Been a while since I last wrote a ship guide, and never on this spanking brand new blog! At the risk of getting it all wrong, I feel the need to nevertheless attempt this guide to congeal my own thoughts into a rudimentary dogma I can stand by when discussing the topic with others.
As a Caldari Achura, my main character is a devilish Missile expert (as all Caldari are) who has grown accustomed to watching Missiles fly for several (or more) anxious seconds before they hit anything. It’s a nervous method of battle - the wait is terrifying and you nearly always waste ammo at the end because of missile flight lag, leaving some few to wander into space uselessly when the target is eliminated.
Nevertheless, the Drake is one of my favourite ships which can tank like no other Battlecruiser and still pack a punch as part of a gang or even solo if you pack Heavy Assault Missiles and pick a manageable victim.
Introduction
The typical flight training of the Caldari on the Missile path can be summed up as follows. First you train for the Kestrel, a light footed Frigate class vessel which packs a mean punch but loses face to more robust vessels like the infamous Minmatar Rifter. Much later, you’ll again fly the Kestrel hull if you train for the Manticore Stealth Bomber which is an advanced Tech 2 ship geared towards Torpedo bombing Battleships and Battlecruisers (smaller with some luck and the right modules). However the Tech 2 Caldari frigates demand Caldari Frigate 5 and Electronic Upgrades 5 before you can so much as step into the hull. Secondly, in the Cruiser class you’ll pilot the Caracal, and it’s Tech 2 cousin requiring Caldari Cruiser 5, the Cerberus Heavy Assault Ship, is again much further down the line. I quite like the Caracal which uses very similar tactics to the Kestrel and can pack Heavy Missiles, but it inevitably feels like a mere stepping stone to greater things…like every Caldari’s favourite ship. The Drake.
The Drake Battlecruiser is a mainstay of all Caldari operations, featuring a legendary tank capable of absorbing incredible damage to its shields once you train your shield related skills. Mission runners will eke every bit of performance possible from this ship, which is more than sufficient to run Missions at Level 3. Some hardy few even run Level 4 missions solo in this ship, or for safety, in a small mutually supportive pack. The primary weakness of many young Drake pilots is their lack of training in shield resistences and other basic shield skills which are essential to a good Drake, and much later a good Raven! Unlike the Kestrel or Caracal, pilots can expect to spend much of their lifes in a Drake since its utility goes beyond running a few missions and until you are rolling in ISK from Level 4 missions, it’s the largest ship you can afford to lose. Remember the single most essential piece of PVP wisdom: Only fly what you can afford to lose!
Drakes receive a 5% shield resistance bonus per Battlecruiser skill level, and a 5% bonus to kinetic damage from Heavy or Heavy Assault Missiles. Given the shield resistance bonus, the most obvious fitting strategy is to fit a shield tank and carry a lot of kinetic missiles ;). It also demands that you don’t dally on Battlecruiser 2, and train up to at least Battlecruiser 4 to get the most out of those bonuses.
Active vs Passive Tanking
The two shield tanking strategies commonly employed by Drakes are fairly easy to explain. Both rely on one common factor - increasing the resistances of your ship’s shields to various damage types, i.e. explosive, thermal, electromagetic and kinetic. The main catch here, if there is one, is that shields tend to have almost no base resistance to EM damage before skills are tallied thus making this a priority when increasing shield resistances. This often means one mid-slot is automatically devoted to an EM hardener or resistance amplifier. Obviously, when running missions you can work around this since mission rats usually shoot two main damage types - so focusing on those types at the expense of lower resistances elsewhere is allowable.
The second part of the strategy is where these two styles differ.
Passive Tanking primarily focuses on increasing the Shield Recharge Rate (i.e. Shield Hit Points divided by Shield Recharge Time equals Shield Recharge Rate) to offset the incoming Damage Per Second (DPS). If your Shield Recharge Rate exceeds the opposing DPS - then your ship can permenantly tank the incoming damage once it reaches its peak recharge rate (generally around 60-80% of shields for a decently skilled pilot). The shield recharge rate has two obvious factors we can try to improve to various degrees to achieve a maximum recharge rate. These are Shield Hit Points and Shield Recharge Time which are impacted by mid and low slot modules we’ll explore further in this article. Improving either of these factors will assist in improving the recharge rate. Obviously, the skills you train have a very important role here also. Shield skills can be found in the Engineering category of your regional market for skill books. If piloting a Drake - make sure you are training appropriate skills. If in doubt, consult the Eve Certification system for your character which should list shield tanking certificates detailing which skills are most useful for passive or active tanking.
Active Tanking, on the other hand, takes the approach of actively recharging shields using Shield Boosters and/or using a larger number of active Shield Hardeners. These all require the use of the capacitor to provide shield regeneration and active resistances. The more active modules you employ, the fewer passive modules you can fit. This is the obvious trade off and the main risk is having your capacitor overutilised to the point you run out of Capacitor and find your tank suddenly diminished to nothing! In PVP, where Energy Neutralisers or Nosferatus are common, this becomes a much more pressing concern, particularly in smaller ships. For those new to Eve, Neutralisers neutralise a portion of your capacitor power, while Nosferatus drain capacitor and add it to the attacking ship’s.
Given the differences, Passive Tanking tends to be preferable since it’s easier on the capacitor effectively frustrating the use of enemy neutralisers and nosferatus. Of course some ships, like the Caldari Raven, just have poor recharge rates to start with leaving little choice but to adopt active shield tanking. It’s also widely seen as providing a stronger tank for the Drake with its generous number of mid and low slots, and it’s base attributes. Of course, even in a Passive Tank there is room to add at least one active Shield Hardener since it costs so little to run with average skills and provides a nice bonus to shield resistances. Passive Tanking also leaves the capacitor free for other uses, handy since there is one free high slot for something other than a missile launcher.
The High Slots
The basic keel of the Drake is fitted with 8 high power slots, including 7 launcher hardpoints. The typical preferred fittings for these are either 7 Heavy Missile Launcher IIs or 7 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher IIs or their best named alternatives if you don’t have the prerequisite skills for T2 Heavy Launchers. Best named varieties, i.e. meta level 1-4 also have reduced fitting needs compared to their Tech 2 cousins making setups easier to put together. The price you pay for the easier fitting is cost - high meta level modules can cost prohibitively more than the Tech 2 varieties.
Standard Heavy Missile Launchers are fine for missions, and even PVP at range. Heavy Missiles (T1) have a base range of 37.5km (i.e. based on a Heavy Missile flight time of 10s and velocity of 3750m/s), which can be boosted past 60km with skill training to improve missile flight time and velocity. Assault missiles, however, have a base range of only 9km (4s at 2250m/s) and you’ll struggle to push their range past 15km. There is a similar divergence in damage with Heavy Missiles having a base damage of 150, and Assault Missiles of 100. Still, the math indicates that given the faster launch times of Assault Launchers, the damage output is quite a bit higher. You just have to get within 15km to put on the pain!
For the reasons above, Assault Launchers are preferable for shorter range combat which is most likely in PVP, whereas the longer range Launchers are preferable for PVE where you can stay at range and selectively agress NPC ships during missions. The math also indicates a weakness of sorts - if Assault Missiles only get to 15km given your skills, you really don’t want to mess with anything which wants to orbit at 20km! And either way, you don’t want to be the focus of attention for anything smaller than a Cruiser since your Heavy Missiles will have minimal damage against small fast targets like Frigates and Interceptors whether due to their small signatures or MWD driven speed tanks.
To discuss missile damage a bit more, any missile’s damage output depends on three characteristics of the targeting ship. It’s shield and armour resistances, it’s signature radius, and it’s velocity. The resistances are obvious - if fighting a ship with a base shield EM resistance of 80%, your EM missiles will only inflict 20% of their final damage potential. Signature radius effects damage, because missile damage is spread over an area known as the missile’s Explosion Radius. Tech 1 missiles have an ER of 125m. If you look, the signature radius of a frigate could be only 40m. Obviously, with missile damage spreading from an explosion, smaller signature ships will only receive a portion of the potential damage. Put bluntly - big missiles are for big ships. You can still take out frigates of course since some of the total damage will get through, but it may become a frustrating experience! Damage is also reduced if targeted ships move faster than the missiles Explosion Velocity. Tech 1 missiles have a base EV of 81m/s. With frigates capable of hundreds of meters per second or greater depending on Afterburner or Microwarpdrive usage, this has another devastating effect on your missile’s potential damage.
The eighth and final high slot can be surprisingly difficult to decide on. At average skills, the use of lower quality missile launchers (such as named Arbalest or Limos launchers) leaves sufficient room to fit a salvager though the slow speed of a Drake makes Salvaging this way a last resort unless you sacrifice a Launcher (rarely a good idea) to fit a Tractor Beam, which itself is another alternative to a Salvager if you are only interested in quickly looting wrecks. One could also fit a Cloaking Device quite handily for covert operations and PVP ambushes, though honestly the delay in locking targets once decloaked mixed with the flight time of missiles can allow prey to escape too easily. But for evasion purposes, it could be quite handy. One could fit also fit a Small Energy Neutraliser but their utility is obviously suspect against anything other than close orbiting Frigates.
None of these options, however, take advantage of the Drakes other strength (besides its shields) which is its relatively untouched Capacitor when passive tanking. At higher skill levels, the Drake can perma-tank at around 60-70% of its Capacitor. That leaves up to 70% of the entire Ship’s power available for some other temporary use. In fleet operations, it may therefore prove useful to use the final eighth high power slow for a logistics support module, like a Medium Remote Shield Transporter or Medium Remote Armour Repairer. These can be further focused by sacrificing a degree of tank to boost your capacitor recharge rate. This is useful for remote support across an entire squadron of Drakes and other ships, i.e. creating a Spider Tanked Fleet where several ships transport shield power or repair armour points to any fleet member taking damage. You could even fit a Drone Link Augmentor I (a Drone Upgrade module) which increases your Drone range substantially - useful to set the dogs on any frigates coming your way but still outside your currently trained Drone range.
The Mid Slots
The Drake’s 6 mid slots are where nearly all Drake pilots first focus their attention for Shield Tanking. The basic components used at this stage are Hardeners, Resistance Amplifiers, and Shield Extenders.
Resistance Amplifiers increase the resistance of the shields to various damage types and draw no power from the Capacitor. Hardeners perform a similar function with higher resistances, but do draw from the Capacitor and must be activated plus they receive fewer bonuses from your character’s shield resistances training (3% vs 5% for Amplifiers). Hardeners also include the commonly used Invulnerability Fields which increase the base resistances of the shield against all damage types. Omnitanking is largely needed for PVP (or convenience) since specific resistances are more useful for Missions where the incoming damage is highly predictable.
Shield Extenders simply increase the amount of shields (i.e. hitpoints) available. Besides acting as an additional buffer to absorb damage, they also have a sometimes confusing side effect of increasing the shield recharge rate. In effect - the shield recharge time is fixed, and the recharge rate is a simple equation of Shield Points / Recharge Time. Since the recharge time is a mutually exclusive factor, increasing the size of the shields, with the recharge time remaining fixed, actually results in a net increase in recharge rate. Getting a recharge rate of above a few hundred is an amazing ability as it lets you regenerate your shields from any opposing enemy DPS which falls below the shield recharge rate.
The typical Drake setup can go in one of two directions for the mid slots. Passive Tanking prefers Shield Amplifiers and Extenders to increase damage resistances and increase the shield recharge rate - all without using up Capacitor power. One might throw in the almost obligatory Invulnerability Field since one Hardener barely touches the Capacitor. Active Tanking tends to use fewer Shield Extenders and several powered Hardeners and Boosters which do use the Capacitor. In general, Drakes perform far better at higher skills when passively tanked. You should play to this ship’s strengths.
My own typical passive fitting for mid slots (used on PVE missions) includes:
3 x Large Shield Extender II
1 x Invulnerability Field II
1 x Magnetic Scattering Amplifier II
1 x [Other Resistance Amplifier]
In PVP, you will need to focus far more on Omnitanking, i.e. maintaining more or less even resistances to all damage types. In PVP, damage is highly unpredictable so leaving a gaping hole in your resistances is a bad idea. For this reason, the final Amplifier left open below may become another Invulnerability Field II since it increase all damage resistances for shields, and should leave you relatively cap stable with higher skills. The EM amplifier is an absolutely necessary in PVP - everyone will assume at first you have a weak EM resistance so never leave that hole unplugged!
As for the high slots, where you cannot fit Tech 2 modules check for their best affordable named alternatives which often given similar benefits in easier to fit modules which need less CPU and power grid.
The Low Slots
The low slots, or low power slots, are where you inevtiably face a triad of decisions and there are four slots to utilise. Gank, Tank or Fittings. At lower skills, you’ll might need to devote some of these to Cap Rechargers, Power Distribution Systems or even CPU Co-Processors to assist in fitting power grid, cap recharge, or CPU intensive modules. If are in this position, get out of it as soon as possible! The low slots are more useful fitting Tank or Gank modules.
The ideal for a passively shield tanking Drake is to fit as many Shield Power Relay IIs as possible. These bump up your shield recharge rate a great deal making your tank harder to break. In PVP it’s almost a given you’ll try to fit four Shield Power Relay IIs (or their best named alternatives). This is the Tank approach to maximise your shield recharge rate. In PVE you might sacrifice one or even two Shield Power Relays for a set of Ballistic Control System IIs which increase your missile damage, i.e. the Gank approach. It depends on how hard your missions are! A few BCSs can bring those Level 3 cruisers down a lot faster if your skills in, for example, shield resistances are sufficient to let you sacrifice a measure of shield recharging.
The Rigs
Given the most likely approach to your Drake is to maximise defence, taking advantage of the Drake’s shield recharge performance, the most common rigs to use are Core Defence Field Purger Is. You can fit a total of three of these to any Drake, and each will decrease the shield recharge time (i.e. your shields will recharge at a higher rate over a shorter time!) at the expense of an increased signature radius. This will require the skill, Shield Rigging, to at least 1. Obviously the better the rigging skill you have, the less drawback will be suffered from using two or more of the same type of rig.
Drones
The Drake also carries a 25m2 Drone Bay with sufficient bandwidth to carry a full flight of Light Drones. Certainly it’s preferable to use Tech 2 Drones, however for many Caldari pilots the early limited Drone Bay space will leave their Drone skills fairly low. Still, it’s useful to work towards Drones 5 and Scout Drone Operation 5 to get hold of the Tech 2 drones for extra durability and effect. Given you can only carry a single flight of 5 light drones, I usually opt for 5 Hornet Is since they offer Kinetic damage which is commonly useful against PVE ships.
It’s easy to underestimate the effect of Light Drones, they are essential to taking down close orbiting frigates your Heavy Missiles can barely scratch. This is emphasised in Level 3 missions where Elite Frigates (the equivelant to Tech 2 Frigates) are very difficult to kill using Heavy Missiles. Training Drone skills should never be neglected - they add quite a useful amount to a Drake’s overall DPS. On my current skills, my Drake’s missile DPS is around 120, with my Drones offering an additional 30. That’s 25% of my Drake’s DPS from missiles, or 20% of the total DPS my Drake can put out including the drones.
Conclusion
This was, I hope, a useful article to budding Drake pilots. It took me time, advice from my Corp mates at Crimson Industries, and the loss of at least one Drake to realise how finely balanced fitting a ship can be. The fittings described above are not a rarity and most experienced pilots would recognise them as being familiar. Of course, you can put your own twists into any fitting using something people do not expect from a Drake to wreak havoc in the right circumstances.
To sign off, here’s my current Drake fitting I hope to improve over the next month by replacing the current PDS with either a BCS or Shield Power Relay. Given my experience, I could easily drop a SPR right now for a BCS II. Built using the excellent Eve Fitting Tool (EFT):
Drake PVE Fitting From EFT
Have fun and fly safe!
). If not Zor, than any of the usual DPS heavy missions you need a partner to assist on. The fact that the sustained and reinforced tank efficiency are the same simply indicates this is a capacitor stable setup. If you are not quite as lazy as me, you could sacrifice a Capacitor Flux Coil for a Ballistic Control System for extra DPS, or the Cap Recharger for an additional shield boost amplifier if you are willing to micro manage the shield booster.
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