Marauding Through Space

Marauders were my very first 'end game' target ship. 
When I first joined EVE's ranks back in 2009, a buddy of mine who got me into EVE was running a Golem for level 4 missions and I was in awe of its power while I was still skilling the T2 shield mods on my purger rigged Drake.
One day I was going to fly one of those sweet ships and blow up all the things with them!

Well, my initial newbro naiveté wore off pretty quickly as I learned how things in EVE work and found out that the Golem was pretty sweet for missions but it wasn’t really THAT great.  It also cost a whole lot, couldn't be used in PVP and was actually worse at the C2 wormhole sites I was getting into at the time than my Drake.
And so, my training focus shifted heavily into cruiser hulls and it would be years before I looked at battleships again.
When I did finally start training battleships, it was all about the Vindicators and Bhaalgorns that were popular at the time and my early fixation with Marauders were long forgotten as they were not on par with their pirate faction brothers.

However, Marauders were buffed pretty heavily by CCP in their balance pass, some time ago now, and their use has grown again, even in WHs.
Running C4s, and even C5s, solo with their new bastion mode has become reasonably common and Marauders have returned to their spot on top of the PVE food chain.
When people started running C5 sites in their new bastioned Marauders, I was reasonably skeptical as there had never really been a ship that could handle the neuts and DPS of class 5 wormhole sites before but the reports of it being possible were not isolated and 'how to' videos and guides started cropping up so clearly it was possible.
I ran the numbers (on paper) myself some time ago and it actually seemed to be pretty simple to fit out any of the 4 Marauders to be able to tank the sites with minimal fit pimp and no fleet boosts while still putting out 1000-1100 DPS a piece.  Sweet!
I decided to train Marauders V on my main, bought and fit out a Paladin and... never undocked it.
At the time I basically couldn't be bothered running PVE in a ship that was far, far slower and lover ISK/hour than my tried and true capital escalation fleet and so left the Paladin in Jita.

However, I finally decided to go ahead and try it out last week and so undocked in my shiny Marauder for the first time.
I pulled the basic fit for it from one of the guys I know who runs sites in Marauders, pimped all the mods by 1-2 meta levels (T2 damage mods? come on!!) and went to run the two Core Garrisons in our home hole.
I threw my fleet booster into fleet for good measure since I have one so may as well and went to town.

Not gonna lie, warping a 2+ bil battleship into a C5 site by yourself with no backup was a little butt puckering the first time around but hey, seems to work for other people!

Turns out my concerns were completely baseless and the Paladin had no issues at all handling the sleepers.
The hardest wave tops out at around 1900 incoming DPS which it turns out my Paladin could tank, fairly easily, on a single b-type repper.
However, I was more worried about the neuts but they were also fine with my cap level never dropping below 50%.
I did manage to cock up my mid site rewarp on the first site to get on top of the last wave which meant I had to kill it from 80km away but since scorch is a fair and well balanced ammo type, this wasn't really a problem.
Honestly, the whole process with links was much easier than I expected.  I feel that even if I'd fucked up a trigger I would have been fine on tank.

All in all, running the site by myself in a single ship was a pretty refreshing change from the standard escalations fleet.
However, when it comes round to it, that's the issue I was feeling the entire time:  why am I running WH PVE in a C5 and not in an escalation fleet?
I understand that not everyone has access to a corp that runs capital escalations but if they do then there's zero reason to ever find yourself running a C5 site in a Marauder.
Still, it was actually reasonably fun for PVE and I do think I'll be optimizing my fit a bit now that I know how it handles and trying out a few more sites out of interest.

I also feel that the Marauders might actually be in a reasonable place for certain PVP scenarios and I'll be looking into some PVP fits too.
It's possible there's still nothing there but I'll report in if I make any progress.