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Well if you have drone interfacing 5 and sentry drone interfacing 5 you can already use t2, so at the point you could use them nearly as effective as T2, you can also use T2.

Faction sentry drones are very good but if you lose 25M every time you have to gtfo in a sentry ship in pvp, you might consider skill for T2.

Edit: I even agree that the improvements to faction sentry range are excellent, since with them it finally only comes down to raw dps vs tracking/EHP(and a bit more ISK) if you chose between T2 and faction sentry drones, for a specific task.

Edit2: There might be a reason why I had a lot of suggestions(that where all ignored) during the introduction of faction drones 3 years ago and now CCP actually addressing most of the flaws I pointed out back in the days, that they should be rather a good option compared to T2 drones, depending on what you want to do, instead of becoming pointless the second you can use T2 drones.

there are more than one, just this is the one i came accross on a regular basis

Exactly - with this new patch, the motivation to train from tech1/faction (which is in many cases equal-to or even superior to tech2 sentries, not counting the racial spec skills) to tech2 sentries diminishes greatly.

For a PVP-oriented sentry pilot, there will likely be *zero* motivation to train for tech2 sentries--and for those of us who did train for tech2's, our training time investment has largely gone down the proverbial drain.

This is a point I have tried to articulate repeatedly in this thread.

In other words, by making Faction drones just as good as, if not better, than T2 drones in terms of general performance and accessibility (i.e. skill training time,) CCP has indirectly nerfed the null-sec cartels' shadow CSM's moon goo income by reducing the market for T2 sentry drones.

Who wants to give Dinsdale the good news that CCP is on the side of high-sec?

Too long, didn't read. Rebalance the drones already! .. Oh, this is actually about drone rebalance. Finally! After reading it all, we can however see that the Amarr and Caldari drones won't still have any use - like many have said here already.

Here is my solution suggestion for the regular Amarr/Caldari drone suckage (exactly the same as seller1122's apparently and shares some similarities with Tippia's on page 6):

Amarr/Minmatar light drones share the same stats except for damage type at high speed and low damage end. Caldari and Gallente light drones share their stats similarly at the low speed and high damage end. Repeat the process with medium and heavy drones.

I chose Amarr to pair up with Minmatar, because both target a defense weakness (EM vs most Shields, EX vs most Armor). Caldari was paired with Gallente just because they don't have any especially vulnerable targets and there is nobody else to pair them with.

Pro: All the regular drones would have their use.
Con: Duplicated stats.
.. but at least all the regular drones would have their use. That is not the case with CCP's plan.

Good call, I don't really see any problems with this, other than the possibility of someone training up combat drone operation I and scout drone operation V in order to get the best possible return. I'll probably be doing that on a couple of my alts-in-training, to be honest.

EDIT:

Actually, this does raise an additional question for me - what skill is going to unlock the drone link augmenters after the change?

the most sensible thing to me would probably be moving them to Drone Avionics, they fit that skill's title and bonuses.

Not sure if this is mentioned elsewhere, but seeing the Sentry Damage Rig changed to a Drone Damage rig would make a lot of sense (or merely add a combat drone damage rig).

Before DDA, the Sentry Damage Rig was the only way to increase any drone's dps (limited to sentries of course). Now that drones have similar mods to the other weapons, it would make sense that all combat drones have a similar t2 rig.

edit- Another simple addition would be Drone Implants...

Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, I have Scout Drone Operation V & Combat Drone Operation IV currently. When the expansion goes live I'll have Light & Medium Drone Operation both at V?

Mostly good changes


Now can we have drone AI that isn't composed of a few simple scripts? :P

I also would like conformation on this. I am in the same situation (scout drone op 5, combat drone op 4.)

After the update Ill have light and medium drone op both at 5 and now will suddenly be able to fit the T2 drone link augmenter?

Please confirm. Thanks.