(Or: "How you, too, could fight 20 med v med ship 1v1's, and win ... 20-0 !")
Want to get into PvP but feel you can't because of your all-gimballed loadout?
Harassed by rails? Pestered by plasma?
Or just want to improve your PvE piloting by taking some PvP tips and letting rip on the NPC's?
Any which way, gimballed Cmdr, this guide is for you.
In Beta 2.3 I have fought precisely 20 medium v medium ship duels against all comers. We have infinite access to the mods, so everyone is fully RNGineered. I had no control over my opponents' loadouts but I used the same one myself, 20 times over.
I used five gimballed pulse lasers.
And I won 20, lost 0.
As the flip side of the coin to Truesilver's Top Tips, No.2: Using Fixed Weapons, let me present ...
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.3: Gimballed Duelling.
Now, welcome to my pulse disco ... with music by The K.L.F. !
[video=youtube_share;reVQ4FXxkxU]https://youtu.be/reVQ4FXxkxU[/video]
Here's the build:
http://www.edshipyard.com/#/L=A0O0,...qpDEqpDIqpD15OGp50wPc4ypDAqpDEqpDIqpD20m068M0
The specials were phasing on c4 and 2 x c2, emissive and scramble spectrum on the remaining c2's.
(To be super-try-hard you could drop the FSD down to nothing to save mass, at the expense of making it impossible to high wake, make the interdictor a 1D, etc, but I didn't bother.)
Note that as I spell out below in more detail, the shieldless laser thing is completely optional. You can dominate with any credible gimballed weapons set up, and you can be shielded. Although highly effective, my build was partly trollolo and partly to test the viability of combat without having to reload (I am sick of synthesis). There are ways to make it (usually) better, such as by including corrosive.
Here's the gameplan:
1. Evade
2. Evade
3. Evade
This ^^ bit is NOT optional. Because I hope that by the end of this guide you will agree that, if you're using gimbals and you aren't evading continuously, then (unless in Big 3) you are doing it wrong. This is the main thing I hope people will take from this.
Political Disclaimer
Now, (hard hat on), I know that some of my fixed weapon PvP buddies may be spluttering, "Thanks for spreading the cheese, True. What's coming as No.4? Your guide to flying backwards and spamming pack hounds?"
Equally I know that some of the PvE guys may be thinking, "If this makes gimbals look OP it will help the PvP nerf agenda."
Spare me, guys. Gimbals are the most widely used weapon variant in the game, eclipsing fixed, turrets and seekers probably 10 times over. It's high time they had their own guide and I'm just going to write it, telling it how it is, not how it should be. But of course you're welcome to discuss all issues in the comments.
Now, on to a full Q+A, with a table and two more explanatory vids...
Q. I don't understand. For years I've been told that gimbals were useless in PvP because of chaff...?
A fully gimballed loadout is still useless in a wing fight if the entire enemy team has double chaff, because wing victory goes to the first team to focus down one enemy. Complete chaff coverage will hamper damage for several minutes, so losing the fight. Even every enemy player having single chaff would pose significant problems.
However, in a 1v1, the game has moved on by reason of 2.1 hit point inflation - and not just 'on paper' inflation but 'effective' inflation via g5 dirty drives.
Even though chaff can be modded up to 15 (14+1) rather than 11 total ammo now, double chaff simply does not provide enough duration of partial immunity. Basically, if you are gimballed you wait out their 220 to 300 seconds of coverage, taking opportunities to tag them, preferably at close range (where much of the damage will get through anyway) until their chaff is exhausted. Then you wreck them.
Most of my Beta opponents had chaff. Many had double chaff. 20-0 does not lie.
Q. OK, can you provide some more details on these fights?
Certainly, here is a complete table. I don't want any guy to feel called out in a guide so I've abbreviated Cmdr names to initials.
Note that I'm here ONLY setting out medium v medium. The pulse disco vid above for example includes a fight against a Diamondback and 4 NPC's but I haven't included fights against small ships in my 20. I am however, without hesitation, including Vultures because they are right up there with FdL and FAS now (especially in Beta due to the buffed large weapon APV).
Here are all my Beta medium v medium ship duels. In every single fight I used the loadout linked above (sometimes with three chaff, sometimes four) except for just one duel in which I had more kinetic, but otherwise the same build. Opponents' builds are notes, not complete. Durations are to nearest half minute.
Q. I don't get it - I've seen lots of recent 1v1 vids of guys in medium ships taking regular hits from fixed cannons and plasma, right from the get-go...?
A. Yes, those vids are painful for me to watch, though I mean no disrespect by that. We are human, we have learning curves. Those guys are early on the evasion learning curve, in particular they use next to no lateral thrust, and sometimes crash face first into more massive enemies, suffering heavy collision damage, due to straight line flying and tunnel vision.
Which is no shame because we were all that guy once. But my point is: none of us need to be that guy forever.
Q. OK, I'm fully gimballed, in medium ship, plasma guy interdicts me - specifically, how do I do this evasion thing?
A. Assuming you have no real prior knowledge at all, please first watch and read Truesilver's Top Tips, No.1: Beginner's Guide to Circle-Strafing...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...silver-s-Top-Tips-Beginner-s-Guide-VR-PvP-Vid
... which I hope will set you up in terms of control of the six axes of motion and opposing the three straight line movements of fw/rev, up/down, left/right, with the curving movements of pitch, roll and yaw. I've recently added a SLF learning method vid which hopefully will help a lot with the basics.
Now let's look at things from the perspective of the plasma guy. He almost certainly doesn't have the long range mod, so his projectiles travel at 875 mps - about half the speed of multis and only about 1.6 times as fast as your max boost. His weapons fire instantly so he's not looking to hold a lead (as a fixed multi guy would) but to take pot-shots. So your trajectory and speed before he fires is relevant but not overwhelmingly so - what he really needs is for you to maintain that same speed and trajectory during the time it takes the plasma to reach you.
So, three things.
Firstly, every single movement you make should be some form of curve. Think fractals. Imagine drawing a straight line from the centre of an analogue clock towards a number. Whether it's headed towards the three, or the twelve, or half past one, this is NOT what you are trying to achieve. Because even the diagonal can be predicted and tracked. So instead, imagine a line drawn towards the three that starts moving towards the half past one and then moves sharply towards the twelve and then back on itself ... in a curve.
To do the above you use lateral thrust (both left/right and up/down) and vary your overall direction, mainly through roll.
Secondly, vary your speed. Pulse your boosts. Vary the rhythm. Make him guess. Decelerate massively by going from FA-Off back to FA-On and thrusting against your original direction of travel. But before this becomes a 'sitting duck' stall, get moving again.
Thirdly, vary your line. I favour down thrust and right thrust but all the time I throw in left thrust and sometimes up thrust. With or without boost. With or without FA-Off.
If you are continuously making curves, continuously changing speed and continuously changing direction, you are presenting a vanishingly small chance of being in the place that the other guy's HUD computer predicted you would be in, between him firing his plasma and it reaching you.
And all of that is basically prevention. There's also cure. See which way he is orientated and go under him, forcing him to roll because he can't see you. Watch out for plasma spheres or cannon shells and move away from them.
Don't joust. If you boost towards him in a straight line, aiming to just miss by using pitch, he will hold fire and shoot you as you move past his centre line. Instead, boost using your vertical, side and forwards thrusters so you move diagonally across and past him. Make him have to roll and use pitch and yaw just to see you. Make him work. And keep using your own roll to change your diagonals into curves.
Incidentally, although I am focusing here on plasma, all of these methods limit ToT for the almost equally popular fixed cannons, fixed multis and rails and to help to avoid the admittedly wide fire-arc of other gimballed Cmdrs.
Q. OK ... I guess I'll need to put in a bit of practice before that first interdiction, then?
A. Well, yes, that would be wise! Seriously, there can a be a lot to take in, which makes the game fun. Practice is the thing, you can't learn the game from a book, lol.
My own more recent story is this: by the time I was in the PvP League back when I used to be in Adle's Armada about a year ago, I was already an effective brawler ... a damage-dealer, rammer, time-on-target guy, with a good knowledge of the game and situational awareness that came from having to stay alive on my own, from back before, when I was into lone-wolf PvP. But I realised during the League that what I really needed to work on was evasion.
Fast forward a year and I've almost done nothing else in between (well, except for the lifetime of RNGineering but I try to blot that out). Practice, practice.
So what I've tried to do recently is take the laterals of Cmdrs like Cillit Bang and the perma-boost of Cmdrs like Z4.Mafia and add it to my own beloved Courier circle-strafing into kind of a Cannibal-FdL thing, a Lance that eats Lances, if you see what I mean.
Of course, I am on my own learning curve, which is why as you'll see from the vids I do take damage ... but at least in these 20 fights, notwithstanding in every single case my having massively fewer hit points than my opponents, the overall rates of damage were so much in my favour that it didn't matter.
Q. And while I'm evading, and he may be chaffing, how do I damage him?
A. You have to strike a balance between facing him nose on (in order to minimise your profile, as if you were using fixed weapons) and using gimbals' ability to hit even though off-line. But remember that the latter is your advantage. People often think the point of gimbals is that they turn near-misses into hits but the real point is their abilities to (a) hit off-line, i.e. with your nose facing anywhere within up to a 30 degree angle of the target, (b) track a target faster than any human can, (c) use those two things to enable you to evade while still hitting. I'd go so far as to say that (except on Big 3, or equivalent) enabling evasion is the major benefit of gimbals.
So, keep moving, keep firing, keep tagging. Try to work around an optimum range of about 750 m to 1.5 km, within which you are close enough to prevent gimbal sway robbing you of Time-on-Target but far enough away not to collide, be fragged, or provide 'can't miss' point-blank plasma opportunities. Don't try to fight at really long range with gimbals unless up against a very large/slow target, that's a fixed laser thing.
If he chaffs continuously, he is either using a 10 second repeater-macro, panicking, or has good timing. In any case, great. He'll run out quickly.
If he pulses his chaff intelligently, he'll leave gaps when you can score.
While he's chaffing, attempt to close range and keep firing. Within the ranges I mention you can easily get 30% of DPS to score, particularly if using lasers. If he does not have high-alpha weapons and you are more massive and willing to get really close, you can get over 50% of DPS against a medium ship.
If he has single chaff, I recommend that you do NOT use de-targeting unless you want to tag him with emissive. With single chaff he's in trouble anyway and de-targeting tends to reduce your ToT during his reload period, while your guns re-acquire the lock.
If he's really good with double-chaff, de-target when at longer ranges but just stay targeted and spam at closer ranges.
Be aware of your hard point locations. Your guns cannot shoot through your ship. Lift the nose of the FdL if the huge hard point is not tracking.
Be patient. You can (probably) evade longer than he can chaff. See the table above and note the fight durations. And those long durations, don't forget, are until I got them, not until they got me. I had more time than I required.
Q. Can this help me against NPC's?
A. Absolutely. Take a ship with strong lateral thrusters such as FdL or Viper III, go to a RES or CZ and fight with just pitch and roll but 4 pips to Eng. Then fight with continuous full-strength sideways thrust with 4 pips to Eng. You will note that the NPC's hit you far less often.
Q. Back to duelling, should I face-tank, or use Reverski?
Not face-tanking is kind of the point of this guide and reverski is just a way to force a face-tank.
So don't use prolonged reversing except in edge cases or if you are in the Big 3 or a similarly sluggish vessel. Reverski is intended to hold both ships within each other's fire arc, because the reverser calculates that he will win on pure hit point trading. To win via a face-tank you have to have higher DPS, DPE and/or hit points than your opponent - preferably all three.
Gimballed weapons have lower DPS and DPE than their fixed counterparts and the best DPS/DPE weapons in the game (plasma and rails, taking modding into account) do not even come gimballed. So unless you have a much higher hit point pool than your opponent, by reversing you are creating a spreadsheet war with the numbers against you.
Basically there are better weapons for face-tanking than gimbals. Get moving sideways, so you can hit him but he struggles to hit you. Convert your lower DPS into more damage via higher ToT.
I employed sustained reverski twice in Beta: against an Orca with frags and a Cobra IV with mines. These are the edge cases.
Q. What about the build? You were shieldless?? In a Ferdie, not FAS??? With gimballed pulses lasers????
A. The basic principles are the same whichever gimballed weapons you go for, or shieldless or not, or in FdL or FAS. Try different combos and see what works for you.
Lasers will give you access to phasing, better ToT and no reload downtime, at the expense of DPS and DPE, thermal load and (unless long range) damage fall-off.
Multis and cannons give better DPS and DPE but require reloading, especially in the case of cannons. Also, gimballed cannons are inaccurate without the long range mod, due to low projectile velocity.
Specials-wise, I strongly recommend emissive to ensure good lock and tracking and wide fire-arc (which is determined by the target's thermal signature). Corrosive is great, as is dispersal. Heat cannons are controversial but useful, at least as suppression. So if you really want a perfect min/maxed gimballed set up, you might consider combining weapons of different types to get a good spread of specials, and carrying tons of synthesis.
Shields-wise, the health pool of an SCB tank or a bi-weave hybrid is vastly higher than a shieldless ship. And a shieldless FAS has a ton more hp than a shieldless FdL. And a Vulture has the same hp and better manoeuvrability.
However, I went for the shieldless FdL because of its combination of a narrow profile, no shield bubble to turn misses into hits, perma-boost, greater DPS than FAS, higher acceleration than FAS and stronger lateral thrust than FAS (the latter two especially).
Basically when I want to evade, I really want to evade, even at the expense of having (relatively) small hit points. I suspect what will work best for you will depend on how much you take the evasion thing on board, or revert to tanking, lol. I did consider the Vulture but the fights are long enough already with FdL DPS and Vulture DPS would just have made them longer again.
If you go shielded you will need a clear strategy concerning whether you are expecting your shield to drop multiple times or not and good pip management to ensure evasion without running your Sys cap dry due to shield regen.
Concerning anti-hull stuff like corrosive and scramble spectrum, I faced all of that. The only thing that is unmanageable is stacked pack-hounds plus emissive. I didn't see anyone with that, but would just have LOL'd and left if I had. Rails and high yield were not an issue, they still have to hit you.
Q. What about gimballed v gimballed?
A. Plenty of these duels involved gimballed v gimballed, in particular against multis (about half were fixed, half gimballed, of those). You can leverage advantage in many ways: (a) Spending more time outside your opponent's fire arc than he spends outside yours. You can't stay on someone's six in this game but you can spend a lot of the fight facing their canopy at 90 degrees because you're better with thrusters. This to me is the main thing. (b) Controlling range - if he has gimballed multis, for example, he can't do much to you outside 2 km. (c) Intelligent chaff - consider his range and angle before you use it. Consider saving chaff for when your bi-weave is down if you have a swift broken reform. (d) Having more chaff - a last resort but offers peace of mind! (e) Carrying dispersal as a back-up (although then you spoil your pulse disco...)
Q. Thanks for the pulse disco but can I watch some full fights to get a better idea?
A. Sure, here are two. They are long of course but I've put in plenty of explanatory captions, which should be considered part of this guide. The first is against a partly plasma FdL, the second against multi-crewed(!) plasma and rails FAS. One reason I've selected these is because rendering of plasma is temperamental, especially in Beta, but you can see it well in these.
Concerning my explanations of evasion, there are for example some good vapour trail moments in these vids which should really help with visualisation.
A few things to note while watching these two vids:
- It is difficult to see sideways movement from within the cockpit. Opponents' videos of me would be much better. But there are barely a few seconds within these 25 minutes of fighting when I am not using full lateral thrust in at least one, and usually two (so, diagonal) directions, in addition to using fw/rev thrust and making curves.
- It tends to look as though I use more down thrust than anything else but actually I use side thrust more (more to the right than the left, for some reason). It looks more like down thrust because of the way the movements interact with pitch and roll, I think.
- You'll note that when I get tagged it tends to be because I get complacent and let my opponent get too close.
- That said, I find long range / reverski fighting dull and gimbals are unsuited to it, so I'm pretty much always moving forwards and trying to circle in that 750 m to 1.5 km zone, just as some may recall from my many Courier PvP vids. (In the fights tabled above I used long range against two Pythons only, and partly due to damaging invisible de-sync collisions at close range which unfortunately are common in Beta.)
Video 2: Gimballed Pulse FdL v Plasma FdL (10 mins)
[video=youtube_share;LUlWQUfOdro]https://youtu.be/LUlWQUfOdro[/video]
Video 3: Gimballed Pulse FdL v Plasma FAS (15 mins)
[video=youtube_share;u_fi09LJCjQ]https://youtu.be/u_fi09LJCjQ[/video]
Q. I do feel motivated to PvP more, and encouraged to see that I could actually try it with my all-gimballed loadout, but I'm inexperienced and I'm wondering whether what you're saying is really applicable only to experienced PvP-ers. I mean, that basically you might have won without the gimbals, and I would lose with the gimbals.
A. Well, obviously I like to think that the time I've put into learning about this game and having hundreds (/thousands) of fights helped me, but I feel that this concern would be more relevant if I was like, "Look everyone, I won 2-0, so therefore gimbals don't suck." I mean, not 2-0, but 20-0? The odds of winning 20 duels consecutively by chance are 1,048,576 to 1. More than a million to one. That I feel is as good a proof of a build as we're going to see in this game. After all, around here, we get 'New Meta' threads when a guy wins one duel! (Not a criticism, I like reading those threads.)
It doesn't prove that this is the best build, of course. Making assertions about what is best is not what this guide is about. It's about viability.
And viability ... considerable viability ... yes, 1v1 all-gimballed viability, I insist, is proven.
Also, I think I can say genuinely with the 'feel' that comes from a couple of years of PvP, that I did feel like I had a build advantage in these fights.
Whether gimbals should confer a build advantage is, of course, a controversial question and as I said earlier beyond the scope of this guide, although it's a valid topic for discussion.
So don't delay - we were all inexperienced once. Get experienced. Do some practice on the NPC's, then jump in to PvP. "Nothing to fear but fear itself", as they say. And with gimbals + evasion, you should have little to fear.
I hope that you found this guide useful. I'd welcome all comments and will try to answer any questions.
Happy gimballed duelling!
o7
TRUESILVER
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some other stuff:
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.1: Circle-Strafing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...silver-s-Top-Tips-Beginner-s-Guide-VR-PvP-Vid
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.2: Using Fixed Weapons
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...s-No-2-Beginner’s-Guide-Courier-v-FdL-PvP-vid
Official FDev Damage Stats Every Weapon
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/246086-Official-FDev-Damage-Stats-for-Every-Weapon
All Ships Max Speed, Boost, Pitch, Roll and Yaw
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...aw-for-Every-Ship-in-Game-Official-FDev-Stats
Side effects of every Engineered special effect
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ects-of-weapon-special-effects-complete-table
Cmdr Truesilver Youtube PvP Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv1zfoWSxsJZxXQ1iYcxmIA
Want to get into PvP but feel you can't because of your all-gimballed loadout?
Harassed by rails? Pestered by plasma?
Or just want to improve your PvE piloting by taking some PvP tips and letting rip on the NPC's?
Any which way, gimballed Cmdr, this guide is for you.
In Beta 2.3 I have fought precisely 20 medium v medium ship duels against all comers. We have infinite access to the mods, so everyone is fully RNGineered. I had no control over my opponents' loadouts but I used the same one myself, 20 times over.
I used five gimballed pulse lasers.
And I won 20, lost 0.
As the flip side of the coin to Truesilver's Top Tips, No.2: Using Fixed Weapons, let me present ...
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.3: Gimballed Duelling.
Now, welcome to my pulse disco ... with music by The K.L.F. !
[video=youtube_share;reVQ4FXxkxU]https://youtu.be/reVQ4FXxkxU[/video]
Here's the build:
http://www.edshipyard.com/#/L=A0O0,...qpDEqpDIqpD15OGp50wPc4ypDAqpDEqpDIqpD20m068M0
The specials were phasing on c4 and 2 x c2, emissive and scramble spectrum on the remaining c2's.
(To be super-try-hard you could drop the FSD down to nothing to save mass, at the expense of making it impossible to high wake, make the interdictor a 1D, etc, but I didn't bother.)
Note that as I spell out below in more detail, the shieldless laser thing is completely optional. You can dominate with any credible gimballed weapons set up, and you can be shielded. Although highly effective, my build was partly trollolo and partly to test the viability of combat without having to reload (I am sick of synthesis). There are ways to make it (usually) better, such as by including corrosive.
Here's the gameplan:
1. Evade
2. Evade
3. Evade
This ^^ bit is NOT optional. Because I hope that by the end of this guide you will agree that, if you're using gimbals and you aren't evading continuously, then (unless in Big 3) you are doing it wrong. This is the main thing I hope people will take from this.
Political Disclaimer
Now, (hard hat on), I know that some of my fixed weapon PvP buddies may be spluttering, "Thanks for spreading the cheese, True. What's coming as No.4? Your guide to flying backwards and spamming pack hounds?"
Equally I know that some of the PvE guys may be thinking, "If this makes gimbals look OP it will help the PvP nerf agenda."
Spare me, guys. Gimbals are the most widely used weapon variant in the game, eclipsing fixed, turrets and seekers probably 10 times over. It's high time they had their own guide and I'm just going to write it, telling it how it is, not how it should be. But of course you're welcome to discuss all issues in the comments.
Now, on to a full Q+A, with a table and two more explanatory vids...
Q. I don't understand. For years I've been told that gimbals were useless in PvP because of chaff...?
A fully gimballed loadout is still useless in a wing fight if the entire enemy team has double chaff, because wing victory goes to the first team to focus down one enemy. Complete chaff coverage will hamper damage for several minutes, so losing the fight. Even every enemy player having single chaff would pose significant problems.
However, in a 1v1, the game has moved on by reason of 2.1 hit point inflation - and not just 'on paper' inflation but 'effective' inflation via g5 dirty drives.
Even though chaff can be modded up to 15 (14+1) rather than 11 total ammo now, double chaff simply does not provide enough duration of partial immunity. Basically, if you are gimballed you wait out their 220 to 300 seconds of coverage, taking opportunities to tag them, preferably at close range (where much of the damage will get through anyway) until their chaff is exhausted. Then you wreck them.
Most of my Beta opponents had chaff. Many had double chaff. 20-0 does not lie.
Q. OK, can you provide some more details on these fights?
Certainly, here is a complete table. I don't want any guy to feel called out in a guide so I've abbreviated Cmdr names to initials.
Note that I'm here ONLY setting out medium v medium. The pulse disco vid above for example includes a fight against a Diamondback and 4 NPC's but I haven't included fights against small ships in my 20. I am however, without hesitation, including Vultures because they are right up there with FdL and FAS now (especially in Beta due to the buffed large weapon APV).
Here are all my Beta medium v medium ship duels. In every single fight I used the loadout linked above (sometimes with three chaff, sometimes four) except for just one duel in which I had more kinetic, but otherwise the same build. Opponents' builds are notes, not complete. Durations are to nearest half minute.
| No | Cmdr | Ship | Build | Opponent's final status | Duration |
| 1 | GT | Vulture | Pacifiers | Ran when shield low | 6 mins |
| 2 | W5 | FAS | Cannons | Exploded | 9 mins |
| 3 | H4 | FdL | Plasma, Torps | Exploded | 7 mins |
| 4 | U | Python | Plasma | Conceded at 27% hull | 21 mins |
| 5 | K | Python | Plasma | Ran at 44% hull | 15-20 mins |
| 6 | FCH | Dropship | ? | Agreed shield drop only | 10 secs |
| 7 | NT | FdL | Cannons | Conceded at 3% hull | 15 mins |
| 8 | NT | Vulture | Bursts | Conceded at 1% hull | 10 mins |
| 9 | R | FdL | Multis, SCB's | Exploded | 6 mins 30 secs |
| 10 | B | Vulture | Pulses | Exploded | 16 mins |
| 11 | YL | FdL | Plasma | Exploded | 10 mins |
| 12 | AB | FdL | Plasma, rails, SCB's | Ran at 80% hull | 4 mins |
| 13 | R | Orca | Frags | Ran at 58% hull | 7 mins 30 secs |
| 14 | M | Python | Plasma, Torps | Conceded at 28% hull | 26 mins 30 secs |
| 15 | Y | FdL | Multis, plasma, SCB's | Ran at 2% hull | 7 mins |
| 16 | PS | FdL | Multis, lasers | Exploded | 4 mins 30 secs |
| 17 | AR | FdL | Multis | Exploded | 7 mins 30 secs |
| 18 | M | FdL | Multis | Exploded | 10 mins |
| 19 | SH | FAS | Plasma, Rails, Multi-Crew | Exploded | 15 mins 30 secs |
| 20 | K | FAS | Plasma, Hammer | Exploded | 18 mins |
Q. I don't get it - I've seen lots of recent 1v1 vids of guys in medium ships taking regular hits from fixed cannons and plasma, right from the get-go...?
A. Yes, those vids are painful for me to watch, though I mean no disrespect by that. We are human, we have learning curves. Those guys are early on the evasion learning curve, in particular they use next to no lateral thrust, and sometimes crash face first into more massive enemies, suffering heavy collision damage, due to straight line flying and tunnel vision.
Which is no shame because we were all that guy once. But my point is: none of us need to be that guy forever.
Q. OK, I'm fully gimballed, in medium ship, plasma guy interdicts me - specifically, how do I do this evasion thing?
A. Assuming you have no real prior knowledge at all, please first watch and read Truesilver's Top Tips, No.1: Beginner's Guide to Circle-Strafing...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...silver-s-Top-Tips-Beginner-s-Guide-VR-PvP-Vid
... which I hope will set you up in terms of control of the six axes of motion and opposing the three straight line movements of fw/rev, up/down, left/right, with the curving movements of pitch, roll and yaw. I've recently added a SLF learning method vid which hopefully will help a lot with the basics.
Now let's look at things from the perspective of the plasma guy. He almost certainly doesn't have the long range mod, so his projectiles travel at 875 mps - about half the speed of multis and only about 1.6 times as fast as your max boost. His weapons fire instantly so he's not looking to hold a lead (as a fixed multi guy would) but to take pot-shots. So your trajectory and speed before he fires is relevant but not overwhelmingly so - what he really needs is for you to maintain that same speed and trajectory during the time it takes the plasma to reach you.
So, three things.
Firstly, every single movement you make should be some form of curve. Think fractals. Imagine drawing a straight line from the centre of an analogue clock towards a number. Whether it's headed towards the three, or the twelve, or half past one, this is NOT what you are trying to achieve. Because even the diagonal can be predicted and tracked. So instead, imagine a line drawn towards the three that starts moving towards the half past one and then moves sharply towards the twelve and then back on itself ... in a curve.
To do the above you use lateral thrust (both left/right and up/down) and vary your overall direction, mainly through roll.
Secondly, vary your speed. Pulse your boosts. Vary the rhythm. Make him guess. Decelerate massively by going from FA-Off back to FA-On and thrusting against your original direction of travel. But before this becomes a 'sitting duck' stall, get moving again.
Thirdly, vary your line. I favour down thrust and right thrust but all the time I throw in left thrust and sometimes up thrust. With or without boost. With or without FA-Off.
If you are continuously making curves, continuously changing speed and continuously changing direction, you are presenting a vanishingly small chance of being in the place that the other guy's HUD computer predicted you would be in, between him firing his plasma and it reaching you.
And all of that is basically prevention. There's also cure. See which way he is orientated and go under him, forcing him to roll because he can't see you. Watch out for plasma spheres or cannon shells and move away from them.
Don't joust. If you boost towards him in a straight line, aiming to just miss by using pitch, he will hold fire and shoot you as you move past his centre line. Instead, boost using your vertical, side and forwards thrusters so you move diagonally across and past him. Make him have to roll and use pitch and yaw just to see you. Make him work. And keep using your own roll to change your diagonals into curves.
Incidentally, although I am focusing here on plasma, all of these methods limit ToT for the almost equally popular fixed cannons, fixed multis and rails and to help to avoid the admittedly wide fire-arc of other gimballed Cmdrs.
Q. OK ... I guess I'll need to put in a bit of practice before that first interdiction, then?
A. Well, yes, that would be wise! Seriously, there can a be a lot to take in, which makes the game fun. Practice is the thing, you can't learn the game from a book, lol.
My own more recent story is this: by the time I was in the PvP League back when I used to be in Adle's Armada about a year ago, I was already an effective brawler ... a damage-dealer, rammer, time-on-target guy, with a good knowledge of the game and situational awareness that came from having to stay alive on my own, from back before, when I was into lone-wolf PvP. But I realised during the League that what I really needed to work on was evasion.
Fast forward a year and I've almost done nothing else in between (well, except for the lifetime of RNGineering but I try to blot that out). Practice, practice.
So what I've tried to do recently is take the laterals of Cmdrs like Cillit Bang and the perma-boost of Cmdrs like Z4.Mafia and add it to my own beloved Courier circle-strafing into kind of a Cannibal-FdL thing, a Lance that eats Lances, if you see what I mean.
Of course, I am on my own learning curve, which is why as you'll see from the vids I do take damage ... but at least in these 20 fights, notwithstanding in every single case my having massively fewer hit points than my opponents, the overall rates of damage were so much in my favour that it didn't matter.
Q. And while I'm evading, and he may be chaffing, how do I damage him?
A. You have to strike a balance between facing him nose on (in order to minimise your profile, as if you were using fixed weapons) and using gimbals' ability to hit even though off-line. But remember that the latter is your advantage. People often think the point of gimbals is that they turn near-misses into hits but the real point is their abilities to (a) hit off-line, i.e. with your nose facing anywhere within up to a 30 degree angle of the target, (b) track a target faster than any human can, (c) use those two things to enable you to evade while still hitting. I'd go so far as to say that (except on Big 3, or equivalent) enabling evasion is the major benefit of gimbals.
So, keep moving, keep firing, keep tagging. Try to work around an optimum range of about 750 m to 1.5 km, within which you are close enough to prevent gimbal sway robbing you of Time-on-Target but far enough away not to collide, be fragged, or provide 'can't miss' point-blank plasma opportunities. Don't try to fight at really long range with gimbals unless up against a very large/slow target, that's a fixed laser thing.
If he chaffs continuously, he is either using a 10 second repeater-macro, panicking, or has good timing. In any case, great. He'll run out quickly.
If he pulses his chaff intelligently, he'll leave gaps when you can score.
While he's chaffing, attempt to close range and keep firing. Within the ranges I mention you can easily get 30% of DPS to score, particularly if using lasers. If he does not have high-alpha weapons and you are more massive and willing to get really close, you can get over 50% of DPS against a medium ship.
If he has single chaff, I recommend that you do NOT use de-targeting unless you want to tag him with emissive. With single chaff he's in trouble anyway and de-targeting tends to reduce your ToT during his reload period, while your guns re-acquire the lock.
If he's really good with double-chaff, de-target when at longer ranges but just stay targeted and spam at closer ranges.
Be aware of your hard point locations. Your guns cannot shoot through your ship. Lift the nose of the FdL if the huge hard point is not tracking.
Be patient. You can (probably) evade longer than he can chaff. See the table above and note the fight durations. And those long durations, don't forget, are until I got them, not until they got me. I had more time than I required.
Q. Can this help me against NPC's?
A. Absolutely. Take a ship with strong lateral thrusters such as FdL or Viper III, go to a RES or CZ and fight with just pitch and roll but 4 pips to Eng. Then fight with continuous full-strength sideways thrust with 4 pips to Eng. You will note that the NPC's hit you far less often.
Q. Back to duelling, should I face-tank, or use Reverski?
Not face-tanking is kind of the point of this guide and reverski is just a way to force a face-tank.
So don't use prolonged reversing except in edge cases or if you are in the Big 3 or a similarly sluggish vessel. Reverski is intended to hold both ships within each other's fire arc, because the reverser calculates that he will win on pure hit point trading. To win via a face-tank you have to have higher DPS, DPE and/or hit points than your opponent - preferably all three.
Gimballed weapons have lower DPS and DPE than their fixed counterparts and the best DPS/DPE weapons in the game (plasma and rails, taking modding into account) do not even come gimballed. So unless you have a much higher hit point pool than your opponent, by reversing you are creating a spreadsheet war with the numbers against you.
Basically there are better weapons for face-tanking than gimbals. Get moving sideways, so you can hit him but he struggles to hit you. Convert your lower DPS into more damage via higher ToT.
I employed sustained reverski twice in Beta: against an Orca with frags and a Cobra IV with mines. These are the edge cases.
Q. What about the build? You were shieldless?? In a Ferdie, not FAS??? With gimballed pulses lasers????
A. The basic principles are the same whichever gimballed weapons you go for, or shieldless or not, or in FdL or FAS. Try different combos and see what works for you.
Lasers will give you access to phasing, better ToT and no reload downtime, at the expense of DPS and DPE, thermal load and (unless long range) damage fall-off.
Multis and cannons give better DPS and DPE but require reloading, especially in the case of cannons. Also, gimballed cannons are inaccurate without the long range mod, due to low projectile velocity.
Specials-wise, I strongly recommend emissive to ensure good lock and tracking and wide fire-arc (which is determined by the target's thermal signature). Corrosive is great, as is dispersal. Heat cannons are controversial but useful, at least as suppression. So if you really want a perfect min/maxed gimballed set up, you might consider combining weapons of different types to get a good spread of specials, and carrying tons of synthesis.
Shields-wise, the health pool of an SCB tank or a bi-weave hybrid is vastly higher than a shieldless ship. And a shieldless FAS has a ton more hp than a shieldless FdL. And a Vulture has the same hp and better manoeuvrability.
However, I went for the shieldless FdL because of its combination of a narrow profile, no shield bubble to turn misses into hits, perma-boost, greater DPS than FAS, higher acceleration than FAS and stronger lateral thrust than FAS (the latter two especially).
Basically when I want to evade, I really want to evade, even at the expense of having (relatively) small hit points. I suspect what will work best for you will depend on how much you take the evasion thing on board, or revert to tanking, lol. I did consider the Vulture but the fights are long enough already with FdL DPS and Vulture DPS would just have made them longer again.
If you go shielded you will need a clear strategy concerning whether you are expecting your shield to drop multiple times or not and good pip management to ensure evasion without running your Sys cap dry due to shield regen.
Concerning anti-hull stuff like corrosive and scramble spectrum, I faced all of that. The only thing that is unmanageable is stacked pack-hounds plus emissive. I didn't see anyone with that, but would just have LOL'd and left if I had. Rails and high yield were not an issue, they still have to hit you.
Q. What about gimballed v gimballed?
A. Plenty of these duels involved gimballed v gimballed, in particular against multis (about half were fixed, half gimballed, of those). You can leverage advantage in many ways: (a) Spending more time outside your opponent's fire arc than he spends outside yours. You can't stay on someone's six in this game but you can spend a lot of the fight facing their canopy at 90 degrees because you're better with thrusters. This to me is the main thing. (b) Controlling range - if he has gimballed multis, for example, he can't do much to you outside 2 km. (c) Intelligent chaff - consider his range and angle before you use it. Consider saving chaff for when your bi-weave is down if you have a swift broken reform. (d) Having more chaff - a last resort but offers peace of mind! (e) Carrying dispersal as a back-up (although then you spoil your pulse disco...)
Q. Thanks for the pulse disco but can I watch some full fights to get a better idea?
A. Sure, here are two. They are long of course but I've put in plenty of explanatory captions, which should be considered part of this guide. The first is against a partly plasma FdL, the second against multi-crewed(!) plasma and rails FAS. One reason I've selected these is because rendering of plasma is temperamental, especially in Beta, but you can see it well in these.
Concerning my explanations of evasion, there are for example some good vapour trail moments in these vids which should really help with visualisation.
A few things to note while watching these two vids:
- It is difficult to see sideways movement from within the cockpit. Opponents' videos of me would be much better. But there are barely a few seconds within these 25 minutes of fighting when I am not using full lateral thrust in at least one, and usually two (so, diagonal) directions, in addition to using fw/rev thrust and making curves.
- It tends to look as though I use more down thrust than anything else but actually I use side thrust more (more to the right than the left, for some reason). It looks more like down thrust because of the way the movements interact with pitch and roll, I think.
- You'll note that when I get tagged it tends to be because I get complacent and let my opponent get too close.
- That said, I find long range / reverski fighting dull and gimbals are unsuited to it, so I'm pretty much always moving forwards and trying to circle in that 750 m to 1.5 km zone, just as some may recall from my many Courier PvP vids. (In the fights tabled above I used long range against two Pythons only, and partly due to damaging invisible de-sync collisions at close range which unfortunately are common in Beta.)
Video 2: Gimballed Pulse FdL v Plasma FdL (10 mins)
[video=youtube_share;LUlWQUfOdro]https://youtu.be/LUlWQUfOdro[/video]
Video 3: Gimballed Pulse FdL v Plasma FAS (15 mins)
[video=youtube_share;u_fi09LJCjQ]https://youtu.be/u_fi09LJCjQ[/video]
Q. I do feel motivated to PvP more, and encouraged to see that I could actually try it with my all-gimballed loadout, but I'm inexperienced and I'm wondering whether what you're saying is really applicable only to experienced PvP-ers. I mean, that basically you might have won without the gimbals, and I would lose with the gimbals.
A. Well, obviously I like to think that the time I've put into learning about this game and having hundreds (/thousands) of fights helped me, but I feel that this concern would be more relevant if I was like, "Look everyone, I won 2-0, so therefore gimbals don't suck." I mean, not 2-0, but 20-0? The odds of winning 20 duels consecutively by chance are 1,048,576 to 1. More than a million to one. That I feel is as good a proof of a build as we're going to see in this game. After all, around here, we get 'New Meta' threads when a guy wins one duel! (Not a criticism, I like reading those threads.)
It doesn't prove that this is the best build, of course. Making assertions about what is best is not what this guide is about. It's about viability.
And viability ... considerable viability ... yes, 1v1 all-gimballed viability, I insist, is proven.
Also, I think I can say genuinely with the 'feel' that comes from a couple of years of PvP, that I did feel like I had a build advantage in these fights.
Whether gimbals should confer a build advantage is, of course, a controversial question and as I said earlier beyond the scope of this guide, although it's a valid topic for discussion.
So don't delay - we were all inexperienced once. Get experienced. Do some practice on the NPC's, then jump in to PvP. "Nothing to fear but fear itself", as they say. And with gimbals + evasion, you should have little to fear.
I hope that you found this guide useful. I'd welcome all comments and will try to answer any questions.
Happy gimballed duelling!
o7
TRUESILVER
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Some other stuff:
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.1: Circle-Strafing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...silver-s-Top-Tips-Beginner-s-Guide-VR-PvP-Vid
Truesilver's Top Tips, No.2: Using Fixed Weapons
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...s-No-2-Beginner’s-Guide-Courier-v-FdL-PvP-vid
Official FDev Damage Stats Every Weapon
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/246086-Official-FDev-Damage-Stats-for-Every-Weapon
All Ships Max Speed, Boost, Pitch, Roll and Yaw
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...aw-for-Every-Ship-in-Game-Official-FDev-Stats
Side effects of every Engineered special effect
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ects-of-weapon-special-effects-complete-table
Cmdr Truesilver Youtube PvP Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv1zfoWSxsJZxXQ1iYcxmIA
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