Forsaken Mission 29 Jan 2014 - The Sawfish

For the first new mission after the raid, Kixeye introduced three new items:  The Sawfish hull, Agility System, and the Assault Disrupter D33-D.  I'll talk about each over the next couple posts, but I'll start with the Sawfish.  New hulls are cool, right?

SAWFISH
This hull is the lower end ballistic hull that we were all expecting.  It is in the same vein as the Mercury, Mauler, Mako, or Rampart, with reduced capability compared to its bigger brother hull, but also reduced build time.  The Sawfish compares fairly closely to the Stingray, but is it worth it?

I highlighted the major shortcomings of this hull in red - Special slots are huge, but you wouldn't expect a second-class hull to have 4 slots.  The lack of ballistic accuracy bonus and evade bonus are also big shortcomings compared to the Stingray, and would be the primary reasons any decent Stingray fleet will chew up a Sawfish.  The reload bonus at R5 also helps the Stingray do that much more damage.  Yes, there's lower turn speed and 1 less weapon slot, but those aren't as important as the other statistics where it falls really short.

I looked at a Stingray vs a Sawfish build, using a basic FvF build emphasizing Evade & using Assault Cannon Z on each hull.  The build is on my Fleet Reference Page, or see it on BP Outpost. Since the BPOutpost Shipyard doesn't have the ray yet, I put both builds on the Ray template for comparison.  Correcting for the hull time, the Sawfish builds in 10.5 days, compared to 14.5 for the Stingray.  But the Stingray comes in at 4712 tons, where the Sawfish is 3980.  This means that the fewer slots on the Sawfish result in it being difficult to use the full weight capacity - Chainguns may help since they are heavier, but do similar DPS per ton as assault cannons.

USE IT IF: 
You need a ballistic FvF and you are looking at using the Battleship, BCX, or Mercury.  The Battleship can take a lot of damage, but is often too slow to get into its best range.  The BCX doesn't have the weight or weapon capacity, and the Mercury doesn't have the ballistic bonus.  Consider Chainguns as a good weapon choice for the Sawfish to use up the max weight capacity.

FORGET IT IF:
You have Stingrays.