When you start this mission you get a choice of which faction you want to help you. There was no mention in the walkthough I was following, but I later found out that your choice does make a big difference as it affects how Dagan’s ships is speced. I choose Amarr (because I was Amarr), I later found this was the worst choice I could have made…
Which ever ally you choose, Degan is setup resistant to that factions natural setups. So by choosing Armarr I had setup Dagan to be resistant to lasers (my primary weapon choice), great…
How your choice of ally affects Dagan’s ship setup:
• Caldari: He has Defender missiles plus Kinetic resistance boosters.
• Amarr: Active armor tanking and massive EM/Therm resist.
• Gallente: He'll throw heavy Kinetic damage missiles and may have Target Painting as well.
• Minmatar: He'll have short range blasters or autocannon and a cap drainer on top of that.
In this mission you meet Dagan’s Battlecruiser. Where as with Kritsan Parthus I had to battle an armor tank, with Dagan (at least he was for me) I had to battle a shield tank.
By this point I had my Omen and lots of different weapons and ammo left over from my experiments with working out how to defeat Kritsan. Thankfully Dagan was quite slow and didn’t hit that hard so I didn’t need to be constantly running from him. A close orbit was sustainable with my noob shield tank whilst I fired everything I had at him. The problem was I was doing very little damage and despite the table above my Degan seemed to have an active shield tank a very good one…
Every time I made any sizable inroad in to his shield he simply flipped on a active tank and I was back to the start again. I needed more firepower! Much more firepower… But I already had a Cruiser stuffed with weapons and there was no chance of getting a Battleship anytime soon…
Switching to a smaller ship (like a Frigate) and avoiding getting hit wasn’t an option, as the problem was not having enough offence this time. It was pretty easy to stick with Dagan and take his damage, even in my easily hit Cruiser. I didn’t have my Destroyer anymore as I got rid of it (insurance fraud) after obtaining my Cruiser. In hindsight it might have been useful as it had a lot more hardpoints than the Destroyer.Over the course of a weekend I trained up skills, tried to acquire more powerful weapons and searched the net for advice – which mostly advised not choosing Amarr as your ally, hmm…
It became obvious I just wasn’t going to defeat him using lasers. I tried using missiles, but they weren’t doing much, so I trained for heavy missiles. They did something, but cycled far too slowly – I still needed more… I trained up drones skill and was now using 3 Hobgoblins in combat in addition to my 5 Medium laser turrets and Heavy Missile launchers. Even with all that it wasn’t doing enough to take down his shield.
I stumbled across an online article that mentioned that Kinetic and Explosive damage was the way to take down an Amarr speced Dagan.
I didn’t have the patients to train up to medium projectile weapons, small would have to do. After a bit of head scratching I choose to mount 280mm Carbine Howitzer I with Fusion S ammo.
Yes, I was finally doing significant damage and his shield was taking a pounding! But, progress through his shield and armor was slow. His offence wasn’t huge, but as I sat there broadsiding him for such a long time it eventually took its toll on my cap. I didn’t have enough sustainability to remain engaged with him long enough to take him down completely and any break I made from combat allowed him to put his shield back up. Grrr….
Nosferatu (Nos) was the answer! I fitted one and it worked fantastically! As the fight went on my cap dropped, I flipped on my Nos and it drained Dagan. This was a double plus as not only did it allow me to keep my shield up, but it stopped Dagan rejuvenating his too.
Victory was mine!
After days of bumbling about with ship fittings and different tactics I finally hit on the solution. So if you have to kill an Amarr speced Dagan, one of the ways is to use the following:
Nos + Projectile Weapons (Explosive/Kinetic ammo)
Make sure you use an active shield tank on yourself as you need low cap yourself (1/4 – 1/2 is fine) to be able to drain Dagan. If you have high cap the drain wont work and Dagan will be able to rebuild his shields easily.
At one point during the fight I had Dagon’s shield and armor completely down and was working my way through the interior. I saw my energy was about 1/4 and so decided to turn off my Nosferatu. Immediately I did that his shield tank came back on, so don’t be tempted – keep the nos on until he is dead!
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