Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The Drake
Talking about the regular Drake, there are to my knowledge three fits coming up, the HAM-Drake, the Podla-Drake and the recharge-pve-drake. With the Drake's resistance-bonus, the relatvely high and decent damageoutput against cruiser and up (T2 Gallente strongly excluded, T2 Caldari to an extent) the Drake still is one of the good BCs in my opinion.
Wether you agree or not, it can be left that a Drake applying 750dps+ with rage and warriors for ham is great, the podlaversion still is pretty nice if you're working in a small gang and the pve-drake still is a temporary pve-vessel for near anyone currently bringing pve-skills up I heard.

The Navy Drake
On the other hand: The Navy Drake as of now is pretty much without purpose for a variety of reasons.
First, you pay a premium and you'll lose dps and - even though you're going from civil to navy, not gaining any significant tank. The application is pretty nice, but without damage to back that up it fails to overcome competition. The enhanced mobility over the drake is barely noticable, both are pretty sluggish. The slotlayout with those 8 launchers might even be considered a bottleneck, cause it binds vast ressources (PG/CPU) into your highs so you'll run into PG-issues fitting HAMs, or CPU-issues going for heavies. A rack of 8 guns also melts insanely quickly when OH'ing highs altogether, which is all but ideal <.<
The one redeeming quality is selectable damagetype. And as for projection, with limitations by ham-range and the aenemic heavy-dps this is simply not getting you anywhere.

The Competition
I'd like to think of the navy drake as belonging in between drake/cyclone (for classy brawler) and claymore/nighthawk (for really kickass brawler) regarding it's proficiency at doing its job. So while the BCs are fairly decent at their Job and the CS being extraordinary brawlers, the navy Drake should be *pretty pretty good* at its task. The task was described as *focusing on skirmishes and mid-longrange damage application*.
It also turns out that if a Drake isn't kitey enough, a navy osprey/navy skythe doesn't offer enough punch, a Claymore/Nighthawk is to expensive/skill-intensive - then you don't fly a navy drake. You get a Cerberus.
The Cerberus does ANYTHING the drake navy wants to do, but better. Resists, sigradius (+mwd-hac-bonus) and capacitor being the most important superior defensive qualities, raw-dps, range, velocity and warpspeed are of such utmost importance in a skirmish-role there is simply no incentive left to deal with a navy drake.

Amongst the things the navy drake lacks strongest in a skirmish role is the lack of utility high(s). The HAM-Drake can vaporize frigs and brawling ceptors (crusader, claw, armor-ranis) with just a small neut and such high dps that even navy hams apply enough after accuracy penalties. The navy drake though can't do that without sacrificing even more dps to a tiny (but sufficient) bit of cap warfare. Even though you could also employ a sentinel or curse to get a bit of neuting that way, the navy drake being the frontline screener shouldn't stand behind to its non-kitey competition in that regard.

Biased Navy
For minmatar, hurricane to fleetcane is a good upgrade. 30ish% additional buffer, second utility high is awesome. Fleetcanes are awesome and expensive enough to be rare, unlike the Sleipnir can armortank very well.
For Gallente, the navy brutix is a good gang-variation of the solo-oriented brutix. Together with med. rails, you really got something. In case of blasters, all of the tracking even. Beasty tank as the fleet cane has, rare for its costs and with three rigslots and a tracking bonus still different from an Astarte.
For Amarr, the navy harb has pretty much an additional mid and a tracking bonus, aswell as extra-hp compared to the civil one. It does the same a harbinger does, but better - and the high base-hp, the tracking bonus and the fifth mid allow you to realize some really wonky fits.

↓ condensed ↓
Caldari though got the Drake being a decent ship, and then a navy drake having the upside of higher base-hp without resists, an application-bonus without dps, selectable damagetype instead of dps... Ya, three things are different, and the rest is worse then a normal drake:
- no utility, is a pretty worthless screener if a raven actually goes just as fast, but has a heavy neut - same pricetag
- PG/CPU issues on a ship with a pretty fixed amount of ressources used due to eight launchers
- outperformed in it's role by a cerberus, THIS hard
- Podla'ing and you can barely OH your highs to burst something into the ground, 1min of heat with thermo V is followed by 5mins of repairing.

It's a navy ship. It should be significantly better at a chosen role than it's t1-counterpart at its own task. For the navy drake, that task should be anything related to screening and skirmishing, concrete as example appropriate mass, damage-output, a rack of highslots allowing it to excel at skirmishing (ideally med neut) and PG/CPU to back up atleast a conventional fit without the need to use genos, slot-6-imps or even rigs.


Feel free to discuss, but that's my opinion on the *Navy Drake Dilemma*

The Navy Drake was designed to be a reincarnation of the old PODLA Drake, due mostly to the HML nerf. Navy Drakes can fulfill this role well to an extent, but even if it was the perfect old PODLA Drake, it would be underwhelming in today's meta, which revolves around very fast nanoing ships with good projection and large engagement envelopes. The navy Drake only fills one of those requirements: projection. For less isk, you can buy an Ishtar, which fits cleanly into the meta and outperforms the Navy Drake in nearly every way.

Problem with the Navy Drake is that CCP downgraded the regular Drake when they rebalanced the battle cruisers because the regular Drake was too powerful. And with the introduction of the Navy Drake they didn't want to offset that balance again to the old situation.

My 2c...

Rigors work wonders.

the navy drake when shooting cruisers does indeed out dps the drake every time given the same fit however the same is true in reverse when shooting battle cruisers on top of that, given the fact that the navy drake has 8 launchers, its fitting is actually worse then the drake
the navy drake is not able to be fit the same effectively makeing its ehp slightly less then that of the drake (mwd dual meta 4 mse does not work on the navy drake with either HM or HAM) if one wants to not leave a med slots empty

when navy battle cruiser revisit comes around I could see a buff done this way
the navy drake fitting buffed to 1000 base PG and 600 base CPU giving it the same edge in fitting space other navy BC have over their t1 counterpart this would allow it to fit a full t2 cookie cutter buffer tank with HM or HAM

[Drake Navy Issue, New Setup 1 copy 1]
Damage Control II (meta 4 for HM fit)
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Warp Disruptor II

Heavy (Assault) Missile Launcher II x8

Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

changing the missile exp radius bonus on the navy drake for a 5% damage bonus would give it 10 effective launchers reducing the dps against cruisers and smaller slightly but giving it more dps then the drake with 9 effective launchers
this however would make it more powerful then the normal drake was pre HM, drake and resist bonus nerf
70km vs 75old, 500dps vs 462old(with HM), same 102k ehp(average resist like eft does it ) and faster though lower resists so less effective RR
even if it was a kin only damage bonus it would be very likely too powerful

the speed difference while indeed not very significant is the only instance where a navy bc is faster then its t1 counterpart so I don't think it needs buffing

in tye sense of caldari navy vessels they just aren't worth flying at all. RNI for pve content and hookbill for pvp if you wish.

RNI is quickly superceded by the golem. hookbill is only an option not a best case like hawk any meta 1 merlin fit.

Navy caracal and drake aren't worth a crap. They need to be put back in the cooker for a while. What they come out like who knows but at least make them worth the cost. I personally would give all caldari navy ships the 10/5/5/5 damage bonus treatment and then seperate across hulls by either damage application or kiting ability.

If this was the case then why did CCP troll us with the Fleet Hurricane? It's just the old supposedly OP Cane with ugly camo skin at 2.5x the cost of the (neutered) standard version. Is the much higher cost supposed to offer balance? Didn't CCP claim they learned their lesson about balance via cost after supercaps proliferated?

Yes, there's always a tradeoff. I have - it's a "neat" experiment, but with zero bonuses to light missiles there's absolutely no point.


Give the standard Drake a 25% rate of fire bonus instead (along the lines of the Raven) - problem solved (The Navy Drake can be left with the explosion radius bonus). Also extend the ROF bonus on the Drake to RLMLs and the missile velocity bonus on the Navy Drake to RLMLs.

Truthfully, I'm not really a fan of either. Not when T3 or HACs run circles around these. They should really be hitting for around 100-200 more DPS with a bit more hull, armor and shields.

100 more PG. Problem solved.