Raven guide - beginner

This guide will walk you through raven basic gameplay and help you figure the basics of the ship.

Raven is a support class ship that is good at shutting down enemy attempts to harm your fleet. Its abilities are straightforward and yet the skillcap of this ship is pretty high.

As you probably saw in 2. Basic upgrades, you most often want to open with EMP, which is sort of bread and butter for raven. Deals damage, denies enemy abilities, and that, as an Area of Effect. Your role early on is to figure which ship uses abilities, whether you witness their use or figure by checking on their upgrades, and deny as many of them as possible. At this point it doesn't really matter what ability you prioritize on denying, you're already doing ok if you do. Know that enemy supports may also have energy denial, and so you have to keep that in mind in order to not to be energy denied.

You may also open Seeker Missile, which is good at either isolating a ship off the fight, or taking away a good chunk of its health.

Without upgrade, seeker will hit faster targets if you cast it about 7-8 range away from it, increasing more for the slower the enemy is. You want to cast it on enemies that stop using abilities (like dreadnought bombarding for instance), or enemies that have short cooldowns on their attacks/abilities. A Seeker Missile on a dreadnought that is constantly dealing damage with gatlings will be way more useful than one on a raven that can use EMP every minute (assuming it doesn't use it on you anyways). Seeker Missile eventually scales off as middle/late game comes, due to abilities like defensive matrix, protective field, hardened shields. If enemy fleet doesn't have too many of these defenses, you may want to purchase it sooner or later.

Shield Transfer is a pre-installed ability that transfers your shields to an ally. Every resource that regenerates is wasted if you don't spend it. The same way staying full energy doesn't allow you to benefit from energy regeneration, staying full shields prevents you from regenerating more, so try to not be full shields too often. On the other side, being low shields makes you vulnerable at a time, so make sure you are not too low on shields when enemies try to flank your fleet for instance.

Point Defense Drones are a middle-lategame countermeasure to missiles. They deny most of non-ability projectiles in their area of action, making it ideal in long game situations where you have to deal with strong missiles. Basically a "place and forget" thing. Beware though, lasers, creep attacks, and phantoms attacks may deplete your PDDs pretty quickly, so don't place them further in front than you need to.

Defensive Matrix is a short-timed strong shield that can negate most damage sources with a chance of leaking. Practically that means the ally you use it on gains a X hp shields, that wears off when it's taken too damage or after 5 seconds. You can upgrade its cooldown to eventually be able to constantly use it. That along with your shield transfer basically makes your allies unkillable. But then, it depends on your energy, and enemies will probably find it convenient to try and kill the only guy that can't be matrixed... you.

Whether it be to give yourself some safety, or to capitalize on enemies tendencies to group and reach your allies, or to catch a ship offguard and prevent allies from helping, Black Out is what you want. Disabling mechanical ships weapons, abilities, regenerations in the target area, aswell as preventing allies from warping on blacked out ships, a good Black Out can be devastating and may turn a lost cause into a victory. If you cannot Black them all Out, remember this: when you're trying to save someone, Black Out the enemy damage dealers, when you're trying to kill someone, Black Out enemy protectors. If you go offense, deny enemy defense, if you go defense, deny enemy offense.

Although Black Out doesn't work on biological, raven has one anti-bio ability. Irradiate tags a target, making it and its surrounding biological units take much damage over a long period of time. Useful against ships that have strong natural regeneration, or ones it's hard to prevent from regenerating. Kind of a niche ability, but sometimes as useful, or even more than Seeker Missile.

SBR Raven wouldn't be SBR Raven without its new ability: Lock-On. This one tethers a target, making it grow in size, so easier to reach with all type of weapons and abilities and possible easier to collide with terrain, while also revealing it through fog of war. Good for surprising ships that are apparently safe, while in reality they are in range of many of your allies. Does not reveal cloaked units, although it remains tethered so long raven is within range.