Player Features and Ideas Discussion

We all know that Gallente got a major boost in use after the way CCP revamped Hybrids and made all Gallentean ships fly faster right?

Well, here is my problem with Gallente now though...

Drones.

That's right, you heard me... Drones are BROKEN.

A flight of 5 tech 2 heavy scouts is dang near worthless... why?

Because there aren't enough of them to do any real damage and the damage they do deal, even with skills maxed, is pathetic. They are little better than harassment.

Here is my proposal.

A Carrier can fly about 15 (20 if you fit all drone controls in high slots; usually only used on rat burners) and a Super Carrier can fly about 20 (25 if fit all drone controls in high; again... BAD idea, usually only used on rat burners)...

... but what about the REST of the so called "drone ships"? You know the ones:

Dominix
Myrmidon
Vexor
Algos

You have to wonder though, if CCP even writes into the descriptions of these ships that they are drone boats, then the primary means of causing damage should be drones right? That's the whole point of drone launching ships correct? To use the drones to do the dirty work while you sit back and orbit at 100 km... right?

So WHY is it that drone boats are SO pathetic?

I say, make drones do double the amount of damage they do now, and make the Tech 1 boats be able to fly up to a max of 7 drones but, make a Tech 2 version of each, classified as a "Drone Micro-Carrier" that have the bandwidth to fly up to a maximum of 10 drones.

Each ship will be sized the same way they are now;

(SPECS BELOW ARE FOR THE TECH 2 VERSIONS)
Algos - Can carry up to 30 Light class drones and fly 10 at maxed out skills.
Vexor - Can carry up to 20 or 25 Medium class drones and fly 10 at maxed out skills.
Myrmidon - Can carry up to 30 Medium class drones and fly 10 at maxed out skills.
Dominix - Can carry up to 30 Heavy class drones and fly 10 at maxed out skills.

Lastly (and this idea will probably get flamed most of all);

1) Make Capital class EWAR drones for use by carriers
2) Make it so that Gallente Titan and Dreadnought can CARRY up to 10 fighter/capital class (NOT fighter bombers) drones and FLY up to a maximum of 5 capital class drones with maxed out skills.

CCP built the Guardian-Vexor with the ability to fly up to 10 drones with maxed out skills, but then nerf-balled it to where it didn't have enough bandwidth to actually FLY more than 5 and then only put out 50 of them in to the ENTIRE GAME!!!

If CCP wants to waste players time and money by clogging up their servers' hard drives with useless nerferlated ships that aren't even capable of doing what CCP SAYS IN THE SHIPS DESCRIPTIONS they are supposed to be meant to do, then why are there drone boats in the first place?

We have hybrid weapons, Both Caldari and Gallente use them. But once you get past cruisers, Gallente ships stick primarily to Hybrids, near completely ignoring drones, and Caldari branches nearly entirely into missles and torpedoes.

We have Lasers, Amarr uses those. We have Artillery, Mimitar uses those.

But NO ONE in the game uses drones like they should be... there are rouge drones powerful enough to swamp a battleship to star dust, we "capsuleers" recover sleeper tech every day, but we can't get ships to fly enough decent drones to really do anything worth a dang.

The Dominix is a very nice and powerful ship... BUT...

... it is meant to be a drone boat... meaning it's supposed to cause damage with it's DRONES... not guns.

What the heck CCP?

WTH???

Well, I meant doubling both base damage and drone bandwidth to double number but; now that I think about it, just doubling the number would be pretty epic in and of itself.

Perhaps a small increase of about 5 - 25% in the base damage of all drones (light scout through heavy scout only NOT fighters or fighter/bombers) and the amount of EWAR oomph that EWAR drones do would suffice along with the doubled numbers.

What I am thinking is this...

... we have Hybrid fleets, Laser fleets, Missile fleets, Projectile fleets, Armor fleets, and Shield fleets...

... why not a DRONE fleet?

Imagine, 10 Super-Carriers flying 20 FB's each, 10 Titans flying 5 Capital drones each, 20 Dreadnoughts flying 5 Capital drones each and...

50 Dominix, 100 Myrmidons, 200 Vexors, and 400 Algos...

all able to fly 10 drones each.

And some flying damage drones, others flying EWAR drones...

... a formidable "Wall of Drone".

looks like someone hasn't been reading up on the battleship changes expected in odyssey

Not to nitpick... but you can only control 10 drones with a carrier... 15 if you use drone controls. Supercarriers (and capital ships that are not the carrier) cannot carry drones at all. Only Fighters and Fighter Bombers (which are in a class of their own).


They aren't. Or rather... not all of them are. Some of them suffer from issues that have more to do with their class or drone "interaction" with the class.

The Algos? With 2 medium drones, 3 lights, enough spare room for 5 more lights, and a rack of [unbonsed] blasters it can top 400 dps with over 10k ehp to keep it going. You can even shield-fit it with 75mm railguns and pop off targets with about 220 dps at 15+ kms (almost 175 of that coming from drones alone). The only thing holding back is its speed.

The Vexor? Arguably one of the best T1 cruisers. An armor-fit can top 500 dps, more than half that coming from drones alone. Shield-fits are even nastier pushing past 600 dps (almost 400 coming from drones) at the cost of tank (which is a little more than half that the armor fit can get).

The Myrmidon? It's still a good ship. Yes, it lost a turret, but it gained bandwidth to launch another heavy drone (the fitting grid wasn't changed much so that lost turret meant more room for better mods). The reason you see it less and less though is because of the Prophecy... which, in its current incarnation, is basically just like the old Myrmidon... but WAY better.

The Dominix? The issues it has are numerous and not completely drone related. It has long suffered a lack of powergrid which has forced people to choose between tank OR gank. Sentry drones and Dominixs have always seemed to go hand-in-hand, however the limitations of sentries (being immobile) has been the bane of their use in mobile/ranged engagements (and by consequence, the Dominix too).
This becomes especially apparent when one wants to retrieve their drones during or after the engagement but find that they are too far away. Large lumbering battleships are simply not going to slowboat over a significant distance to retrieve those drones... instead they will just accept that they are lost and move on (note: the Ishtar doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to it's much higher mobility). Until this specific issue is resolved, the Dominix will be passed over in favor of ships that can shoot and move at the same time and warp away at a moment's notice.

Heavy drones have similar issues since it takes a godawful amount of time for them to reach a target 10+ kms out and return when you need them to.


Drones are the primary or equal damage dealers for most current drone-centric ships, yes. But that doesn't mean you can just "sit back and orbit." Just as drones supplement the dps of most gun and missile ships... guns and missiles supplement (or are a close equal to) the dps of most drone ships.


Oh? And what trade-offs are you willing to make on those drone ships? Use the upcoming Vexor Navy Issue as a benchmark as it's getting all but 2 guns chopped off in order to field 5 heavies.

You also have to take server lag into account... which is the reason why there is a hard 5 drone limit per ship.
Back in the day, you could launch as many drones as you could stuff into your cargohold . Then people started using them in large fleet fights. You can guess what happened with that many objects on field.
With the nerf to fielding hordes of drones CCP put in new skills to compensate. With all of them maxed you have about 10 effective drones using only 5... 15 on drone ships.

Now you seek to undo this by doubling the amount of drones that could be fielded per [drone]ship. A 25 vs. 25 battle using nothing but droneships would create about 500 objects on field all requiring their own server calculations (because a drone is an entity separate from the ship it came from).

And yes, I'm aware of Time Dilation. I'm just not keen on changing a mechanic so that it kicks it over what we would consider small to medium sized battles (never mind huge 1000 man slugfests).

id like to know where u are getting your number. seems way to high as u imply they are without damage modules? even with damage modules seems like max gank fits numbers

Algos:
[Lows]
Damage Control II
400mm Mtea 4 plates
Drone Damage Amp II

[Mids]
MWD
Web
Scram

[Highs]
5x Electron Blasters (Void)

[Rigs]
Hybrid Burst Aerator
Trimark
Anti-Explosive.

[Drones]
3x Hobgoblins
2x Hammerheads

DPS: ~200 from drones + ~200 from turrets = 400 DPS total.


Vexor:
[Lows]
Damage Control II
2x EANM II
Adaptive Nano Plate
1600 Meta 4 plate

[Mids]
MWD
Web
Scram
ECCM

[Highs]
4x Electron Blasters (Faction Antimatter)

[Rigs]
3x Trimarks

[Drones]
2x Ogres
2x Hammerheads
1x Hobgoblin

DPS: ~300 from drones + ~180 from turrets = 480 DPS total.



Granted... the Algos has a drone damage amp... but adding a second one would only increase its power.

What the OP is asking for is that drone ships to be able to field DOUBLE the amount of drones they currently can without taking away any turrets or drone bonuses on ship hulls... that means they will have DOUBLE the drone damage.
I'm just trying to illustrate how overpowered that would be without drastically cutting into the ship in other ways.

Drones have 99 problems, but damage ain't one.

Drone as a primary weapon system do have somewhat lower DPS than the primary weapon system of similar ships that carry Drones as a secondary weapon. As an example the max usable DPS you can achieve on a true Drone boat (like a Domi) is 800 DPS with Gardes and 825 with Ogres using (4) DDA IIs. Consider the DPS output of JUST Large AC's on say the Mach. They do by themselves over 1200 DPS (yes I know that's within a very short opt). So the point here is that Drones being used as the primary dmg system on a Drone boat certainly should do nearly the same dmg, say 1000-1200 DPS max, BUT, this would mean that ship would have to lose all but maybe 2-3 turrets/missiles so that the secondary dmg from them is inline with the secondary dmg from Drones on the non-Drone boats, thus balancing the overall DPS output. Look at it this way:


Mach (currently): 70-80% of dmg is from Guns [ACs], 20-30% dmg is from Drones to about 1600 DPS total.
Domi (after Odyssey): 60-70% of dmg is from Drones, 30-40% dmg is from Guns [Blasters] to about 1500 DPS total.


The problem here is that no other weapon system is destroyable like Drones are. So as NPC's/Players start nibbling down your Drone supply your DPS permanently suffers, unlike gun/missile ships. To buff their HP could unbalance them in PvP and to give ALL Drones an increase in dmg WOULD unbalance them in PvP especially against non-Drone carrying ships. So neither is a good way to "fix" what is only a little broken.

The cure imo is to make true Drone boats exactly like they sound like. Change the Drone ship bonus of +10% dmg/hp per level to +15-20% dmg/hp per level (max Drone DPS of 1000-1237 with 4 DDA IIs). Add an additional Drone bonus like the Domi/N-Vexor are getting in Odyssey to these ships. Then to balance the dmg output, REMOVE all but 2-3 turret/missile hardpoints from those ships and any bonus that is Gun/Missile related. These "Drone boats" would then have nearly the same DPS as now but it would come primarily from the Drones, which would have more HP so die a little less, thus keeping the ship balanced while not unbalancing the entire game with ALL Drones getting buffed.

Also, the idea of 10 Drones per ship is nice but not needed at all. And +100% to Drone damage is ridiculous and a poorly thought out idea. The above idea just changes the Highslot weapons to true secondary on Drone Boats (like it should be) and buffs Drone DPS output ONLY of those ships.

I seem to remember suggesting something similar at one point or another however to keep an eye on balance. I would suggest making a new high slot module that is capable of boosting a ships bandwidth and +1 active drone. That way you have to give up potential gun slots to boost drone output.

Drones are fine.

Stop being bad at game.