EVE Evolved: Flying the Dominix
Of all the ships I've flown over the years in EVE Online, the Gallente Dominix remains one of my absolute favourites. It's big, it's slow, and it looks like an upside-down mouldy shoe, but it's forever been one of the most versatile battleships in the game. With a massive bonus of 10% to drone damage and hitpoints per level of the Gallente Battleship skill, the Dominix can easily deal around 500 damage per second just with its drones. It can take on targets of any size by switching to medium or light drones and can field a full rack of six railguns or blasters to push its damage even higher.
In PvE, the Dominix can be set up as a long-range damage platform for blitzing missions, a salvaging platform relying only on drone damage, or even a heavily tanked ship that will take all the damage while your drones automatically kill everything in sight. For PvP, the Dominix can be used for short-range damage, sniping, remote repair support, electronic warfare support, spider-tanking, capacitor warfare, and other roles. It can shield tank or armour tank and can even be set up with a reasonable hull tank for a surprise factor.
In this week's EVE Evolved, I give two viable PvE fittings for the Dominix and two of my favourite PvP setups, along with advice on how to use each setup to its fullest.
The Dominix is an absolute monster for mission-running, able to fit a massive armour tank and still dish out consistently high damage with drones. The setup above is a drone sniper that uses three Omnidirectional Tracking Link Is to boost the tracking speed and optimal range of tech 2 sentry drones. With the Sentry Damage Augmentor I rig fitted, a set of five Garde IIs will deal up to 495 damage per second and easily hit targets as far away as 50-60km. The railguns deal over 200 damage per second to targets within 30km when using Antimatter L ammo, and they should be loaded with Iridium L when you need to hit targets farther than 40km.
The instant long-range damage provided by sentry drones and railguns will make short work of missions, but you'll need to send in a dedicated salvage ship after the mission is complete if you want to salvage the wrecks. Warden IIs can potentially hit targets 150km away, but as the setup above only has a drone control range of 80km, you won't be able to issue orders to attack anything beyond that distance. If you find a mission in which you really need this kind of range, you can swap the guns for four named 425mm railguns and add another Drone Link Augmentor I to reach 100km drone control range.
The four active hardeners should be selected depending on which race's ships you'll encounter in a mission; Guristas pirates, for example, deal only Kinetic and Thermal damage. If you're not sure what damage types you'll be facing, head over to the EVE Survival mission reports and look up your mission.
Where the Dominix really shines is its massive active tank when fit with two large armour repairers and enough capacitor generation gear to run them both flat out. The setup above is capacitor-stable unless you run the afterburner and all five guns continuously. Mission NPCs are as dumb as bricks and will never switch aggro onto your drones once you've got their attention. This setup exploits that weakness by providing a big enough tank to handle an entire mission pocket at once. Shoot one NPC from each group in a mission stage to get aggro from every NPC, then you won't have to worry about your drones taking damage.
Your railguns and Ogre IIs will make short work of NPC battleships and battlecruisers as they close in, but you may have trouble hitting cruisers or frigates with them. When this happens, call the Ogres back and swap to Hammerhead IIs. This setup can be modified to run almost automatically while you're away from the computer or busy with other tasks. Just set your drones' behaviour to aggressive and they will make their way around the mission automatically, killing everything they can.
If you plan to use this setup for AFK mission-running, swap the railguns for a mix of tractor beams, salvagers and additional Drone Link Augmentor Is. You need to keep at least one turret for getting aggro, but it doesn't have to actually hit the target, so you can just make it a small laser or civilian gun. Swapping the 100mn Afterburner II and one Cap Recharger II for two Omnidirectional Tracking Link Is will also help your Ogre IIs to hit smaller targets, usually removing the need to switch to Hammerhead IIs when you want to take out frigates. With your massive tank and one-size-fits-all damage output, you can safely go AFK and return to find most or all of the mission NPCs dead.
Head over to page 2 for my two favourite PvP setups, including one slightly unorthodox neutraliser fitting that is a hell of a lot of fun to fly.
