The Secret Art of the Vulture

Last week I talked initially about the leadership skills I needed to train to take advantage of the Vulture's role bonuses (and Nighthawk incidently). Today I'm going to look at various setups for the Vulture that I've been playing with as I experiment with the ship.

Vulture - Siege Warfare 

So here we have a Vulture with good solid tank sporting all three Siege Warfare Links. The weapons on the ship are secondary; its job is to stay alive and improve the performance of the rest of the fleet.

There's just one problem. Two of the three warfare links give bonuses to shield boosting and shield transporting (i.e. remote repping) and while the increase is very nice to a ship with a shield booster or a Logistic ship Basilisk with Shield Transporters, its not ideal for a typical 0.0 engagement where passive shield buffer tanks are the typical fare for shield tankers and everyone else using armour tanks.

So while this Vulture has some applications, especially in PvE scenarios where it can increase an active shield tank by almost 25%, we need to look at other options.

Vulture - Mixed Warfare

By getting rid of the two active shield warfare links and adding in the Armour Warfare Passive Defense link and Skirmish Warfare Evasive Maneuvures link the Vulture essentially becomes a damage control module that also reduces signature radius, increasing the survivability of the entire fleet by a significant margin.

Now the other types of warfare links requires more training including getting Armoured Warfare and Skirmish Warfare up to V and then the respective specialist skills, but that really is never a bad idea anyways.

Vulture - Sniper

It all feels kind of wrong to not be taking advantage of the Vulture's bonus to Hybrid damage and range, so this setup is intended to act as fleet support Sniper as well as providing resistance bonuses to the fleet. It has to sacrifice quite a bit of tank to accomplish this, and I had to use a 1% powergrid implant to make it work, but it can deliver a bit of punch out to 150 km which can ruin an interdictor's day.

This setup lacks a MWD, so I could switch the Large Shield Extender II for a MWD but it requires the 3% powergrid implant to fit.

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That was not an extensive list covering all possibilities, just some I've looked at. If you have your own Vulture setups, please post them in the comments.