New Frigates

The addition of Navy EWAR Frigates is an interesting addition to the already bloated options available to frig pilots. It will be interesting to see how these spread in use outside duelling on stations and FW plex fights, and get adopted in larger fleet situations and wormholes. It is difficult to see the Navy Griffin and Crucifier as fleet boats, although the Navy Maulus and fleet Vigil have some use.

Frigate wormholes are an area rife with possibilities, as the extreme size chokehold forces you to deploy scram boats against BS, and when it's a Rattlesnake there's not a great deal of survivability for scramming frigs. These Navy EWAR frigs promise some pretty nice niche abilities for frig hole gang use, and their optimisation for brawling should see us using them....assuming frig holes can be found. 

Navy Griffin
The new Navy Griffin is going to be, essentially, Shameboat III. It's an interesting concept, the ECM brawler, but it's very niche. I wouldn't expect it to become as glaringly horrible as a Falcon is, nor as widespread in us, because the Navy Griffin pilot will have some distinct problems in dealing with the drone meta which will reduce the utility of the ECM to a GTFO card if drone DPS is too great. But there will be some good opportunities for an ECM brawler to take out larger ships like battlecruisers and the like, as it can park itself in close orbit sig-tanking territory and work away at their tanks once it's neutralised the drones. I also expect this will become a very good solo dueller ship, for the few people with info links trained up.

Fleet Vigil
I think this is one of the more 'fleet' ships of this set of Navy EWAR frigates, and will be a very good anti-drone and anti-support platform. Even without links, it will be murderous for interceptors, with a decent whack of DPS (my estimate c. 150's with LML's), a decent enough tank, and almost class-leading mobility (only the vanilla Vigil will go faster). It also, somehow, has been given enough fittings to use LML's. I'm not convinced it is set up for being a great brawler fit, because although the web range is nice, you will be fast enough to use your webs to kite a foe even if they have a MWD on, so it's really just too risky to get within brawling range and much better to use your excessive mobility and long web and actual DPS to kite around. It's going to wipe the smile off a lot of Slicer faces, Garmurs etc, but suffer mildly against drone boats.

Navy Maulus
This will be very popular given the fact it is a long-point drone boat. it's kind of a mutant Tristan-Keres hybrid. The utility of a 3 point scram is interesting for catching DST's, Ventures and stab whores, so this will be popular in FW. Besides this, it is de riguer for long-point ships, with the only distinction versus a Keres being it has an actual tank and actual DPS. It won't be anything amazing to comprehend how this is going to be used; gate camps, gate camps, kitefags. The drone bandwidth and tracking also opens up possibilities for sentry drone meta, which you can do with Tristans already but not very well. Likewise, good-tracking Berserkers will be an interesting fillip worth exploring. Mutant mini-Ishtars?

Navy Crucifier
With the addition of Missile Disruptors, this will become a BC's worth nightmare (assuming you can clear drones). Get in close, with a TD/MD, and most large ships are going to be cactus. Especially HAM boats and turret BC's which lack webs. Besides that, you can already achieve the majority of this ship's role with an AB Sentinel or a normal Crucifier, so the only real benefit it has is the higher DPS over the bog standard Crucifier, and a little more tankiness over a Sentinel.

Against other frigates, it will be interesting to see if you can achieve superiority given that your TD/MD won't be effective beyond 13km; if you get kited at all and don't get scrams on the foe, you will be cactus. Slicers and Garmurs are going to have a field day against the slower Navy Crucifier, and it is going to really want to avoid dedicated drone boats like Tristans.

T2 Logi Frigates
No deets yet, but in general the advent of T2 logi frigs is well overdue for frig hole gang use, and in frig gangs in general. Harpy-Burst fleets in nullsec will obviously be getting a buff with the introduction of T2 logi frigates.

The real question is going to be whether they get a range bonus, a tank buff (sorely needed, especially if they cost 15-25M), or repping buffs (arguable). The real key here is that falloff in RR is going to strongly impact frigate logis, where frigs face RLML ships everywhere and can't really afford falloff impacts given the short repping range.

I await the thread in F&I with bated breath. Tankier T2 logi frigs with 30-40km rep range and medium RR modules might be n the cards; that's just what a Confessor gang needs to become a PITA.