Gallente Tech II Cruisers and Battlecruisers - Follow Up

In response to last night's post dangman4ever asks about my thoughts on the Proteus and Cosmik R5 suggests going for a pure gank Astarte as they are running fairly cheap these days and can act like a heavy Heavy Assault Cruiser.

Proteus - Strategic Cruiser - Its hard with the strat cruisers to give an overall impression on their capability since they have the option of being in so many different configurations, but I'll give you a comparison to one of my all time favourites, the Gank Thorax.

Setting the Proteus in such a configuration meant maximizing blaster firepower and speed with as much buffer defence as possible. And the Proteus excels at this task:

I've probably went too far on the buffer tank with over 19 thousand hitpoints as this slows down the cruise considerably. Swapping to an 800 plate and one Trimark still gives over 12 thousand while having another rig slot. Its almost cap stable with only one CCC, has long range scrambler and great tracking on the heavy blasters. Beautiful ship for short range gang PvP and one I would probably buy and use if I could find the month of time to train the skills. Maybe in the spring.

Astarte - Gank Configuration - So I took Cozmik's advice and played with a pure gank configuration on the Astarte, playing with a shield tank instead of traditional armour.

With the drones it can achieve nice DPS but requires the cap booster to power the hungry MWD (unlike the Proteus with its cap use bonus on MWDs). I threw on some overdrive injestors to give it a boost in speed to keep up with smaller targets. Not sure if I like trying to shield tank it though, even if I switched a hardener for an extender it still seems weak for a command ship. I wish the armour repper bonus was resistance bonus and then I could go with the armour buffer tank and ignore the reppers entirely.

I think if I want a pure tech II damage dealer, I'd go with the Deimos for faster agility and speed and lower price point.