Well, most tacklers in general it seems. I’m (painfully) trying to grind out the silent fox to get the wolf, finishing the last ships in the T3 for every faction (up to 92 thus far, woo!). The slowing beam, while fun at xmas, seems to blow goats in a PUG. It hits like a wet noddle, and the fed chassis is already paper thin. The only time its ever semi-useful is with a wingman waiting to pick off the captor you neuter with it…but organized games are few and far between for me ATM. As such, the PUGlife is really grinding my gears on this syn climb.
Tell me I’m missing something blatantly obvious on these builds - but I sure as hell don’t want to grind out 3 more levels of syn just to get a often used gunboat.
You are missing just 1 thing. Silent Fox is rank 7, that’s why it’s not THAT good in T3 (some people do wonders with that ship anyway).
Sadly, there are no Rank 9 non-Premium Fed Tacklers, so you wont experience unless you buy them their awesomeness. In T4 I ensure you that you will enjoy them and discover their true power.
Well, most tacklers in general it seems. I’m (painfully) trying to grind out the silent fox to get the wolf, finishing the last ships in the T3 for every faction (up to 92 thus far, woo!). The slowing beam, while fun at xmas, seems to blow goats in a PUG. It hits like a wet noddle, and the fed chassis is already paper thin. The only time its ever semi-useful is with a wingman waiting to pick off the captor you neuter with it…but organized games are few and far between for me ATM. As such, the PUGlife is really grinding my gears on this syn climb.
Tell me I’m missing something blatantly obvious on these builds - but I sure as hell don’t want to grind out 3 more levels of syn just to get a often used gunboat.
Silent Fox is decent enough, mine is elite just because it was fun to play.
But slowing beam is for team play, so unless you play in a squad don’t use it, and if you play in a squad don’t use it either because you really don’t need to slow the enemy more than you already do. 
I suggest to get a Gauss cannon with projectile speed ammo and infrared scanner in the CPU slot, and fit the no-cooldown tackler mods only, you don’t need the engine suppressor. Put a survival mod in the last active slot (personally I’m a sucker for flares but you’ll probably want a shield booster unless you know what you’re doing). Don’t be stupid and get an emergency barrier unless you want to become every enemy LRF’s and cruise missile frigate’s favorite target while your chameleon is on cooldown (don’t you wish you went for flares in your last slot now? xD).
Now go to town and feed on the weak (i.e. everybody inside of your 50% bonused tackler mod range - it’s good to be OP). Just know that your role is not to brawl, you’re a mid range sniper and team support. Fit a tetroxide injector so you can run away like you should when they’re coming for you - situational awareness is key; you can 1v1 most things if you see them early enough to capitalize on your superior range, but a cloaked cov-ops plasma arcing you from behind means you’re dead, so don’t get tunnel vision.
If you don’t get a maniac medal (or at least double digit kills) in detonation and combat recon matches like that you’re doing it wrong. Know that you can intentionally fire your slowing field missiles into a rock (or another obstruction including friendly ships) for area defense. You may want to pick another ship for other game modes because being a mid range sniper isn’t really going to help you there (you can still get lots of kills but those beacons are not going to capture themselves…).
I’ll play with Gauss a bit to see how it works. Almost done with the grind 
So: mixed results. If I’m on a US server with decent ping, I do well. Dumped on Russian? Forget it (>150ms). Also, the charge mechanic - when is the threshold of heat vs. damage output? Still kinda defeats the purpose of a ‘tackling’ ship if all you do is midrange snipe shots and bail. T3 seems to be flooded with interceptors (rightfully so - their OP LOL) and it turns into a damn twitch shooter before too long.
Oh well.
Retrospective: So T3 in general illustrates what I dislike about the game - at that point, pug drops/casuals begin to taper off (which is why I never finished anything beyond R9 for all 3 factions apparently). Matches are usually one side, and honestly not very fun. A field flooded with pesky fast movers and zerging of objectives with frigballs covered by interceptors. Sometimes the games are interesting, but more often than not they’re just boring. I don’t really see much incentive to move past where I am honestly. I’ve got zero xxxx to give for coordinated play anymore… after 10 years of EVE and ungodly amount of MMOing… I can’t stand to even hear some other mouthbreather on comms regardless of how good he/she is. Perhaps with additional balances and the future free roam, I may actually have desire to play in those tiers.
I’m still on the fox because I hate the feds tacklers 
I’ll play with Gauss a bit to see how it works. Almost done with the grind
So: mixed results. If I’m on a US server with decent ping, I do well. Dumped on Russian? Forget it (>150ms). Also, the charge mechanic - when is the threshold of heat vs. damage output? Still kinda defeats the purpose of a ‘tackling’ ship if all you do is midrange snipe shots and bail. T3 seems to be flooded with interceptors (rightfully so - their OP LOL) and it turns into a damn twitch shooter before too long.
Oh well.
Interceptors should be your favorite targets though. Inhibitor beam turns off their adaptive shield, add to that the debuff from your target painter and they die very very fast to you. If you crit on a charged double shot (charge up, shoot and instantly double tap again for an no-cooldown second shot) you’ll kill or at least trigger EB on most interceptor targets. Lag is always an issue of course, I can’t do much at > 150ms ping myself.
Interceptors should be your favorite targets though. Inhibitor beam turns off their adaptive shield, add to that the debuff from your target painter and they die very very fast to you. If you crit on a charged double shot (charge up, shoot and instantly double tap again for an no-cooldown second shot) you’ll kill or at least trigger EB on most interceptor targets. Lag is always an issue of course, I can’t do much at > 150ms ping myself.
Assuming I can hit them. Lag, or just plain no desire to chase a little circle around the screen Not sure about the double charge thing, I’ll try it - the mechanics of the gauss aren’t really described well in game.
Silent Fox is decent enough, mine is elite just because it was fun to play.
But slowing beam is for team play, so unless you play in a squad don’t use it, and if you play in a squad don’t use it either because you really don’t need to slow the enemy more than you already do.
I suggest to get a Gauss cannon with projectile speed ammo and infrared scanner in the CPU slot, and fit the no-cooldown tackler mods only, you don’t need the engine suppressor. Put a survival mod in the last active slot (personally I’m a sucker for flares but you’ll probably want a shield booster unless you know what you’re doing). Don’t be stupid and get an emergency barrier unless you want to become every enemy LRF’s and cruise missile frigate’s favorite target while your chameleon is on cooldown (don’t you wish you went for flares in your last slot now? xD).
Now go to town and feed on the weak (i.e. everybody inside of your 50% bonused tackler mod range - it’s good to be OP). Just know that your role is not to brawl, you’re a mid range sniper and team support. Fit a tetroxide injector so you can run away like you should when they’re coming for you - situational awareness is key; you can 1v1 most things if you see them early enough to capitalize on your superior range, but a cloaked cov-ops plasma arcing you from behind means you’re dead, so don’t get tunnel vision.
If you don’t get a maniac medal (or at least double digit kills) in detonation and combat recon matches like that you’re doing it wrong. Know that you can intentionally fire your slowing field missiles into a rock (or another obstruction including friendly ships) for area defense. You may want to pick another ship for other game modes because being a mid range sniper isn’t really going to help you there (you can still get lots of kills but those beacons are not going to capture themselves…).
sooo your saying that gravi beamer is a complete waste and we should stick to gauss cannon and join the gauss cannon sniper klub where everyine just snipes at 5k away
And that we need slowing missles when the gauss cannon proj is almost going 10k meters per second
Invis on tackler is your greatest friend, sneak up ceptors, dropping dissy and rockets locks, shakes off recon shield suck. Speedtanked gauss tackler is very fun to play ceptor chaser.
Tacklers are very strong and very capable of solo pew-pew, its just tackler is one of the ships that is very crusial to understanding of what you are and what you are not, and ability to avoid those cases of what you are not, on top of that there are some maps/modes that are just terrible for tacklers, and other ships would do much-much better job and be more crucial for your team, so another things that is very-very needed is ability to know when you should not fly silent fox or tackler (unless you built it specifically for this case) at all
Just a reminder for a silent fox decision makings:
- try to not bring it into R9 games, meaning when you fly silent fox, just keep your hangar with R7 ships, most of the time you you will ended up in R7-R8 games
- Different weapons call for different builds (including actives and passives, and , sometimes, implants) so depending on what build you use you have to stick to what you do best i.e.
- Gauss - best vs interceptors and federation fighters, relatively xxxx vs empire fighters and frigates overall (very affected by ping)
- Slowbeam (my personal favourite on tackler right now, ye seven for solo play it can be very-very good) - great vs interceptors, overall good vs fighters and not terrible vs frigates, requires very good aiming, not much affected by ping
- Assaults - best vs fighters, ok vs frigs and interceptors, noticeably affected by ping
- Ions, best vs Frigates and Fighters, might be terrible vs interceptors if you do not have steady aim, not much affected by ping
- Bubbles, well bubbles are good vs everything, problem is you do not have ability to use it effectively, not fast enough, not agile enough, cant pump up base dmg much, not survivable enough, IMHO it is a big No-No on a silent fox (personally I don’t like bubbles on tacklers what so ever, I’de rather pick a gunship for that role, but that’s a personal choice)
I think for the silent fox Gauss, Ions, SlowBeam are the best choices and game play/builds that come with those. Just don’t pick it in the Wrong time and then blame the ship
That’s how i like to play it, solo, i have very similar build on a Bear and even Lion MK2 for Sector Conquest.
Those are not my Best games, but those are nto my worse games either, i would say these are pretty much average performance with this type of build in solo random games, when i do pick my tackler (picking it in wrong time makes you a dead weight comparing to what would i have done in a interceptor or a lrf for example)
Logs
The problem with the silent fox is that you lack the passives and the fourth active that makes the tier 4 fed tacklers so good.
I remember making it elite with long range Ions. Just paint and suppress engine of anything that comes into range. Focus fire on fighters and frigates, and use Camo to gtfo if any interceptor locks you on.
Or you can do the same with gauss and switch the target to interceptors, but you will lack DPS for killing other thing than interceptors and maybe other fed fighters.
Really it’s a pain, but the three T4 tacklers are much worth of all the suffer you will have with the silent fox. Think of it like the Federation Deimos.
I confess to flying my Silent Fox with the mentality of a lily-livered pilot. The inherent weakness due to its low rank only served to fuel my paranoia.
But I had a much better time levelling it as compared to the Katana AE. SF is slot and implant starved because of the low rank, hence, as many have suggested, I went with long range (gauss in my case) sniping. The range bonus also favours engagements at longer range.
Admittedly I bought a Parallax at the end of the day, but that was only after I maxed out my SF. What can I say? I love Fed tacklers too much.
Just a reminder for a silent fox decision makings:
- try to not bring it into R9 games, meaning when you fly silent fox, just keep your hangar with R7 ships, most of the time you you will ended up in R7-R8 games
This is important piece of advice that some dont seem to realize, so I quote it here again.
But I’m American!
Nobody is perfect! :taunt:
Wait… I thought it just dumped you into games based on tier, not rank? If that’s the case, then yeah i’ll drop thru Styx out of the lineup and see if I can get into r7ish territory
Wait… I thought it just dumped you into games based on tier, not rank? If that’s the case, then yeah i’ll drop thru Styx out of the lineup and see if I can get into r7ish territory
There are 3 major contributors to where you ended up:
a) highest rank of the ship equipped
b) online population
c) skillrating
Here is a chart for reference
p.s. >1200 and <1000 is on-line population on server at the moment of queue
Hadn’t seen that updated version of the chart, thx. Do you know what the bold rank numbers on the left are about?
I dont know, i’ll try to get this info thought and update