I'll admit some bias, i adore SLF's, they're great as a mostly solo pilot who favors a Vette for taking pressure off my ship and keeping up DPS on faster targets such as Ferdies and Alliance ships…
but boy are they comically weak.
and i get why, they're basically free damage and agro draw and can actually do a surprising amount of damage on their own, enough to eliminate small ships like diamondbacks and even vultures on their own (depending on npc rank/build)… But against any mildly built ship or compitent+ ranked pilot and they're more or less regulated to suppressing shields and bussing newbies so they can learn relatively risk free in multi crew.
And after racking my brain for a bit I came to a conclusion, the issue isn't with the fighters themselves, the issue is with the lack of modularity with the whole system.
Elite's biggest draw combat wise is the sheer variability to ship configuration, sure you get "pvp pilots" who are basically enslaved to the FDL and a pair of plasma accelerators, but the sheer creativity that you can employ in your builds is staggering, like cold running DBS builds that strip opponents with cascade effects before venting heat out of beam weapons that prevents the enemy form ever hoping of locking onto the attacker, or tank type 10s that literally can sit afk in rez sites and reap tens of millions by doing diddly.
Fighters utterly lack this, the most configurable your fighters ever get is in guardian hybrid fighters and…. well… there's a reason few use them.
Fighters need to be made either customizable, or have some bare minimum engineering applicable, especially the guardian hybrid fighters who take hours and hours of research and guardian sites to unlock.
