3 heavy needlers and 2 graviton beams is 1026 DPS for 750 flux (1.37 ratio). And in practice it's better than that, since it also increases anti-shield flux effiiency of autopulses.
Realistically though it's hard to gauge the contribution of the 200 soft flux from the Graviton Beams; they definitely won't be as effective as the hard flux from the Heavy Needlers though, so you can't really just add them together.
Really, the main thing is you should be using gravitons. Ship has plenty of mounts for it, and +10% anti-shield damage is quite big.
That's one of the things that I'd like to test when I have time. In 0.96a, you also have the option of mounting IR Autolances in the medium energy slot, which reduces the time it takes to kill armor and hull. The AI for them is pretty good -- even with autofire on, they won't fire into shields except when they're at near full charges, and then they'll automatically burn through charges once shields go down. They also kill fighters pretty well so they help with anti-fighter coverage.
So the choice then is whether it's better to put in some Graviton Beams to speed up building up enemy flux, or IR Autolances to speed up finishing them off before they get away. I don't know which offhand (or what combination), but it'll be fun to see.
In .96 I think Conquest will still be a strong ship, but I'd be willing to bet $5 that Pegasus (or maybe Executor? but probably Pegasus) will be the new Ordo farming meta.
It depends. A lot of people seem to talk about the Pegasus being good as a player-controlled flagship, rather than under AI control. So it may not end up that great under AI control (although I think it'll do fine). So it depends on what you're talking about exactly.
I still think there will be a lot of other good options for player-controlled flagships, and it may come down to player preference. At some point I'll figure out a test for this as well, although I haven't really worked out the details. Right now I'm thinking of just spamming some ship under AI control (probably Gryphons) and switching the player-controlled flagship around, against double Ordos again, and seeing how much damage the flagship does in that environment. Maybe try other spammable ships if I have the time, but Gryphons are probably the easiest for the AI-controlled ship in the player fleet (in terms of, fewest issues with getting successful completions).
Not only that, but there are different flavors of each ship to consider. For example, one that I'm looking forward to trying in 0.96a is the
energy Onslaught. The main limitation in 0.95.1a was that a lot of hybrid weapons had a relatively low sustained DPS, despite having good burst DPS. With s-mod Expanded Magazines increasing sustained DPS by 50%, that makes hybrid weapons in ballistic slots a lot more attractive. Maybe energy Retribution with Expanded Magazines and a bunch of Minipulsers/Cryoblasters with Ballistic Rangefinder will do well, who knows.
I didn't start doing formal, quantitative testing of the different ships until fairly late in the last update cycle; this time around I should be able to get more complete results, so that may include player-controlled flagships under a variety of fleet setups. It assumes that the player will behave similar to what I do, but I generally follow fairly simple rules and those are fairly straightforward to enumerate.
That is because Gryphon and Conquest were very strong anti Ordo ships in .95, I don't know if Vanshilar ever did a head to head but both performed well in formal testing too. But Pegasus is like you get 2 Gryphons and an Eradicator on top for free, or 2 Conquests for the price of 1.25.
Both did pretty well in formal testing in 0.95.1a, in fact, it ended up being that the best fleet I could find for Ordos-farming was player-controlled Onslaught, 3 Conquests, and 2 Gryphons. Gryphons on the flanks to catch anything that got past, Onslaught up the middle, and Conquests in between. So the answer for which was better was "both". Nobody ever gave a really strong loadout of the Onslaught under AI control for me to test, so I still don't really have a clear view of Conquest vs Onslaught. (I think for player-controlled the Onslaught is better though due to spamming Proximity Charge Launchers.)
For Pegasus, I'm concerned about how long it takes to switch between targets. Stuff like the Squall and Hurricane have a fairly long time switching from one target to the next. So they do well in sim and/or when testing against a single, big target like a Radiant. But during the other ~3/4 of an actual fight, they don't do anywhere near as well; a Squall hits close to 100% against a Radiant but somewhere around 50% against the rest of the Ordos fleet. A Pegasus that uses FMR for big Hurricane alpha against Radiants may lose out against the rest of the fleet. Hence I think Executor with HIL (or maybe Plasma Cannon, but I think that'll be too expensive) and HVD may do well, perhaps Heavy Needlers if the player doesn't take too much damage. I'll be happy to be proven wrong though.
