Never fear, the Stabber is here

I think CCP has a goal of creating one shit T1 cruiser per race. I think that since the Scythe has become OK, if you fit it a particular way and have all 5 skills, and certainly better than it was, the mantle of Minmatar's Worst Cruiser has to fall elsewhere. This now falls on the shoulders of the Stabber, as the Arby is now the Amarr's least favorite ship.

The virtue with the Stabber is its speed - the highest base of any cruiser and, truth be told, even faster than some AFs. It screams to be made into a cheapass Vagabond, what with uber rate of fire and falloff. My eyes got all goggly at the idea of kitey lolbuckets...and my e-peen got turgid at the looks of the thing. It is damn sexy.

The problem with the Stabber is, pending an update on PG and CPU available, it has a 4/2 gun/missile high slot layout, 4 mids, 4 lows. It can fit prop-point-2 slot shield tank, or plate-EANM-2 buff lowslot tank. You can even make a dualprop version of the vanilla Stabber. Sounds good, right?

You however run into one serious problem: lack of DPS, and tank. You can get 220's and T2 HAMs, and 327 DPS, with 15K buffer from a LSEII - but no DCU due to pathetic CPU. You can get a dualprop setup but DPS is below 280 and 16K buffer. You can shoehorn on an 800 plate, 435's and T2 HAMs for 357 DPS and MWD-web-TD and 16K buffer; hardly a great brawler, hardly a great kiter.

Perhaps the best role is to chase frigates. Duel-web MWD, medium repper, 180's and rockets - 11K EHp and 312DPS cold, but you can get moving at 3400m/s. But given a MSE Merlin will dish 200+ DPS and you'll be webbed yourself or scrammed...really, not much point.

Stabber, I am disappoint.