Fit Kitchen: Khizriel

Well this is weird. Didn’t think I’d be writing another one of these articles again after winning EVE. Then again, I had never thought CCP would actually introduce new ships. See, I had this whole thought of “what if I wrote an article about a ship I have never seen and know nothing about?” I picked the Khizriel because a mini Machariel is something I always thought would be interesting. It’s a role that the HFI and Sleipnir try to fill, but they never really get enough speed or agility. Time to flex the theorycrafting muscles, I suppose.

I hope you enjoy the fits here. The Khizriel is a very odd ship and, honestly, I don’t really like it. I was told by some friends over in Omnivores that it is seen as something of a one-note ship. It kites, stays around point range, and is quite expensive for what it does. If you’re looking for a nice wormhole corp by the way, go speak with them. They’re good people.

Gallente Battlecruiser bonuses (per skill level):
10% bonus to Medium Projectile Turret falloff
Minmatar Battlecruiser bonuses (per skill level):
5% bonus to Medium Projectile Turret damage
Role Bonus:
25% bonus to Medium Projectile Turret rate of fire
25% bonus to warp speed and warp acceleration
50% bonus to Command Burst area of effect range
25% bonus to Medium Projectile Turret optimal range and fallof

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Kitey Khizriels

To begin with, I figured I would try and come up with something somewhat normal. Maybe something a little bit like what CCP intended or what Zkillboard looks like for this Khizriel. I will note that I haven’t even looked at losses on Zkill so I have no idea how people normally fit this ship. My thinking was that the Khizriel was designed for:

• Being a battlecruiser that matches/exceeds cruiser speeds
• Point range kiting
• Room for multiple tank types or utility options
• Good damage as long as it can be applied
• A mix of the Machariel and Cynabal

Now is any of that true? I think it is. This ship does truly feel like a midpoint between the Cynabal and Machariel in some ways, but it also does seem to be quite fragile and lacking in fitting. Those two factors were something that kept cropping up while creating fits for the Khizriel.

So my ‘standard’ fit below tries to address the tank issue while completely ignoring the fitting problems and throwing fitting mods at it. Thus we have a dual XLASB kiter. This is my way of trying to keep it cheap-ish while giving you some damage, some speed, and some tank. I know that most people who really want to kite are going to pick up a fancy MWD and shield booster.

Assuming you are unable to reach the third set of cap boosters, this fit has 73.2k EHP. That is similar to the equivalent single-XLASB + invul version. You can also go for shield buffer and get something similar, but honestly I’m just not impressed by any of those. My thinking is that you’re just going to get the XLASB Orthrus treatment of being rushed. scrammed, and killed. I don’t like it.

We can fix that, though! Take a look at the second fit below, a much more defensive kiter. This is an armour version which sacrifices in tank to gain the point, web, scram combo. Adding in an interdiction maneuvers skirmish charge and you’ll get heated ranges of 43.1km point, 21.8km web, and 15.1km scram. You’ve also now got larger 425mm guns for the added range and damage, so that’s nice.

I do recommend going for the SW-900 web drones to really excel in control here. It’s going to help you out with stopping those incoming tackle ships so you can blast them before you’re scrammed and can’t track them. This fit does suffer from the issue that it has a relatively small tank and, honestly, I just expect you to get outgunned in kiting scenarios if anyone cares to focus you down.

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Bait Tanking Khizriels

This ship is expensive, right? For the price of a Khizriel we could go out and get ourselves a fancy, slightly blingy Loki or an incredibly tanky Sleipnir. An HFI is also so much cheaper and gives you 4-5 shots at combat for the price of one Khizriel. We can use that. People are dumb and will fly right at you, I’m sure of it. Let’s bait them.

So my idea with this first one started of as ‘lol hull tank’, but turned into something much better. It’s a hull tanker that gets 115k + 35k EHP. Potentially 185k EHP if you get a second round of XLASB charges. It’s not particularly fast, nor does it do much damage, but someone who attacks you is going to think two things:

• You can’t kite and are bad. They caught you, yay.
• You are a typical XLASB fit and are slowly bleeding armour.

I played EVE for 11 years and I know that those conditions will get everyone horny about your killmail. What you want to do is feed off that. Kite away and pull other ships into vulnerable positions then scram + web them (use point + web or scram to really sell the illusion). Ideally, you should be able to hold someone in place and apply some damage of your own while your hull bleeds and you wait on a second set of XLASB charges. That’s going to give you so much time on grid to both apply damage and wait for backup to arrive. If I were still playing EVE, I’d use this. It’s hilarious.

Next up after that is the dual tanker. Usually, this is seen as a bad thing to do because shield and armour buffer have anti-synergistic properties with agility, signature, and more. In the right conditions, however, active buffer approaches can unlock extra slots and let you do weird things. If you fly this one, your game plan is that you are a pretty normal XLASB fit that just has extra sustain from an ancil rep in the lows so you can reach that second cycle.

This approach is going to give you more tank on your Khizriel while also activating that response in pilots who smell blood in your armour breaking. It’s all about the bait tank here and that can make people do stupid things. In terms of numbers by the way, you have 65k of almost guaranteed tank from active buffer and decent DPS at 539 + drones (max about 900 DPS). It’s dumb, but this style of tanking is fun and akin to the Breacher or Loki.

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Weird Weapons

The next thing I went for was a set of strange weapon options. I had wanted to make something like a neuting Khizriel work for the sake of being totally out there and confusing people, but the powergrid just isn’t there. This ship is just not built for doing much beyond what CCP want it to do.

Taking a look at the polarised option below, we gain about 1,570 DPS when you go all in with implants, drones etc. out to 26km falloff. This does seem like a lot of DPS, but honestly I am not impressed. The Cynabal does almost the exact same thing for much cheaper. If you use this version, you’ll need to keep in mind the normal polarised issues of having almost zero tank and focus fully on melting whatever you can before you go down. As an already blingy ship, I can hardly recommend actually doing this, unfortunately,

If you came here looking for a simple buffer kiting fit by the way, you can get that by swapping the weapons back to T2, dropping a Gyrostab for a Damage Control, and swapping a shield extender to a Multispectrum Shield Hardener. That one has 70k EHP and 1,224 heated DPS. It’s honestly probably better than even the ‘standard’ fits above.

For the second fit in this section, I dreamed up a world where 650mm arty actually works (it doesn’t). This came about from me fitting 720mm arty and attempting to fit a regular old Cynabal or Mach-style arty fit. It… gets a pathetic 3.5k volley. With no tracking bonus. With barely any damage. Ouch.

So my idea became to see what a fleet fit would look like with 650mm arty. The end result is something that is better than competitor navy battlecruisers in several ways, but in all ways is still pretty awful. It moves at about 200m/s faster than an HFI, it has more damage at range than a Harb Navy, and it’s overall surprisngly decent. In a world wehre Khizriels come down to like 200m ISK, I would drop the plate to compact and give it a go for the sake of the silly artillery choice.

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Afterburner Khizriels

To finish things up, I had a play with afterburners, both regular 10MN and overpropped. While my first thought was to go for a dual-prop variant, I decided not to since that just felt a bit boring. The Khizriel is a battlecruiser, so some of the benefits you’d get with sig tanking are lost like when making a dual prop Cynabal.

Instead, the first fit below is an attempt at making something which Phantasm enjoyers would like. With heat, snakes, and drugs, you can get it up to 1,675 m/s which is pretty damn fast! That gave me the idea of running with an active tank like Phantasms often do and as such, I went for the Gist X-Type X-Large which is bloody expensive. I normally wouldn’t do that in these articles, but over my time of playing EVE, I’ve seen modules like that bounce up and down in price so much and I don’t really care right now.

The point, anyway, is that you’ll get about 750 EHP/s hot and 512 EHP/s cold. With 1000 DPS, that should be enough to win out most mirror matches if you can keep in range. If you’ve got the money to do this, it would be kinda funny, but honestly I think your money would be better spent on a really fun Sleipnir instead. This is just ludicrously expensive for no reason.

Now, jumping to the 100MN afterburner and taking inspiration from the Vagabond, we have a dual XLASB variant. If you fly this like a Vagabond, you’ll want to just burn away and try to blap tackle as it comes in. 680 DPS cold with drones isn’t terrible and 468 EHP/s sustained tank (charges burned over one minute with a hot invuln) is ok. Your max speed is 2.4km/s and mid-grade snakes will take that to 2.8km/s nearly.

If you like this style of flying then the Khizriel does seem to do it well. You’re also a juicy target, so everything I’ve already said about baiting applies here once again, just in a different format. I really hope you like flying in straight lines and never turning.

Finally, I wanted to do the same thing again but with a more reasonable shield booster this time. This regular shield booster Khizriel is actually the first one I came up with when playing with fits and my first objective was to get a 4s align time for the speedy warps. That’s why you’ll note the Domination Nano!

Sustained tank is about the same as the dual-XLASB version if you fit with crystals. I would say, honestly, that if you want to fly this then you can upgrade to a Pithum C-Type Multispectrum Shield Hardener and keep the crystals in. If you don’t care for the super fast align time then you can also drop one or two of those mods for extra damage/tracking too.

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Overall, I really don’t like the Khizriel that much. It just feels like one of those ships designed too much for a specific role and that just doesn’t feel like EVE to me. Some of the most glorious fits over the years have come from ships that were designed many years ago and have only loose vibes for what they should do.

I think the Khiziel could do with just a bit more in every area to really exceed and be worth the price. Just a bit more base EHP, some more base velocity, and trade some CPU for some more PG. That would give the Khizriel more room to fit artillery, while helping to restrict the sillyness that can come from large modules. Extra EHP and speed would also help make up for all these situations where the tank or the speed just feels so ‘meh’.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Perhaps I’ll write something new again in the future but for now I’m done. I won EVE and that did wonders for my mental health. Go join Omnivores.