Ship Class Tactical Overview
This Tactical Overview is designed to give a brief synopsis of the uses of each ship class in PvP. It is intended to give an overall overview by ship class, not ship type. Learning what every ship type can do becomes necessary as you advance in your PVP career. However, as a starting point, just learning general rules about ship classes is enough.
For more in-depth ship information, look at some of the other pages in the Ships Category, or click the "More Details" link at the end of each section.
Frigate Class Ships
T1 Frigates
These will generally just be tacklers. Point, web, speed mod, overdrives etc in lows & mids, irrelevant dps or nos etc in highs. Notable exceptions: Rifter The rifter is one of the best combat T1 frigs, and by most people even considered THE best. In a dogfighting fit with autocannons, afterburner, web and scram, it can take on most other frigs, and even some larger targets, and win (watch out for the Taranis (gallente combat interceptor) and all the assault frigates though). Punisher and Incursus are the Amarr and Gallente equivalents, but they don't quite reach the level of the Rifter. (More Details)
T2 Frigates
Interceptors (Inty / 'ceptor)
These are the primary tacklers in anything but 0.0 (where dictors and hics take over). They have the highest scan resolution of any class, and only Vigils (Minmatar electronic warfare frig) can match their speed. Their main purpose is tackling, and that's what they do best, but many interceptors can also be refit to be effective combat ships in an interceptor only gang. Their firepower and tank will be low compared to other types of ships, but they have the advantage of very high speed (even when tank & gank fitted) and awesome agility. (More Details)
Covert Ops
They can warp cloaked, and are used as scouts and for probing stuff down. Can also be used for tackling stuff it has scouted/probed out, but that's only for experienced people that know what they can and can't hold long enough for help to arrive, and what targets are worth the risk. (More Details)
Stealth Bombers (SB)
Super high dps/alpha frigates that can warp cloaked and doesn't have a sensor recalibration delay after decloaking. In 0.0, they can also launch bombs (basically a large, higher damage smartbomb). They have trouble hitting small targets with their torpedoes though. (More Details)
Electronic Attack Ships (EAS)
These vary allot from race to race. Basically, they are frigate sized version of the combat recons that will be described below. (More Details)
Assault Ships (AS / AF)
High tank, usually high dps frigates. If you get tackled by one of these, you're generally not going anywhere, they're a pain to get rid of when properly fitted. The disadvantage compared to interceptors is that they're slower, and often sacrifice their MWD and fit an AB instead to be able to survive longer after getting the target tackled. (More Details)
Destroyer Class Ships
T1 Destroyers
Anti-frig ships. Very good tracking, lots of small guns, however their tank is frig level, while they're almost as big as a cruiser. They die extremely fast, and are considered useless by many. Some missioners use them as a cheap salvaging vessels. Due to its many high slots many salvagers and tractor beams can be fitted on a low cost ship where no other qualities are required. (More Details)
T2 Destroyers: Interdictors (Dictor)
These are useless in high and low sec, however, when they get into 0.0, they become one of the most important ships available. Their role is launching warp disruption probes, usually called bubbles. Those probes create a warp disruption field in a 20km radius from the probe, and inside that field, nothing can warp, nomatter how many stabs they fit. Anyone trying to warp to a spot within 150 (iirc) km of the edge of the bubble will be pulled to the edge of it, although only if the bubble is in line between the 2 objects that the ship is warping between. Interdictors and HICs (heavy interdictor) are the only ships that can tackle titans and motherships. (More Details)
Cruiser Class Ships
T1 Cruisers
Can have many roles, from mining and logistics (Osprey, Auguror, Scythe, Exequror) and electronic warfare (blackbird, bellicose, arbitrator, celestis) to pure dps (the rest basically). (More Details)
T2 Cruisers
Recon Ships
These come in 2 categories, combat recons and force recons. Force recons can fit a covert ops cloak and therefore warp cloaked, while the combat recon is generally better suited for the actual combat part, either trough stronger tank, higher dps or simply better range for their electronic warfare (EW) type. Their main purpose is EW, but what they use vary from race to race. (More Details)
Heavy Assault Ships (HAC)
Extremely versatile and powerful ships. They combine high speed and agility with either high dps and decent tank when in a close range setup, or very long range where only sniper battleships will be able to fire back, while still offering good dps and decent buffer when in a LR setup. (More Details)
Heavy Interdictors (HIC)
With the exception of some T3 cruiser setups, these will have better tank then any other cruiser, and match that of most battleships. Their dps is extremely low, but their role is tackling.
In 0.0 they can create a 12-20 km radius warp disruption field similar to what the light interdictor create, however, while the light interdictor can launch its bubble and then get out, and the bubble will stay there for 2 minutes anyway, the HIC has to stay where it want its bubble to be, and while the bubble is up (30 second cycle time), it can not recieve any type of remote support, and while its normal speed remain the same, afterburners and microwarpdrives will have reduced effect. In return, their mass gets heavily reduced, so they can get up to speed and change direction etc extremely fast. In high and low sec, the bubble can't be used, but a script allows it to work as a normal disruptor with infinite strength and 50% more range.(More Details)
Logistics
Each race do it a bit differently here, but overall, these ships are supposed to increase the survivability of the fleet in 1 way or another.
Gallente and Amarr repair armor, Caldari and Minmatar repair shields. (More Details)
T3 Cruisers: Strategic Cruisers
You can't get more versatile then this. Depending on what subsystems you put on it, it can basically do anything except for bubbling. With the right sub system, you can even become immune to bubbles, which is a unique ability that no other ship has, but you can still be tackled by hics with the script in and normal disruptors/scrams. They can be fitted to use their racial warfare links with an even stronger bonus then fleet command ships (described below), but it can only fit 1 link by default. However, by fitting 2 command processors, that can be increased to 3. (More Details)
Battlecruiser Class Ships
T1 Battlecruiser (BC)
Very good mix between gank, tank, agility, speed and cost. Usually short range fitted (especially harbingers due to the awesome scorch), although some people that can't afford/can't fly a heavy assault ship (hac) use them with a long range fit.
HACs are way better for that role though, with better dps and range, so experienced pilots usually do not have a reason to use a LR fit on it since most of them can also fly hacs, and therefore only use the BCs for close range stuff. BCs also have the ability to fit a single warfare link, which can give extra bonuses to your gang. (More Details)
T2 Battlecruisers
Command Ships (CS)
These come in two classes, field command ships, which are basically just a stronger version of the T1 BC with a bit more dps and tank and better resists, and fleet command ships. Fleet command ships get a bonus to their racial warfare links, and in general have extremely good tanks with great resists. The racial links are: Armor for Amarr, Shield for Caldari, Skirmish for Minmatar and Information for Gallente, and there are 3 types of links in each class. If the command ship is in a leadership position in the fleet, everyone below him in the command chain (including normal members) get the following bonus, assuming the command chain is complete (for example, if the CS is wing commander, and there are no squad commanders, or more squads then the CS can handle with its current wing commander level, no bonuses will be applied). (More Details)
Battleship Class Ships
T1 Battleship (BS)
You can't get heavier then this and still stay in sub capital ships, although there are of course variations. Great buffer tanks, very high dps when close range fitted, long range fits have the best range in the game, while still maintaining good dps (usually Apoc, Mega, Maelstrom/Tempest and Rokh, however, Mega and Mael/Tempest can also be close range fitted and still perform better then/as well as the other BS of their race). One notable exception here: The Caldari Scorpion, which is the only T1 EW BS, and use ECM.
The battleships weakness is low speed and agility combined with slow lock speed and bad tracking, so it's hard to force an opponent in smaller ships to engage if the odds are in your favor, or to actually kill them since you'll be missing allot if you do get a fight. (More Details)
T2 Battleships
Marauders
These are basically PVE only ships. Decent dps and good local tank, but in PVP you generally want a buffer tank instead, and marauders have very low sensor strength, making them easy to jam. However, the Paladin and Kronos can be situationally useful if you really need a target webbed down as much as possible, and don't mind using a ship worth over half a bill that's not insurable, since they both get a 50% bonus to web strength, so a T2 web reduce the targets speed by 90%. I've only seen this used by one person, and that was on the Tama station since it's a kickout to prevent people from getting back in dock range, and that was with carrier support just in case.
They're even less useful now that Blood Raider and Serpentis ships get a 10% bonus/level of minmatarr frigate/cruiser/battleship depending on which class it is, which also adds up to a total of 50% bonus at level 5. (More Details)
Black Ops (BO)
These are the big brothers of the recon ships, however, while they do get bonus to how fast they move while cloaked (which actually means that they'll move faster when cloaked than when not cloaked with the BO skill at a decent level), but they cost about 700m or so before fittings, so they're not really worth the risk of bringing it into combat. Despite that though, they do have a very useful role to play in PVP: the covert jump bridge. Covert cyno fields can now be lit even in cyno jammed 0.0 systems and doesn't appear as a beacon in the entire system like a normal cyno, and a black ops can then lock on to that field and create a bridge to it, which then allows other covert ops ships (aka any ship that get a bonus to cloaking, including T3 cruisers with the cloaking sub) to right click the BO and click jump to the system the bridge was set up to, so it basically becomes a 1 way stargate. However, only BOs, recons and cov ops can fit and light covert cynos. (More Details)
Capital Ships
Capital ships, aka dreads, carriers, supercarriers ("motherships"), titans and rorquals (although the last one isn't a combat ship) can't use gates, and the supercarriers+titans can't even dock. Instead they use their own jump drive to travel around, but in order to do that, they require fuel (racial isotopes, helium for amarr, oxygen for gallente and the rorqual, nitrogen for caldari and hydrogen for minmatar) and a cynosural field to jump to. Those cyno fields can be created in 2 ways, either by anchoring and onlining a cyno gen pos mod which will always be online and available for use for the corp/alliance the POS belongs to, however it requires the corp/alliance to have the relevant upgrades installed to the hub in the system before it can be used, and it's impossible to have both that and a cyno jammer online in the same system. Jump freighters and black ops also require a cyno field to use their jump drive, but they have the ability to use gates aswell, and black ops can lock on to a covert cyno field too, which is an unique ability for them. (More Details)
Dreadnoughts (Dread)
If you want pure dps, this used to be as good as it gets, but they have now been surpassed by supercarriers doing 8k dps (10k for the nyx) with max skills and a full flight of fighter bombers, and Titans which can reach similar dps numbers as dreads, but also get a super gun that does 3m damage/shot, but can only be fired once every 10 minutes. Dreads do amazing damage, and can reach almost 5k dps when in siege even in a long range fit. When not sieged though, they generally just match a BS. Their tracking though is extremely bad, so they can basically only hit other caps and POSs/outposts, unless the target isn't moving at all. The exception is the moros, which gets an awesome 50%/level bonus to drone damage and hitpoints, so the drones are lethal for any size of ships, but especially frigs. 5 T2 warriors with a 250% damage bonus before counting drone interfacing and stuff like that will kill any frig, except possibly for an AF (but that will die pretty fast too), in almost no time at all. (More Details)
Carriers
These are giant logistics platforms. They have the ability to store 1.000.000 m3 of assembled ships in their ship maintenance bay so that people that lose their ship can quickly pick up a new one, and other ships from your corp (or fleet if you have configured your carrier for that) can use you to refit in space. They get a 50%/level range bonus to 2 of the following, varying depending on which racial carrier it is: Capital energy transfer, capital shield transporter and capital remote armor repairers. The amarr archon get cap transfer and armor rep, the gallente thanathos and minmatar nidhoggur get shield and armor and the caldari chimera get cap transfer and shield. In addition to that, all carriers get an additional 5%/level bonus to the following: the Chimera and Archon get a resist bonus (armor for Archon, shield for Chimera), the Nidhoggur get a capital remote rep amount bonus and the Thanatos get a fighter damage bonus. All carriers get the ability to control one extra drone in addition to the normal 5/level of racial carrier and the ability to use fighters (but not fighter bombers). They can't fit any guns or launchers at all, so the high slots are usually used for neuts, smartbombs (drone/small ship defense) and remote reps. However, just like dreads, carriers also get a special module that only they can fit (5 minute cycle): the triage module. (More Details)
Supercarriers ("Motherships", MS)
A larger carrier with the ability to use fighter bombers, greatly increasing their dps to roughly twice as much as a sieged dread with a full flight of bombers and max skills. It gets +3 drones/carrier level instead of 1, but it can't dock and it has shorter jump range (equivalent to a dread/jump freighter). However, it is no longer able to triage, but they're always immune to EW anyway due to being a super capital. They can only be tackled by dictors and HICs (well, and anchorable bubbles I guess, but that's not practical due to the anchoring time required before they activate combined with limited range). (More Details)
Titans
Like supercarriers, they are immune to EW and can only be tackled by dictors and hics. They're all able to fit and activate the largest and most lethal gun in the game: a doomsday device, which does 2-3m damage depending on skills, but can only be fired once/10 minutes, cost 50k racial isotopes to activate, and prevents the titan from moving at all for 30 seconds and it can't use its jump drive for 10 minutes. Activating it takes 10 seconds, so you have some time to get out before the damage is applied, and the range of it is 250 km (aka the hard coded max lock range, nothing can do damage at longer range then that). Titans can also fit a jump bridge module, which works in a similar way to the cov ops jump bridge described above that the black ops use, but this one can bridge any type of ship, has longer range and can only lock on to normal cynos, not cov ops ones. (More Details)
Capital Industrial Ships: Rorqual
This ship is primarily intended for mining support with its huge tractor beam range and speed, ability to fit bonused mining leadership links and ability to compress ore. However, it does have a 50%/level range bonus to capital shield transfers, and a 20%/level drone damage bonus, so while it's not intended as a PVP ship, some people have been known to use it for that. (More Details)
