Fit Kitchen: Ashimmu

Did you know that there was a time when the Ashimmu only cost about 60m ISK? It wasn’t even that long ago, being that cheap until March 2021. Nowadays we’re rising back up to the 2014 cost of 150m ISK or more. I mention this because the Ashimmu is only worth about 60m ISK in all honesty. This is not a good ship for a few reasons that we’ll get into, though it does have some uses. I’ve been wrong about things before, but I think you’ll agree with me here.

The Ashimmu’s stats are, as always, below. Do note that this has a “damage bonus” of 100% but it can only fit 3 turrets. This is simply the equivalent of using 6 unbonused turrets, similarly to the Omen Navy Issue. That’s not bad on paper, but without an application bonus it means you only do ok damage under 10km. I don’t think that this means the Ashimmu needs a DPS buff. Instead, I propose a 100m3 drone bay and with 50mb bandwidth. Top up the base armour HP from 2,950 to 4,100 and you’ve got a much more competitive ship in the role it was designed for (without being OP).

Amarr Cruiser bonuses (per skill level):
15% bonus to Energy Nosferatu and Energy Neutralizer drain amount
Minmatar Cruiser bonuses (per skill level):
20% bonus to Stasis Webifier range
Role Bonus:
100% bonus to Medium Energy Turret damage
• Energy Nosferatu fitted to this ship will drain targeted ship’s capacitor regardless of your own capacitor level

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Brawling Ashimmus

There are a few ways you can make this Blood Raider ship work well in a brawling environment. The most sensible one is a plate+ancillary rep for about 60k EHP. You can then slap on double web, double nos, and an afterburner to achieve something decent. You can swap to nos+neut for improved neuting, but it puts your own cap in trouble and that’s not something you want. If you lose your webs, guns, or tank then you’re useless. It’s not really worth blinging the webs here since you’re throwing money at a throwaway ship. Just get better at positioning and anticipating your opponent.

It’s worth noting that this fit makes use of two Corpum C-Type Medium Energy Nosferatus. They’re amazing at only 8m ISK with great range and lower powergrid usage. They should work well against most ships when disabling weapons/tank etc. but dual nos won’t necessarily be enough to take down a Tengu. It could simply slow down its own shield boosting since you really aren’t putting out that much damage.

The other way to make use of a brawling Ashimmu is in a heavy armour brawl. There’s a problem here, though. The Ashimmu has no range bonus on its neuts and you don’t want to have to spend 10-20 seconds burning over to the new primary before you have any effect. I say primary because I don’t recommend neuting the logi with an Ashimmu, you simply don’t have the range nor the strength to harass Guardians properly.

The fit I present below is my favourite balance of tank and neuts, mostly because I love the power of the small neuts here. They cycle much more quickly so if you’re not going after Guardians they will have a better chance at keeping hardeners or EWAR turned off. The single web also offers some limited utility to a fleet that doesn’t bring many of them. If you need more raw neuting power then you can access that relatively easily by swapping to a single plate and even dropping the 50MN. A final point on brawling Ashimmus: ship scanners are extremely powerful in the hands of someone who knows how to analyse a fit and seeing their cap level is a nice bonus.

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Kiting Ashimmus

There are only two ways to make a kiting Ashimmu work and both involve making heavy use of your long web. If you want something traditional then try the first fit below. Please be aware in advance that it doesn’t have great tracking so you’ll still need to match transversal with a small ship even when you have it webbed. You’ve also only got 7.63k EHP in armour so most RLML ships are going to cause you trouble if you don’t start getting off grid asap. You could patch that by dropping the nano for a T2 800mm plate, swapping a Locus rig to an ancil, and lowering the CPU requirements of a mid or two.

Whichever way you end up flying it, you’re going to want to try and favour situations where you are fighting several frigates or other such small ships that don’t have the projection. Your neut and nos are defensive and, on top of the web, provide excellent protection from ships that try to scram you. This is why I chose for one to be a nos instead, because you get the 15+7.5km range on a cheap B-type. For some reason the B-type neuts are super expensive so you can’t really justify spending on that.

Moving on to the other way of kiting and you’ll be breaking out the 100MN afterburner. This is once again your traditional “I’m going to burn away in a straight line method” if that’s your thing. Don’t try to do anything serious in brawling range because you take 40-50 seconds to get to full speed. My version also uses beams because of that exact issue, I can’t rely on you being the aggressor within 20km Scorch range here. Once again your nos is defensive. Neuts are better, but running all this EWAR alongside lasers and two armour reps is very taxing on your cap.

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Weird Ashimmus

The slot layout and base HP of the Ashimmu makes it a little awkward when it comes to finding something else you can do with this ship. Of course, there’s the option to polarise the weapons on the ship, but everything can do that. The Ashimmu just happens to be pretty bad at it. I’ve created a fit below for it which pretty much requires mid-grade Amulets to make it usable. The benefit you have from flying in this way is that nobody expects 1,000 DPS from an Ashimmu, they’re more worried about the neuts and webs.

You might also try and make some sort of dual rep brawler, believing the nos to be your key to a lively full life full of capacitor. This too falls flat as a T2 rep Ashimmu only reps for about 400 EHP/s or so. You can now spend 1.5b ISK on implants and bling to make it 850 EHP/s. Congratulations, you can do that to any ship in the game. I’m personally not all that interested in blinging a T1 resist ship to say “look, this is a good fit”. It feels like a cheap cop-out from actually fitting to a ship’s strengths.

Really, the only other good option for an Ashimmu is to run a gatecamp fit. I don’t see too many gatecamps around these days and I think the people who run them are risk averse. More than one ship comes through and they scatter like cockroaches. Still, there’s a use case here. I’ve made my own version below rather than just ripping one off Zkill. I figured that bonusing your Ashimmu towards lock speed would go a long way towards getting more kills on a gate. You just can’t use up the mid slots since you need them for webs, point, and prop.

Overall I’m not a huge fan of the Ashimmu. There’s a good reason why it was hardly used in ATXIV despite being lower point cost than other pirate cruisers. Just bump the HP up a bit and give it some more drones, though, and it’s fine. No, I don’t expect my ramblings to result in a change to the Ashimmu. I wrote a post about that sort of thing after all.