Low skill FDL - prismatic shield with skill booster stacked
high skill FDL - bi-weave shield with 2 SB (up to 4) and 2 HS for SCBs
Being away from the pvp community for more than a year, I'm just amazed now at the nitpicky arbitrary "rules" that you guys decide on what skills/gear constitutes crutching/low skill. "Skill booster" lol. And it changes over time without any dev balance changes, too. In spring 2017, I was often told that a hybrid FDL was bad because it was UNDERpowered; by having shield boosters and no SCBs, I wasn't going to have the largest possible shield health pool. And by sacrificing SCBs and putting armor in instead, I was just making the FDL a bad hull tank (as it only has 4-4-2 internals available, far less than dedicated hull tanks). I kept playing it anyway, because I'd rather have more shields up front available to survive hull tank rams at the cost of never getting them back during an engagement. I was just basically sick of being rammed to death by ships like the FAS.
Now I recently discovered that I was being viewed by you guys as a sperg who was crutching on an OVERpowered hybrid FDL, presumably because it became a weapon of choice by 13th while I was away. Even though, as an independent, I was mostly taking my FDL into situations where I was either somewhat or overwhelmingly outnumbered. I'm hardly unkillable by having a boosted prismatic up front to start fights, especially since I use it offensively in phase 1 and trade shield health for damage much like people do in chess when they sacrifice a piece to push the game towards the endgame more quickly. In fact, most of my recent success has happened after shields are down anyway, which basically turns the FDL into a bad hull tank that's extremely vulnerable to module sniping because there aren't enough slots to fit module reinforcement.
