EVE General Discussion

It's all good and well for turret based ships, but for drone platforms a lot of the missions have somewhat broken aggression towards them, to the point where it is only possible to use sentries until all that is left are tackling frigates.

I am all for the more intelligent AI, but right now I don't think it is balanced quite right.

there are some lvl 4 missions where i can complete everything without being targeted and pulling the sentry drone the AI aggros results in them doing nothing while i kill them all.

He's complaining that the AI goes after the real threats shooting them now instead of keeping a lock on him. It's not so bad with sentry's because they remain next to you and attack while you RR them.

Essentially Drone boats can't aggro the whole room and afk the mission anymore.

Ahh.
My mistake.
I was always under the impression the Gals were in to a bit of adjusted pleasure.
Turns out they were really about laying back and letting others do the work.
Oh well.

The man is always trying to oppress the Drone Brothers and Sisters!

The other drones are still viable, you just have to be a little more proactive on when to use them and when to call them back. Sorry man, gotta play the game now.

My tactics only changed slightly. Usually I would try to wipe out a few of the larger ships and push drones about halfway into a battle and making sure to recall them on spawns. But seeing how frigs do slap damage to my hull anyways I figure on just leaving them there until the end and then I'll let the lights clean up, unless the webbing bugs me too much or I get a scrammer.

Agree that it looks like mediums and heavies are useless now.
Anyone have a use for them?

Lights are still good for cautious defense against fast frigs.

Not used sentries myself.

I really hate this sentiment (probaby because it doesn't describe how I played and its used to justify a change that affects me). Any ship that can perma-rep/perma-tank could go afk and they still can. Drones are about as smart as FOF missiles, most of the time you would try this tactic (and go literally 10-15 minutes without looking at the screen) you'd end up with dead drones due to respawns/new wave, or your sentries would be shooting a frigate that they can't track. The only time drones could reasonably be left to their own devices is once you've cleared all small ships, dealt with any unique mechanics or respawns of the particular encounter, and are just chewing through 3-10 BS/BC while tanking. In other words, 95% of the hard work and attention-paying is done. Now imagine you are in this situation. Frigates and Ewar cleared, no respawns, dps manageable, just grinding through the last few ships of the mission/complex. The "Hard Part" is done.

1 Non-drone ship - Home free. Press f1, switch targets, repeat
2 Drone Ship (not getting drone aggro) - Home free. Press f1, switch targets, repeat. Your drones sometimes switch for you.
3 Drone Ship (getting drone aggro) - constantly scooping and releasing drones, targeting individuals to apply reps, etc. The easiest part of the mission now requires constant micromanagement. You're at the DPS grind part of the mission, and your drone dps has plummeted because you're needing to scoop and rep constantly.

The reason this change has honked me off so much is that its hurt explorers more than "afk missioners" and its hurt the gila/ishtar more than the domi and the rattlesnake. The gila and ishtar get more of their dps from drones than the domi and snake, and their ability to remote rep drones is much much less than those two ships. Furthermore, they can't use the large MJDs, which the domi and snake can use to great effect. Also, drone ships make a lot of sacrifices to use drones. In particular, if you're using sentries, you give up MOBILITY (unless you have a MJD lololololol). Honestly, having your sentries auto-switch for the last 5 minutes of a mission seems like a pretty insignificant advantage. if the 1% of people that were literally afking the entire mission/encoutner/whatever, I'd much rather have ccp change drones so they must be manually ordered to aggro a new target than make them harder to use for everyone in every situation.


Also, when CCP made the change, they cited this one particular place (not even a mission) where players were setting up afk-domis to make hundreds of millions of isk per day. Some kind of static cosmos plex or something. I can't find the bluepost or devblog that mentioned it, but it seemed like a really absurd edge case to use to justify the whole overhaul.

Lastly, I reject the entire notion that PVE content needs to be more like PVP content, in terms of ewar and AI. If it was, missions would not pit you against 1:10 odds regularly, and offensive ewar besides target painting and webbing would have a point (it doesn't because jamming 1 ship out of 10 is still pointless).

Want to draw aggro away from your drones? Bring in a Noctis... NPCs seems to love the hell out of my Noctii when I drop them into active rooms...

I actually jsut built a navy domi and am loving it so far.

Only lost one ogre during Stop the Thief and I dont even know when or how lol

Besides that the damage bonus from the domi jacked up my hobs so much that they nearly two shotted all the frigates

Ogres are pretty awesome for tear a new one for a Mercenary machariel (yet to try an angel mach).

Personally It's not near as bad as people think really.

If you say the changes were meant to stop the afk drone boats then you are dumb. If they wanted to do that they could just remove aggressive stance, revamp drone interface (which it's actually something that takes work and testing) and make drones work like a turret slot.

But that would take too much trouble, better copy paste sleeper aggro mechanics, call it advanced AI (aka random target instead of a first contact aggro) and stick it in patch. +1 Feature