Rubbing Hands In Evil Glee

Long time readers of this blog might remember my ongoing experiment in the Gank Falcon, but for those who are not familiar with the concept let me quickly review.

Last year, jealous of pirates hunting me in Arazus, Rapiers, and Pilgrims I tried to emulate them in my Falcon with this out of the box setup:


That's right; a Falcon with tackle and damage mods. Its piss poor damage and lack of any tank whatsoever (and weak ECM abilities) meant I could not take on multiple targets but I was fairly confident I could tackle a cruiser or smaller and shut it down long enough to wear it down and kill it. Got myself a Rifter and Arbitrator in my solo days in this ship and more recently helped surprise a Phobos that didn't expect a tackle as well as jamming.

This ship is one reason the new ECM ship changes intrigue me. The Signal Distortion Amplifier drops in strength from 20% bonus to 10% bonus, but the Falcon itself gets a bigger bonus to its ECM strength. It also gets a third turret hardpoint so I can put three Heavy Neutron Blasters on it boosting the DPS by about 34. And its rumoured to get a Hybrid weapon damage bonus of 5% per level... taking the current DPS of 167 to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 240. Then add the 93 DPS from 5 light drones.

To summarize: twice as much DPS to over 320 and effectively stronger ECM (enough to lock down one ship with near certainty).

Suddenly my Gank Falcon is looking very damn nice...