Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hopefully you wouldn't change the cap use on the target painters? That or make it so target painter scripts would either affect falloff or cycle time.

I typed 4, then started typing my favorite ships and realized there were more than I thought!

+1 to the script suggestion.


about the cycle time:

cycle time should be way shorter to make the use less awefull playing experience

Thank you!! I greatly appreciate your taking the time to write back.

I know you already know this, but we all "get" that it's going to be a big project, too. But come on, it's been needing to be fixed for a long while, and especially considering now that you guys are further evolving drones into one of the major weapons systems, it's about time you guys stopped pushing it aside because of the size of the undertaking. Imagine if you had to select your turrets and fire missiles from a right click menu. Or if it was impossible to see which one of your turrets was damaged. Think about those things the next time someone suggests at a planning meeting that a drone overhaul is a big thing. It is. And it's a big thing to us too.

New skills don't hurt new players do specific things. New skills hurts every being able to do everything, but then, you're not supposed to be able to do everything.

It's not a matter of "doing everything". It's a matter of "you need to train more SP to remain as competitive as you were in what you were already doing before". It's similar to WoW raising the level cap after you already reached the existing one.

Hey Rise, you're pretty bad. Painters are fine, people just want to be able to grind incursions harder with them. I've sperged out a big list of how you can fix drones. It's probably better than everyone else's suggestions.

• Set medium-sized drone ships to 50 bandwidth and larger drone damage bonuses to bring them up to the same paper dps as they have now: that way, a ship's drones will go faster than it and be able to hit equivalent size targets, which is how it's supposed to be. Currently these ships apply damage really badly (like a trimarked, plated blaster ship using electron blasters, but with the tracking of spike rails) and the drones get exploded all the time, cost loads and use up loads of bay - easily the worst weapon system.
• Make heavy drones go faster. I'd intend that they be used by battleships, but seriously they're just too slow to use on anything.
• Make drone pursuit AI better, so 5x 7km/s drones with a tracking bonus can actually kill an untanked condor going 4km/s. If this is too complicated to implement, you could simply increase the range on drones from 1-2km up to 7-8km, it would have a similar effect I think.
• Make drone modules make more sense - look at what slots they all go in and the crazy amounts of CPU they all use (faction DDAs would be nice, I doubt I'll be able to afford these nonexistent officer ones).
• Make drone rigs less bad - a general damage one would be nice, and change the penalty to something sensible (a proper rig rebalance is in order, but it'll never happen because there's a tonne of rigs and nobody cares).
• Nerf drone assignment somehow - make it count against the number of drones you're using, so you can have up to 5 assigned to you if you have none of your own or something. Make it possible to do in lowsec - it never works here.
• ECM drones are horrible and should be removed. Other ewar drones, either do something with the stacking penalty so they're less bad or just remove them. Balancing this stuff looks really complicated, and I just don't see what they add to the game other than annoyance and badness.
• Add cap transfer drones to go with rep and shield drones.
• Better UI would be pretty nice, but I could live without it. Something like a designated drone group you could launch on a hotkey or click of a virtual module would be cool.
• Make it so they don't fly off and shoot sentry guns.
• Also make it so you can tell them to just aggress something that's aggressing you, when you are jammed or damped out and cannot lock - currently if you get jammed/damped before you launch them, they are useless and just sit there. I've also had a fight where I got them out in time, and they went after the ECM frigate, but they decided to switch target and go shoot someone else right before he would've died. I was pretty mad about that, it was awful.
• Oh yeah, make it so the different damage types are good.
• I'd probably go with making it so sentries benefit from/require racial drone spec. They don't at the moment.
• Navy vexor's speed bonus means heavy drones (lol good luck with that). Dominix's optimal bonus means sentries. It would be nice if they could both do both effectively. Tristans are pretty awful too, and algos - whose idea was it to put medium drones on a destroyer? Those new destroyers are all weirdly slow, I don't like it.

Something general to compensate for the power creep all other weapons have had would be nice - everything else has faction/t2 ammo, overloading and general buffs over the years, and ships have links and go very fast now, while drones haven't really improved except for DDAs and sentries - they are left in a worse position. I've no idea though, other than nerf that stuff (links), but you won't. Sometimes they're really good (sentries with DDAs and omnis), but that doesn't mean they should be bad the rest of the time.

Regarding Odyssey, your attack battlecruiser nerf was really disappointing, go do it again but properly this time. I get that you think they're good for small gangs or whatever, but they're really massively broken. Remove or think up something new they can do.

You forgot the Eagle! If only it had drones to deal with those pesky frigs :)

As an on topic post however, something similar to a web activation/usage would be a great tweak to TPs in the short term.

@ offtopic drones

it would be great to be able to command your drones to a "fleet swarm of drones" protectiong every ship in fleet (like for miners) or be commanded by fleet command