Raising Combat Ranki

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

Greetings!

What is the best way currently to raise combat rank (In ship, not on foot, or "Mercenary" rank)? I am already Elite and looking to get a few stars pinned to my lapel.

It used to be fighting Thargoid scouts was the best way, but they nerfed a while back it seems.

Is it just a long slog now at haz-res'es, Compromised nav becons, and interdictions? While the trade and exploration rankings have been going up at a good pace for me, combat is painfully slow.

Would massacre missions help? Space Combat zones? Also, I do have a SLF pilot which I herd eats up Exp. She is already Elite though, but if I kept her at home (Inactive) does she still take EXP?

Thanks in advance for your input! o7

 

[sinisalo]

The only thing that matters is the rank of the ships you kill.

With the nerf to scouts, the best way now is to find instances with high-rank small ships. That's a matter of RNG. Small ships are faster to kill, so in a theoretical sense, lots of small ships with high rank will increase your combat rank at the fastest rate.

So it's wide open, and you can find this is a RES or CNB and elsewhere, just a matter of whether the Elite gods smiled on you when you dropped. Finding one filled with Elite Eagles, Adders and Sidewinders is best. If you drop and find it's not this way, you can low wake out, and return to reset the instance, or try another one nearby.

RES is where you find an endless supply, and the ships there are not robust like in say a CZ or pirate threat. Assassinations are slow. Massacres are good, if the ships are suitable.

So yeah, I'd recommend High RES, and just keep dropping until you find the right composition in there, small, high ranked ships.

 

[Jubatus1]

Thargoid scouts were nerfed but they still count as elite opponents so you do rank up quite fast in AX conflict zones. Someone did the maths on them last year:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/combat-deadly-to-elite-by-the-numbers.594537/

 

[Treya]

Best way is still with scouts imho. Try to find two AX CZ adjacent to each other (as close as possible) and jump back and forth between them. Take out the first wave of scouts and leave when interceptors come in. Last time I did this was shortly before EDO launch when the nerf was already in place. Found two instances that were a few hundred km apart and saw 4-5% increase towards Elite per hour.

 

[d8veh]

I'm pretty sure that high RES beats Thargoid Scouts by a lot because of the very high kill rate you can get if you do it right. You need a fast all-laser ship with long-range sensors and at least 2 long-range weapons. Log until you get a high spawn rate of only small ships, then fill your boots. You should be able to get over 100 kills/hr.

That's for Horizons. If you have Odyssey, some of the ground stuff is quicker.

 

[Erei]

I heard outbreak system in anarchy are the best. They can spawn an anomaly with a blockade or something, and a lot of the ships there are all elite, but most of them are poorly fitted and small ship easily dispatched. They also respawn super fast. It might be possible even to farm them with an AFK t10.

I tried to find one some time ago, but didn't find a blockade in it. Inara has a setting to search for it, on the right for the "nearest" search tab.

 

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

Thank you all for your input. I'll take a look at all these suggestions and see what ones work best.

Combat ranking moves so slow compared to the others! Lol