet outage prevented me from posting it. Last night I went out and purchased my scorpion and outfitted it with ECM and Cruise Missile Launchers.