Aerico

"A corrupt vessel that summons ships to spread the Blight plague. Aerico can feed off Blight Nebula to enhance its combat performance."

General
The Aerico is the Tier 7 Umbra unique, heavily based off the frigate class. It spreads the Umbra Blight plague through its spawned ships and draws energy from Blight Nebula Fields.

Advantages
The Aerico, like other uniques, has incredible mass reductions, enabling it to make use of even level IV Ablative Tungsten Armor and Thonian Armor, which are notoriously mass-inefficient.

It can make use of its Myrs to generate Blight Nebula Fields, then fly into them in order to receive both defensive and offensive bonuses from its Stalk overdrive. The closer it gets to enemies, the faster its Myrs are destroyed such that they respawn at a higher rate, which in turn fuels its Rile overdrive.

Its speed, when combined with the 15 km engagement range of its spawned ships, enables it to kite most enemies except for dreadnoughts, battlecruisers and other uniques such as the Zeus, in addition to all Pharmakon Hulls due to their speed bonus in Phase State. Despite this speed, it is no pushover in terms of defense either, with four slots for Ablative Armor, on par with the Behemoth Dreadnought.

The Aerico has Counter Chain and Counter Ricochet, which vastly decreases the effectiveness of the Epsilon ECHO Cannon and Glance Cannon respectively against this ship.

In PvE, its spawned ships can keep the enemy AI distracted from the main fleet, thus reducing the amount of repair time taken from the battle.

Like other Umbra ships, this ship deals extra damage against Altairian hulls.

Disadvantages
The Aerico only has one firing arc and, thus, lacks the firepower of battlecruisers and the Omega. It only has two armor slots and will go down quickly once stripped of its ablative armor.

The Blight Nebula Fields generated by its spawned ships are ineffective against Umbra Hulls and to a lesser extent, Pharmakon Hulls. Moreover, enemy Umbra Hulls can quickly recover their ablative armor by targeting and/or destroying the Myrs, making this ship weak against its brethren.

While resistant to Chain and Ricochet effects, the Aerico remains vulnerable to Piercing and Stasis Dealing weapons, which are favoured by the Pharmakon in particular.

Trivia

 * The Aerico is the first Umbra ship with spawner slots.
 * All player ships had their Resurgence values modified as a result of the late February 2020 update.
 * At the start of the Penultimate event, all active players were gifted a fleet of 6 Aericos.
 * The repair time of all Tier 7 ships apart from dreadnoughts has been standardized to a flat 2 hours (similar to existing Tier 8 ships) in the late September 2020 update.