Test Server Feedback

L4 The Guristas Spies

Managed to get my sentries aggro against enemy battleships (first half of mission was a massive clusterup, due to me using the wrong domi, and not useful for testing). They seemed relatively durable. Primary complaint being that I couldn't see missile or turret shots directed at my drones. The enemy might as well have been using magic invisible mind bullets.

Recalled drones, activated one turret on each target to spitball aggro, and launched again. The enemy never so much as glanced away from me again.

I expect non-drone boat drone user's will just have to accept the fact that their drones will be lost. If CCP implements the current "Sacrifice a single T1 light drone to buy drone safety for the rest of the mission" then all boats with more than 25m3 of drone room will start carrying that single T1 drone.



I seriously doubt CCP will delay unleashing the AI on us for... well... much of anything. Conversely I expect in 18 months when tiericide finally hits BS's and faction BS's will all have more drone bay space than we'll know what to do with. Of course, again, it's the time between now and then that's likely to cause some pain.

FoxFour was on for hours yesterday. Just because his TZ isn't the same as yours, doesn't mean he wasn't there. He is more likely to be around during his mass test, and will have a lot more feedback then as well.

If 10 people post before you start your tests, and only a few after, that doesn't mean you're the only one testing. It just means you're the only one that will post the same thing over and over and over and over, even though everyone else has said the same thing.

It is pretty obvious that the NPC AI isn't working properly. One sacrificial drone, or simply recalling drones shouldn't break the AI, but it seems to. The server has been so laggy the last couple days though, it's hard to know if that's the problem, or it's a fundamental problem with the AI. More non-drone boat pilots in fleets posting would be good though. Would be nice to know how it breaks with logi, or just 2 ships warping out and back in, or if they can drop 1 drone to lose aggro from the logi, etc.

Your comparison explains it better.
Mine uses ingame mechanics.
Yours was better, mine does in fact work something like that on TQ.

Somehow I don't see CCP pushing back on the AI change for spring saying it needs more time, and will be deployed when it is done.


Yes, a drone UI upgrade would be nice with the AI change.
Something like a different-pitched locking on sound and visual next to the drone in the control, so you know damage will be incoming there before it gets shot at. If it's right as it's locked onto, you'll see the red HP bad anyways.
But in the case of sentries it wouldn't be much of a change (can just sweep them back), in the case of heavies it may be too late even afterwards.
Just one of those adapt things I suppose.
Using nano repair on drones in bay would be nice.
Them being auto-repaired would be even better.
Or just being able to see their damage/shield while in the bay... (though I can just just dump severly damaged ones out of the control group).

Something to make our drone-loving lives easier for the increased effort required and reduced efficience (if recalling/managing/extra repping drones instead of having another gun on, or EWAR in the mid instead of a cap/tank/omni module) would be nice.
Well, drone damage amp will get beefier, pvp in drone boats is looking better and better, plus it's unaffected by any of these (unless you gank missioneers/ratters in a drone boat). But droneboat PvP can use all the buffs it gets.

Ran Intercept The Saboteurs and The Score, both lvl4 in my Kronos with my logistic alt in her Oneiros. No drone aggro at all, Hobs and Hammerheads, alt got a fair amount of aggro tho, had to adjust her tank a bit but overall did fine. It looks like having a second ship in mission makes the new AI forget that drones are there.
I'm liking this new direction, makes running missions more interesting, will be testing more missions tomorrow but overall I think this will work.

As a heavy drone boat user, i hate these changes. They will make a drone users life harder without any benefits but he is right, from a developers point of view. He and FoxFour are the one who implement the Drone AI and all they have to care about is if their AI works or not. So i dont understand your hatred against them. It probably wasn't their decision to implement these changes. The decision probably was made from a game design team and i have no idea who' s responsible there. Maybe we should hear something from them how these changes suppose to influent Drone Boat users.

This AI change will be way worse for nullsec than highsec, just saying. We get all the income problems plus the negative effects on PvP (it will be much harder to tackle ratters).

It wouldn't help. You already have essentially a watch list in the drone window, as you can see damage. The problem is with drones you don't have enough buffer, so that by the time you see them taking damage it may already be too late.

As a pilot I have indicators telling me when target switching is happening. What drones really need is some sort of alert to the pilot alerting that they are being targetted.

And being able see damage while in the bay is critical. In the middle of battle relaunching without knowing which ones are damaged or not is a serious PITA.

Well I did not get as much testing done as I wanted, But I did get on as much as I could.

LVL 4 missions seem fine. They are slightly more challenging but were way to easy before. So no issues there.

LVL 5 missions I ran 4 of them. Lost my logi 3 times. The amount of DPS that switched to the logi was insane. considering it is all NPC's that can actually hit it. Droping two shield reps and going with a more tanky fit on the logistics, and throwing some logi drones on another ship to rep the logi was not enough. Switching out all my drones on the other 3 ships was enough to keep the logi alive, but droped my DPS so much that it was almost impossible to finish the mission. It may be possible to complete them with 3-4 ships using a different strategy but based on my initial testing this change has made lvl 5 missions almost impossible for a reasonable small gang of 3-4 ships to complete. The same set up that could complete them easy before.

I did not test 6/10-8/10 plexes but did try to run a 9/10. It was a disaster. I used to run them with a heavy tanked BS with about 500 DPS, a DPS BS doing over 1200 DPS with a weak tank, a Smaller DPS ship to help clear frigates and cruisers(either a HAC or T3) with a balanced fit doing about 650 dps, and a logi orbitng the main tank. This was done mutiboxing 4 accounts.

between dropping some drones for logi drones to keep the logistics alive, and droping DPS on both DPS ships to give them enough tank, my DPS ended up being to low to complete the plex. I managed to stay alive but was not able to finish the plex in 3 hours.

It would seem to do the same small gang stuff I previously did with 4 accounts I will now need probably 6 accounts for. I will not be subbing two more accounts. If anything I will drop two accounts as the only reason I have 4 accounts is for muti boxing a small gang. I also use these 4 accounts for mining but have been doing this less and less in favor of less boring game activities. The changes to mining ships have made mining easier, but also more boring. It is almost to safe now. So if I can not run level 5 missions, and higher end plexes mutiboxing my 4 accounts then there is no point in having 4 accounts.

One other question for CCP FOXFOUR; When you run this content for your internal testing do you use a god mode dev character with all skills at lvl 5? If so to get a acurate feel of what most PVE players are facing you should be running them with a character with not more than 20 mil SP. I would guess the BULK of the PVE player base is in the 15-30 mil SP bracket. Most players with more than 30 mil SP have moved on from PVE. The difficulty of a mission is drastically different from 20 mil skill points to over 40 mil which is what my two main combat toons are at. I can only assume it gets even easier with over 100 mil SP as I still have much left to train on my 40 mil SP pilots.

Also keep in mind that a very large potion of the community is not active on the forums, and do not read developer blogs. They will be blindsided by this change.

I tested a few anomalies in a sentry carrier this weekend while paying varying degrees of attention --

Guristas Forsaken Hub -- fairly close to being 'not game breaking', lost ~3 drones mostly all to elite cruiser focus fire
Guristas Sanctum -- (ring version) similar to Forsaken Hub, ~6 drone losses to elite cruiser focus fire

The common theme in the high end anomalies likely to be run by sentry battleships and carriers is that elite cruisers are too aggressive to sentry drones, probably due to their relatively high DPS and low sig. The frequency with which they targeted drones was a bit high, but more than that the damage they dealt to drones was excessive. With a couple elite cruisers a T2 sentry drone would die in ~20s or less. With up to 4 on a single spawn in a Haven/Sanctum, the level of micromanagement was tedious.

Infrequently full pocket aggro would switch to drones and straight annihilate a drone practically before there was a damage indication.

Guristas Hidden Hub -- (I had trouble finding real anomalies to run) The enormous number of elite frigates and smaller ships in this site (and I suspect all of the mid / low-end sites) made it effectively a waste of time. Even paying full attention I lost around a full flight of T2 sentries completing it, not sure I broke even on bounties. Focus fire frequently volleyed or near-volleyed drones, large portion of NPCs in the pocket consistently switched immediately to another drone upon recalling one taking damage. Very tedious 'whack-a-mole' side game in the horrible drone UI, very much hope this is not representative of intended game play with the changes.

It is worth noting that this is *not* the sort of anomaly you'd usually run with a high-skilled character in an 'end-game' PVE setup, but it does seem strange that as a consequence of the AI as tested it is the lower-value / lower-end PVE content that becomes disproportionately more costly and difficult. This flavor of site was already avoided except by newer players due to the tendency of the rats to tackle and low battleship density. With the new AI the lower end sites may be excessively challenging for newer players ratting in groups, particularly if they are relying on drones from smaller subcap drone bays for any significant portion of their DPS.