Deimos? Nope, nope, nope.

I have been running 5/10s in Lowsec for cashzors. Sometimes, 200M/hr sometimes a mere 30M ISk, depending on the drops. My choice for doing this is a T1 cruiser and a T1 logi cruiser on the alt, because of the cheaps.

Nearly every single time, I kid you not, some smartass comes along in a Deimos. Either they dock up and grab probes or their mate gets probes, and they come along trying to gank me. Yesterday I decided to take the fight, which i shall not be doing again.

There's a reason the Deimos is the solo HAC of choice (and Ishtar is the gang andd fleet HAC of choice). DPS, permarun MWD, and twin-rep tank (MAR/MAAR). You get 1002 DPS, 650 DPS active tank for 2.5 minutes and 2700m/s OH.

My problem is, I shoould have clued in to the Deimos proliferation sooner and done the EFT research on it before taking a fight in a pair of ships which, literally, you cannot even ever have a spitballs chance in hell. 450 DPS Omen, with a RR tank of about the same? No chance, ever.

In fact, your only chance of ever cracking a Deimos is oddly enough the Nereus. I should know, as I am #1 Nereus user in all of EVE according to zkillboard (with RTS Avalanche a close second, though it is noted he will have full Tengu links for even more hilarious tank).

But this raises some interesting balance issues, as I'll show. The trend is there - you never get assaulted by a Sacrelige, you never see solo Zealot, you absolutely never see solo Cerb (lol, seriously) or Eagle (luls). Why? You simply cannot get the same performance out of any of the HACs.

Zealot has a pathetic 450 DPS and can only tank and spank for about 1m 50s and is 250m/s slower than the Deimos (which gets an extra mid for web, so it's game over for kiting). So it has half the DPS of the Deimos and cannot crack the MAR/MAAR tank before it vapes. GG.

Sacrelige is still a Sacrelige - it is even slower at 1500m/s, it does 500 DPS, and can tank 500 DPS with a MAR/MAAR setup. It gets a web and a neut, which may - just may - tip the balance if it doesn't melt within the time it takes to cap the Deimos out. I wouldn't try it. Similarly, plate/MAAR setups also suffer from an inability to withstand the Deimos's extreme DPS and cannot crack it's extreme tank.

We'll ignore the Eagle and Cerb entirely. Both are incapable of fitting any form of tank sufficient to shed the Deimos' DPS (not even with ASBs), and are also both slower than the Deimos, which inevitably ends up with a dead Caldari HAC. The bleagle can do a respectable amount of DPS (520), but it isn't up to 650 DPS for >2m 30s.

We'll ignore the Munnin - it's not a solo boat by any means - so our last great hope is the Vagabond. Here, finally, you have a HAC with the base speed necessary to not get caught by a Deimos (2430m/s), the capacitor not to cap out while firing its guns or running a rep (XLASB ftw?) but...420 DPS is not necessarily going to top off the Deimos. The Deimos can perma-tank 350 DPS, and you'll be fighting deep in falloff with autocannons.

So, all in all, is the Deimos overpowered? Yes. Clearly it dominates the solo HAC space by a significant margin. The problem is not any of the individual components. Individually it's OK to have 2m 30s capacitor and a 650 DPS tank, or permarun MWD and being faster than your foes. Or you can have a huge local tank and 1000 DPS. But put it all together and you can run down almost any HAC, and you can survive that one HAC you cannot run down for long enough to blaze his ASB charges, at which point he will have to withdraw.

So now you know - never take a fight with a Deimos. It will 99% likely be a MAR/MAAR fit, it will run you down without capping out, it can tank whatever you throw at it's tiny sig radius (oddly, scramming it is counterproductive!), and it will melt your face.