Help! - FDL - Xeno hunting or human bounties?

[reesevc1]

Morning everyone,

I hope this is the right place to post this... O_o!!!!

I couldn't sleep very well, so, I decided to work on my FDL combat build. Whence I docked; I became a little stumped to find out (realized by this time... yeesh) that having high tiered/ranked (and now even modified(!)) Optional Internal modules can get important when doing Megaship missions.

So, I started looking for repair limpets. Then, I decided I didn't want to use that space for limpets, and GAH! The depth of customization is pretty intense and I'm beginning to feel a slight "I feel lost, help"-feeling. Can anyone recommend a good ship build site or have any suggestions as to what to build towards?

TLDR: I want to get into the thick of it and raise rank in Combat (I was doing exploration). My ship: F.D.L. Need suggestions for v.high risk + v.high reward missions, quests, things to do. Using (unfortunately -- lost power cord for HOTAS(?) setup) only a keyboard and mouse setup. Thank you!

o7

Signing off.

[lafzy]

If your objective is to raise rank in combat, I personally find thargoid scout hunting an excellent way to do that, and at the moment there are loads of thargoid encounters to be had at USS's in the systems around Maia, Merope and Asterope. Be aware that any non-human signal source over threat 4 will have the bigger thargoid ships not just scouts, and will be much more of a challenge to a lone pilot.

Each scout killed counts as an elite opponent and I calculated in going from master to dangerous, that approx every 6 scout kills was a 1% increase in rank. The downside is that it doesn't pay very well, each scout nets 10k in credits, where a human bounty is usually much higher than that.

For any thargoid hunting, I would highly recommend taking decontamination limpets above any other type of limpet to counter the caustic damage that can eat away your hull. I found out the hard way first time around!

FDL is an awesome ship that is very combat focused, but its issue for me with AX hunting is the limited optional internals so i tend to only use it for bounty hunting. With thargoid combat, you will need a space for the decontamination limpet and a cargo bay to carry said limpets, which reduces the amount of shield and hull reinforcements you can carry, it was for that reason and to speed up the grind that I ended up doing most of my scout hunting in a tanked up corvette having started in a Krait, with enough space to carry both decontamination and repair limpets as well as enough shield and hull buffs to keep going until i ran out of ammo.

In terms of ship builds, coriolis is a good site, and you can set out your ship as you would like it and see the stats. This link from a Reddit discussion might also help and has links to coriolis FDL AX build:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous ... an_ax_fdl/

Hope that helps!

o7

[reesevc1]

Thank you very much for the information. I haven't been on in a while (depression sucks), but, I think I'm up for some combat this Friday morning. Going to load up the game and do some bounties in my Anaconda til I feel I'm really ready for xeno-hunting. Also, I need the money.

Hope to see you in the black, thank you again!

o7

[lafzy]

My pleasure buddy, hope today's a better day for you.

Have you unlocked the Guardian weapons, modules and engineers yet? That might be worth doing, especially before taking on thargoids although it is quite the grind. The Guardian hull reinforcements give you some protection against caustic damage (i think its 5% per unit) caused by either thargoid missiles or from being too close to thargoids when they explode. Re the weapons, personally i'm not great with fixed weapons and prefer turreted AX multicannons for xeno hunting, but if you are good at aiming fixed weapons I believe the Guardian gauss cannons are pretty effective against the xenos.

I also think that the Anaconda might be your best bet for thargoid scout hunting when you are ready to give it a go, as you can easily tackle 4 scouts at a time in that with enough shields and modules.

I'm not a particularly good combat pilot, and struggled to take on 4 at a time in the krait, sometimes having to flee and decontaminate before I lost my hull completely. By contrast, in my corvette i can take on 4 scouts at a time without losing a single ring of shields and have taken on a group of 7 without losing my shields completely, although some of the damage they deal bypasses shields completely, so i was still down about 10% hull. I found it a really quick way of boosting my combat rank as I could kill over 20 scouts a time before needing to dock and restock on ammo.

Ultimately, the best thing will be trial and error and finding out what works best for you and your playing style.

Hope our paths will cross in the black, until then fly safe CMDR!

o7