Pointless Merlin

Starwalker had spent a lot of flying time recently in a Breacher because many pilots were electing to fight in scram or point range and his favourite Merlin was best up close and personal. Brawlers were very vulnerable to kiters and everything hinged on whether they could get into range and stay in range.

As an alternative to close range brawling the Breacher, with its rocket weapons and drones, was a good ship but Starwalker liked sheer DPS and raw, brute force of the Merlin. With that in mind, he had gone back to the Merlin and had changed the EFT fit to catch scram range kiters.

A pointless Merlin:

• The dual web would certainly establish range control in most close range situations and allow afterburning scram range targets to be caught and held
• No scrambler would mean that the target could escape at any time as soon as it realised that it was not scrammed. It also meant that micro-warp-drives were not turned off, again allowing escape via simply overheating the MWD 
• Neutron blasters, fit the best - fit neutrons. Other blasters (Ions and Gatling) would provide more fitting room but sacrifice some DPS and more importantly sacrifice some range. However, Ion blasters did provide a credible alternative and they removed the need for the small ancillary current router
• Medium Ancillary Shield booster should be used with Navy Cap Booster 50 as that allowed 9 charges rather than 8 and consequently supplied one more repair cycle. This module, like the blasters, should always be overheated at the start of the fight. Close range frigate fights were usually finished before either of those modules burnt out
• Shield rig selected was for thermal damage mitigation, due to the prevalence of Gallente drones and frigates but equally an EM rig could have been selected
• Two magnetic field stabilisers brought the real pain, raising DPS with the neutrons and one damage rig from 158 to 223 and overheated that went up to 256 with level V skills. Serious firepower in a T1 frigate

This pointless Merlin had strengths and weaknesses like any ship in the rock, paper, scissor nature of combat in New Eden. Starwalker would take it out into the space lanes to see what would happen. He was confident that he would get some kills in this T1 monster DPS frigate, especially as this monster DPS was supplemented by a couple of +3% implants in slots 6 (hybrid damage) and 9 (rate of fire):

This Merlin was both a beautiful ship and deadly:

 

It had surprise factor - who would expect a T1 frigate to put out so much DPS before the fight started? There was bound to be a number of pilots that would "freeze" and not realise that they could escape before their ship was destroyed. Indeed Starwalker knew that was true - it had been proven in his pointless Daredevil.