Friday, March 26, 2010

Ishtar vs Guristas: Hilariously Excellent

The ishtar is the gold standard ship for killing guristas, especially when plexing. I just got into one for the first time and yes, it's good. I'm not though -- I can't use t2 heavy drones yet and drone interfacing is only level 4, so I'm severely lacking for dps.

For those who don't know, the Ishtar is a gallente drone-boat HAC that starts with some kin/therm resists. It's good against guristas because they do kin/therm damage and target jam constantly (hence, it's nice for drones to be doing most of the work).

I've included two fittings here. One is optimized for resists (the deadspace mods are actually pretty cheap) and the other is a solo scanner/plex runner. Both are currently set up with caldari heavy drones, which should be best against guristas resists even though gallente do slightly more damage. The DPS tank is calculated using a 50% kin, 50% therm EFT damage profile.

EDIT: On the first fitting below, it might be good to replace the thermal passive resist mod with an energized adaptive nano membrane -- as it is, that fit can't tank the EM smartbomb in guristas military complex without taking hull damage, even starting with full shield.


Fittings


Cap stable and tanking
(note that there is a second ship off-screen doing DPS to the target;
I don't think I could break its' tank solo with my drone skills)

There are two things I've noticed flying the ishtar. First, heavy drones are actually very effective against small rats, at least once they've caught up to them, so once everything's aggressed you can just launch heavies and do something else while keeping an eye on local. Second, the ishtar is completely and utterly screwed by neuts -- some plex (pith penal colony seems to) and ladar sites (h-pa crash crew) have some energy neutralizing going on. In both cases the trick is to stay outside of neut range (about 45 km for guristas energy neutralizing sentries).

EDIT: In response to comments on this post I've made a follow up post addressing shield ishtar setups.

8 comments:

  1. I think Guristas do much more kinetic damage as thermal. Your tank would be stronger if you focused kinetic damage more.

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  2. It's possible, though IIRC many of the smaller ships do a fair amount of thermal damage, and they're more numerous and less affected by your speed and sig radius tank. Although I haven't used it, the second build is one I was linked to ingame and is apparently a widely-used, utterly generic build, so I assume it must be able to handle things.

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  3. You are prolly right. I am bad in this carebearing, lost my PvE experimental ship last week to Guristas, so I am not much capacity on this topic anyway. And considering North should burn soon, not much time for testing left anyway.

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  4. Ishtars are little beasts with the right drone skills, the problem is getting those skills to level 5!

    Shot a link to your post for someone aspiring to become an Ishtar pilot over at: http://tovoni.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/show-me-the-money-again

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  5. Hey Parajosa, interesting post, I had a few thoughts about using a passive shield tank on the Ishtar for plexing.

    Take a look,
    http://owenworley.co.uk/blog/post/Ishtar-vs-Guristas-Passive-shield-hilarity.aspx

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  6. Interesting. I'll have to play with EFT and try to address this in a subsequent post.

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  7. [Ishtar, Ishtar: Lvl 4 max sentry gurista]
    Medium Armor Repairer II
    True Sansha Armor Kinetic Hardener
    True Sansha Armor Kinetic Hardener
    True Sansha Armor Thermic Hardener
    Beta Reactor Control: Capacitor Power Relay I

    Cap Recharger II
    Sensor Booster II
    Omnidirectional Tracking Link I
    Omnidirectional Tracking Link I
    Omnidirectional Tracking Link I

    125mm Gatling AutoCannon II, EMP S
    125mm Gatling AutoCannon II, EMP S
    125mm Gatling AutoCannon II, EMP S
    Drone Link Augmentor I
    Drone Link Augmentor I

    Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
    Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I


    Warden II x5
    Garde II x5

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  8. Looks like your post had some success, but unfortunately the image links are broken now and the fits are not visible anymore. Could you fix the links or post the fit in a text format?

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