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Are Target Painters Great or Stupid?

Are target painters useful? In context, I'm running level 4 missions in my Drake without any real problems with the exception of DPS. It's pretty slow going on Battleships. Will bringing in a non-combat alt with Target Painter's help this at all?

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mymindisglowing
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Please consider restructuring your title question to be more specific. You really don’t share much information with it the way it is, and it turns out the answer to your question contains the answer I needed. Because your title question is so vague, I almost created a new question for it.

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4 answers

  • 4

mull [ Editor ]

Target painters are useful when you are shooting at something with a sig radius smaller than your guns/missiles. If you are shooting cruise missiles at a cruiser then they will help a lot. In your case shooting heavy missiles at a battleship signature radius is not going to be a problem (a battleships sig radius is larger than the missiles).

Traditionally painters are used on cruise missile ravens while mission running to kill cruisers/frigs/etc. faster and with torps to shoot at basically anything smaller than a capital.

Less commonly they are used to increase the sig radius of smaller ships being shot at by any battleship sized guns (e.g. painting a hac or hic for a mega) or drakes and sometimes caracals to hit frigates for full damage.

When it comes to missiles the speed of the target needs to be taken into account (just because a frigate has a huge sig radius does not mean you will hit it for full damage if it is going faster then your missiles explosion velocity), for guns transversal velocity is the other thing that effects hit quality.

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  • 4

alec grahm [ Editor ]

Target painters increase the signature radius of the target ship. This makes it easier for big guns and big missiles to hit smaller ships.

With missiles, if the signature radius of the ship is larger than the explosion radius of the missile, increasing the sig radius of the target ship won't increase the damage. Pointing a target painter at a battleship and using heavy missiles won't do anything. Pointing a target painter at a frigate and using heavy missiles will do quite a bit more.

Not exactly asked, but missiles are single damage type. If you are firing a type of missile at a target that has a high resist in that damage type, you won't be doing much damage at all. You need to match the missile type with the target for missions. Battleships have quite a bit more tank and it can be difficult to break that tank with a battlecruiser.

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mymindisglowing
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This is actually the best answer, though it leaves out a few specific things Mull’s answer addresses (i.e. speed/transversal v. painted target).

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  • 3

camon bear [ Editor ]

If your weapons are matched to your target (Heavy Missiles/HAMS vs cruiser) then a Target Painter will probably not help. If your target is larger than your weapons ie a BS and you're in a Drake then a TP will not help at all.

TP's are best used when your target is smaller than your weapons (HAMS vs The Frigate).

If you're part of a fleet and you're in a small ship (quick lock time) and the bulk of you're fleet mate are in larger ships (eg BS - slow lock time) then if you paint the target before they attempt to lock it, your TP will reduce your fleet mates lock time by increasing the targets sig radius.

However for PvE your best bet would probably be to get T2 drones and let them deal with the frigs/cruisers.

TL:DR

  • Your ship = Their ship - Pointless
  • Your ship < Their ship - Stupid
  • Your ship > Their ship - Worthwhile
  • In a fleet, then it may help your mates lock the target quicker.
  • T2 Drones deal with T1 cruisers and all frigates better than a cruiser/BS weapons + TP.
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  • 1

serpentine logic [ Editor ]

Target painters work best with missiles, so that's a plus.

However, are you going to get into target painter range? If you're just lobbing missiles from long range, a painter won't help much.

If you're going to bring in a non-combat alt, it's probably easier to rig your main with DPS rigs, swap out some low slots for ballistic control systems, and get your alt to remote repair you instead of target paint.

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