EVE New Citizens Q&A

I am a returning player who is basically new to the game again. I played the Gallente in the past and used some drones. I have been reading up on drones and all i see to see is people complaining they are getting targeted by NPCs and killed quite easily. Is this still the case? Also, in PvP, are drones fairly easy targets too?

It's all about aggro and knowing which drones to use on which targets. Each situation is different
Also there are skills to boost their durability to take a bit more shots

Time spent shooting someone's drones is time not spent shooting you. It's very rare to see a player spending time popping drones in PVP and, if they do, then you will kill them.

Furthermore, drone ships have drone hitpoint bonuses and enough drone bay for backups flights.




Virtually every drone-bonused hull uses drones as their primary means of DPS. That means about half of the Gallente lineup.

Light drones are still pretty handy for the larger ships that have issues with tracking the light rat frigates that love to zerg up and scramble you. And since those rats will be zerging up all in yo' grill you should be able to recall them in time when they start taking fire.

Medium drones have had their life spans dropped considerably, though. You can still use them, but only on targets at under 10 kilometer distance if you want to get them back in one piece once they get total aggro and instalock dumped on them. There's still very few situations where lights or sentries wouldn't do a better job, however. If the target is frigate sized then lights would do better and if it's any bigger then you'd be better off just nuking them with massive sentry damage instead.

Heavies... egads, why they're even in the game is beyond me. Heavies are basically just chaff now - something you drop to draw the aggro off you when a rat is scrambling you and you need to warp out. However, when you're that deep into the crap then you could just as easily have dropped lights against the scramblers instead, and they're a lot cheaper & waste less space.


Drones used to be awesome - I flew nothing but drone boats for the majority of my career, including a Myrmidon that I used to solo L4s in for well over six months straight. Those were the days. Today, however... I ended up just giving away that same Myrmidon to a corpmate to use as a warfare link support ship. I still do use drones (at least until CCP coughs up a SP refund - like that will ever happen) in a different ship but it is no longer the least bit fun or exciting. Now it's just stop, drop sentries, play the "launch & recall" paddle-ball game to keep them from getting blown up when they invariably draw 100% aggro over & over. Sometimes I'll use some lights when the little scramble frigates get too close, but that's pretty much it. If I start having issues with my tank then I hit the microjump, stop, drop sentries, and start all over again while the rats try to catch up.

It's all very, very dull now and sadly that's become the new norm. Even more sad is the universal "Domi + Sentries" copy/paste that you'll hear every other post is exactly the style that CCP were trying to break up when they made these changes. Instead, that's the only style left that's still viable anymore.

But the saddest of all is that you'll quickly learn that the forums are filled with people who like to not-so-subtly wave their e-peens around by not-so-subtly making claims how they, in their infinite superiority, never have any issues with drones because they're just soooo smart, skilled and handsome that they can't fail at anything, ever, not matter what. A smart person will ignore these people like the fat pathetic fifteen year old insecure zit covered ubervirgins that they really are. Drones are not great, the AI is pretty broken and the UI is a complete headache. I honestly would no longer recommend the Way of the Drones to anyone anymore unless they're just training up to become a triage carrier alt for some day in the distant future or something. Just go Tengu like everyone else and you'll save yourself a lot of disappointment.

The only thing that may happen is that sometimes NPC switch targets away from your ship back onto the drones. It's easy to spot (npc starts yellow boxing) and unless you're afk or you sent them out 40km (which is dumb enough already) you can handle it just fine. Especially once you figure out the logic behind their aggression (frigate NPC aggress differently from cruiser NPC, depending on which drones you have out).

NPC who don't alter their behaviour to what you're doing is from before the dark ages, like Doom or perhaps Quake. Losing aggro is pretty much a basic thing for NPC to do in games, it's not difficult, amazing, terrible or impossible to predict or adapt to. Anyone sulking about how it's not "fun" anymore is just using "fun" as a replacement for "easy mode and lazy".

Sure, drones have issues and sure they are of limited use in most PVP situations (as main damage) but that hasn't changed lately and it certainly has NOTHING to do with the pouting "waaah, my drones now actually may get hurt and I'll have to pay attention", because that's all I hear you saying.

As a rookie I dont have the 'how drones used to be' frame. Given that can anyone point me toward some detail about aggro mechanics? I searched, but didn't find any detail. For instance, what else besides dps contributes to aggro. I am guessing target painting and some things like that. I would like to experiment with loadouts that max aggro. Any suggestions?

What you need to know is that EVE never started out as a PVE game, it was a PVP focussed "bash eachother's heads in" kind of thing and had PVE bolted on as an afterthought. Because of that the NPCs were simplistic, basic and rather silly (that's also why NPCs "cheat" and their frigates can lock you from 100km and ewar you etc etc). From when the game came out 10 years ago up until recently NPCs were SO basic that they would never switch target, once they had a target they'd stick to it regardless of who or what did damage to them. AI like that can't even be called AI, it could have been coded in C64 Basic.

So people were used to this prehistoric behaviour of NPCs, they would aggro a whole room in a mission or anomalie in a super tanked Domi or Rattlesnake, then they'd launch their drones and simply go afk while the aggressive drones would slowly but surely kill all NPC. It allowed them to be lazy, semi-afk.

Finally CCP decided that this over simplistic and rather laughable AI was outdated and should be replaced with a more active, reactive and simply put; more modern version. Much like you see in other games or MMO's NPC in EVE now react to damage and Ewar and can/will switch their targets based on what they perceive to be more important (they have a tendency to go for targets/ships that have points/webs, Nos/Neut, ECM or remote reps on board). This is not something amazing, out of the box, never seen or completely over the top; it's standard practise in just about any game or MMO made in this millennium that NPCs react to what's going on. And yet, people whine and yell about how dreadful it all is and how drones now "suck".

The really funny part is that most grind bears don't realise that the changed AI actually makes it safer for them to PVE because previously if someone would enter their mission who could attack them (war, low sec or 0.0, aggression, killright) in a smaller, faster dedicated ship they would just slowly kill them simply by neuting them till their tank failed while the NPCs did the rest. NOW, because that PVP ship has points, webs and neuts onboard, the npcs will actually favour the mission runner's attacker as a target and switch to him. So... yeah.



In short; people are whining over the fact that NPC now actually HAVE an AI, resulting in lazy clowns not being able to afk their way through missions anymore, at least not as easy as it was before. That really is all there is to it.

Oh for the days when I was a "fifteen year old insecure zit covered ubervirgin..."


Drone boats are fine....jeez


"Pets....?"


Kid won Wow...

I started playing after the drone change so I don't know what it was like before. I primarily use drone ships for missioning so learned under the new way drones work.

I haven't had any issues. Yes I did lose quite a few drones at first and there are a couple of level 3 missions that are annoying but beyond that I haven't had any problems. I don't even have full drone skills. I'm even able to do level 4 missions (carefully) in just a Myr and light scout drones. Don'y have sentry or heavy drones trained yet.

I chose Gallante before knowing about the change and read about all the complaints so I was concerned. I'm not at all now. Now I'm doing a lot of high-sec (low-sec when I get more skills up) exploration with an all-in-one vexor or Myr so rely primarily on drones for pew pew. Love it.

I figure that if this newb can manage with no issues then vets should really have no problems. Maybe they just have to adjust what they are doing is all.

Note to self: Arguing with an ISD alt is pointless as they will stealth-edit/censor your stuff and act like nothing happened.