EVE General Discussion

5 pages...nice troll...

Solution? Train up drone skills...problem solved. Unless you really expect no aggro on drones, so basically you want invincible drones...?

Again, nice troll. :)

You do realize the NPC essentially have no 'range'. The frigs target (and jam/e-war) farther than 250k. The BS's can even shoot torps over 100k. Please tell us what their ranges are, so that we may stay 'outside their range'.

Also, i'm enjoying seeing all these replies saying "well just use sentries or lights for orbiting frigs." Yeah, because not being able to use any other drones means nothing is broken.

I'm pretty sure they NPC's do not aggro based on who's more of a 'nuisance', but based on some equation that takes sig radius and a few other variables to determine who gets the full aggro. In every mission i remember running since this change, it switched the full room (or whatever was aggro'd) to the new target. With two players they will typically hold aggro for a minute or so, then switch.

Though there is the fact that they supposedly changed the amount of drone hate to where only certain classes would target certain drones. Which still doesn't help kill the 8 dramiels orbiting/scraming you with your petty 5 light drones, because by the time you drones get one shot you've almost lost another drone.

As someone who came back to Eve recently and therefore having a good way to compare the before and after, I would absolutely support the statement that Drones are currently very much broken.

The big question is: what did CCP want to archive with the Drone change anyways? It can't seriously be the afk-missioners, as those were perfectly balanced before the change. Doing a Worlds Collide with my Maelstrom takes about 30 minutes, doing the same with my AFK-Gila takes about 2 hours as drones are stupid, slow and do significantly less damage. The income on a WC is ~50 mil/h in the Maelstrom and ~12,5 mil/h in my Gila, where the later is only slightly higher than afk-mining in high-sec. So if anyone tells me that afk-missioning was an issue, we seriously need to do something about miners as well.

Then this change doesn't add any value to the game, as there is no challenge in watching your drones and recall them. For once it is mindless staring and pressing a button and for second with the current drone system you only notice that your drones have aggro when they are already being shot, and till they react the NPCs usually fire a few more shots. Effectively if you attack the wrong enemies with Drones, they report aggro by exploding.

Using Drones is absolutely required in some missions, where elite frigates scramble you. No existing large turret can even remotely hit elite frigates close by, so Drones are your only option here. But now those drones usually get fragged much faster than they kill, so usually you have to either abort/ignore certain missions just because there is no way possible for a gunboat to do them, or you need to either train up an entirely different skill tree for that one mission or exploit by using EWar. Exploit because it does nothing in the fight except for keeping the aggro. And take in account as well that equipping EWar modules does hurt your tank if you fly a shield-tanker.

Effectively this change renders some ships completely pointless and makes others the main choice for mission-runners. If you are in a Dominix with maxed sentry skills you are fine, a Raven with missile skills is even better, but everything else has become sub-par because of this one single change to Drones.

Now please explain to me why it is not broken that all my points in Minmatar gunboats and Drone skills have been completely wasted with a single change to the game.

The thing was CCP was nerfing drones being used in plexes (FW comes to mind here with multiboxers).

But it's a one-size fits all "solution". There's a good reason for it, and frankly don't mind it because in WoW a player that goes AFK for even 5 minutes can be dead by a wondering NPC (respawns are crazy now, and they h-u-r-t).

When missioning in EvE is easier than questing in WoW, there's a problem. EvE sets missioning up as an ISK faucet (but at a lower ISK/hr in high-sec than low and null), but doesn't want players to get too comfortable doing it as such (which is ironic as it's setup for exactly that). WoW it's turning in the quest that actually pays, there's little incentive to hang around to just farm.

Sure they do. They're just not the same ranges our weapons have. Many of the longer-ranged missions (or the missions against close-orbiting enemies) will amply demonstrate that the NPCs will miss at long ranges the same you do. They're just not clever enough not to shoot, so they start firing away as soon as possible.

If you want a lore explanation, just think of it as them using different ammo than you do, which explains why they do such appalling damage (all in line with how damage scales between short- and long-range ammo). It doesn't entirely explain why they don't switch to something more damaging as they come close, but hey, they have to leave something behind as loot, after all…

You can use other drones just fine. It's just not a good idea, since all you're doing is giving up damage application. This was just as true before, so that part has nothing to do with the improved AI.

Not really, no. It's just a matter of adjusting how you use them. They did it to improve the thread rats are able to project and to only have one set of AI code to maintain. The benefit of all this is that it means you get to learn things like proper drone usage even if you just shoot at red crosses, and that you have to pay more attention and prioritise your targets rather than just release and randomly press F1 as you read the newspaper.

The big question is: what did CCP want to archive with the Drone change anyways? It can't seriously be the afk-missioners, as those were perfectly balanced before the change. Doing a Worlds Collide with my Maelstrom takes about 30 minutes, doing the same with my AFK-Gila takes about 2 hours as drones are stupid, slow and do significantly less damage. The income on a WC is ~50 mil/h in the Maelstrom and ~12,5 mil/h in my Gila, where the later is only slightly higher than afk-mining in high-sec. So if anyone tells me that afk-missioning was an issue, we seriously need to do something about miners as well.

It hasn't particularly affected which ships can or can't kill rats, since it's still trivially easy to keep the drones alive.

How so? Gallente ships murder rats as fine as ever.

Meh, I was talking about the drone boats, which Gallente tend to have lots of.
I don't use drone boats, but those are now only useable with sentries and light drones, anything else and you can say bye bye to your drones.

Let's see… I got my first Myrm some time around March or April 2007, and from that perspective, I must say, no, not really. You just have to know how the “new” AI works (in quotation because it is now more than four years old) and adjust accordingly.

I don't think anyone has come to the right conclusion yet.

AFK missioning is still 100% possible, and there is 1 or 2 modules that will keep it that way. Buuut I'm not telling you what they are as I'd rather it didn't get nerfhammered.

Rats do not pose any threat, no matter the change, as one is able to perfectly calculate the outcome of a fight against NPCs, can take enough time to figure out the minor details and can warp out at any time should there be any mistake to try again. All that matters is the time it takes to kill them.


Every ship can kill rats, it comes down to the question of efficiency. If I can do a mission in 30 minutes in ship one, or in 50 minutes in ship two, I take ship one. And while before every ship had its pros and cons, now half of them are pointless and the other half is superior. And the only trivial way to keep drones alive is currently to not use them at all, which cannot be the intended purpose of a 'weapon'.

I made the mistake to read your other posts as well Tippia, and found nothing but blank statements or false arguments, so you are either a troll, massively clueless or both. Whatever it is, you are trying to defend a severe issue in this game, one that still exists even if you close your eyes, you just won't see it anymore.

It's funny (in a sad kind of way) to know that 1st a person fails IN game than fails posting about it out of game too lol.

I guess when i do level 4 missions in a Dominix or a Rattlesnake and don't lose drones I'm doing something horribly wrong, because that's what I did all last night lol.

Even after all this, people are too lazy to develop an understanding to the threat generation mechanics and put a couple of simple modules on their ships, like the Target painter + remote armor reps i use on Drone boats to keep aggro off my drones, or peel aggro off if the npcs switch. And the same people are too lazy to use faction drones with higher HP the the cost of some dps to minimize drone losses.

I mean it's soo hard to replace one drone link aug or gun on a dominix (yes some of us still gun out our domis lol) for a remote reps for sentries. Or figure out how to make a perma cap MWD Drone boat that keeps a drone at range (thus allowing the domi to stay in rep range of heavy drones) etc.

A lot of mission runners problem comes from CCP allowing YEARS of crappy stale unchanging PVE. The old missions were the same experience over and over and over again and they attracted people who REALLY don't like to adapt to new things, with the result being a huge chunk of the mission running community being unable and unsuited to thinking about new ways to mission.

That's why so many think drone ships are "useless" when the fact is that with a little bit of creativity, drone boating is BETTER now than it used to be.