A capsuleer is only as good as his fitting.

Since getting back into the game, I have been pondering ship fittings alot. Many of the changes introduced in the last 2-3 years have made a sizable amount of my old, trusty fittings obsolete (I will miss you, sniper Zealot!), plus I just love twiddling around in EFT (EVE Fitting Tool, an essential program for any fit-makers). Due to this heavy brain-using on fits recently, I thought it would only be fitting (heh, pun) to write up what I believe seperates the good fits from the bad fits, and general do's and don'ts when deciding a fit.

Now, I don't know how large a portion of our many, many readers (Shut up, 2 is many) are new to the game, vets or don't even play the game at all, so I am going to pretty much start from the beginning.

First off, I will say this: There are no definitive rules to follow when fitting a ship, save it has the resources and ability to fit it. Like a wise man once said to me (Or I read somewhere, I don't know), "If it looks stupid, but works, it ain't stupid". If your fit looks stupid, but it does what it's supposed to do well, it isn't stupid. With that said, if your fit looks stupid, apparently has no purpose and doesn't do anything well, it's pretty damn stupid and you should feel bad for fitting it.

HA! STUPID!

I'm going to start off by spouting some general rules of thumb regarding fittings. Like I said before, there are no definitive, universal, commandment-like rules regarding fittings, and these are not, however in order to create a good fit, these should in most cases be followed.

In my opinion, the first, and most sacred, general rule of thumb of fittings is: Do not fit different racial
types of turrets on your ship. That is, projectiles, hybrids and lasers. Try to keep all your main weapons the same type. Now, of course there are exceptions to this (I can't think of any at the moment but there probably are), but in general, it's a bad idea. You are going to be spreading your dps over a variety of ranges, the cycle times are going to be different, you're going to have different ammo types to deal with and your ship is only going to have a bonus to one type if it has one.

Now, a very related general rule of thumb is: Do not fit different types of one racial type of turrets on your ship. That is, don't fit both blasters and railguns, artillery and autocannons, beam and pulse lasers. This has pretty much the same reasons as above, your optimal ranges and cycle times are going to be different, and ammo (If you're using t2 guns and t2 ammo)

The same mostly goes for launchers.

Also, don't dual-tank your ship. Stick to either a shield tank, or an armor tank, and not both. The reason for this is basically efficiency and slot management. Now, some people might say that "Real men hull tank", and however badass and hardcore hull tanking sounds, it's a bad idea. The hull is your last line of defense, which is why hull tanking is pretty much like eating at a mexican all-you-can-eat buffet and wearing no underwear for the next few days. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Each ship in EVE is going to have a certain thing that it's very good and perhaps the best at, which is called its role. This can usually be figured out from its innate bonuses in the description, and with the recent overhaul of the t1 cruisers and frigates, it's pretty clear which ship does what from the description. Generally, you are going to want to fit a ship according to its role, as then you will be getting the most out of its bonuses and abilities. An Amarr Magnate for example has innate bonuses to scan strength of probes and cycle times of exploration modules, that makes it an ideal exploration and scanning ship. That is not to say it can't be used for anything else, although other Amarr frigates might simply do better at whatever else you'd fit it for.

An Auguror has innate bonuses to remote armor repairers and cap transfers, which this support fit utilizes.

Now, I could go on and on about everything related to fittings, but to be honest, I don't really feel like writing a 3000-word blog which would double as a research paper. In the interest of keeping this post as interesting and to-the-point as possible, I am going to show you a few different fittings and explain what makes them good or bad. Let's start with my favourite Rifter fit!

Screen from EFT. If you haven't already, get it

This fit is a brawler fit. It's designed to fight other frigates or cruisers. The armor rigs and plate makes it quite a slow ship for a frigate, but it makes up for it in sheer survivability. This is not at all an ideal tackler, as it's way too slow for that, but in a small frigate gang, it's a beast. Notice the extremely tight fit. If you have problems with a fit, try using higher-meta modules as I have done here, as they usually have lower CPU and/or PG requirements and play around with it until you can get it to fit. Notice also the lack of an armor repairer. For the situation this ship is designed for, it is not needed since it's basically do or die anyway. I opted for higher EHP rather than repairability as the fights this ship partakes in are generally very short.

What it's good at:

• Brawling vs. other frigs (very high EHP (Effective HP) making it difficult for other frigates to kill you)
• Harassing cruisers (Because of its small size, if orbiting close enough and at high speeds, cruiser-sized weapons will have a hard time hitting you while your own high-tracking small autocannons will easily hit the target)
• Scouting/Baiting
• Amazing survivability if coupled with a friendly logistics frigate
• Staying alive

What it's bad at:

• Tackling (Too slow)
• Fighting alone vs. other heavily tanked frigates. Since there is no armor repairer, it has low sustainability. This ship is designed to kill the enemy before he kills you.
• Fighting drone or blaster boat cruisers (High tracking = you're dead)

Next up we have my jammer Blackbird!

This fit is designed purely to be a long-range, cheap, jamming support ship for small gangs. It is very specialized and can't do much of anything else. It can very effectively jam over 100km away, and up to 170km although the effectiveness is reduced somewhat in ranges beyond the 101km optimal. This setup effectively has no tank at all, save for the Damage Control II which is pretty much only a lifebelt, so if an enemy has the chance to shoot you, you're dead. This is why it is very important to keep range at all times with this setup, and to keep aware of who is trying to kill you (so you can jam them). The highslots and drone bays are completely dedicated to defense against tackling frigs, aswell as the jammers themselves. Notice how I have racial jammers instead of multispectral jammers. While multispectral jammers have a higher jamming strength, they also have less range, take more capacitor and are harder to fit. In most cases, it is a good tradeoff to lessen your jam strength a little bit to get all the other bonuses. Also, if you have an idea of what you're up against, the non-appropriate racial jammers can be swapped out for the appropriate ones for even higher jam strength.

What it's good at:

• Jamming from a very long range
• Not much else

What it's bad at:

• Tanking
• Dealing raw damage
• Being alone

I'm only going to do one more, my beloved Brick Wall Rupture!

This is basically a bigger, meaner version of the brawler Rifter. With EHP of 36,6k and dps of 311 (Without drones), it is essentially a brick wall with fists. It is designed to roll into a fight with guns blazing, holding you down with its dualweb (2x Stasis Webifiers) so you won't go anywhere and basically beat you to death while you desperately claw at it. This setup is built around its armor resists, with its lowest sitting at 64,7% with my skills (65,1% with all Vs). It was originally intended for small gang ops with armor repairing logistics ships helping it out, which is where it's very close to invincible. It still does okay solo, but the lack of armor repairer, like the Rifter, robs it of sustainability.

What it's good at:

• Brawling, especially with a friendly logistics ship around
• Baiting
• Small-gang ops

What it's bad at:

• Brawling against bigger, meaner ships
• Kiting
• Long, drawn-out fights

So, that's it for now. If you made it this far, congratulations for not falling asleep!

Just some final points (I love bullet points!)

• Fit your ship according to its role
• Fit your ship according to what you want it to do
• Don't try to do too much at once with your fitting, you'll end up doing a lot of things badly and nothing well
• Know your fit's weaknesses! No single fit out there can do everything well and all fits have some flaws.

That's it for today! Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog, where I will probably talk about something equally pointless. Yay!