Missions & Complexes

Depends which drones u use, and how high your skills are. Sentries are great, heavies may become worthwhile in summer expansion, small and mediums work great as long as u dont have elite rats on the field. i personally avoid using these as i cant manage them good enough.

Been useing hobgob/ogre IIs, skills aren't maxed out but still have 1.6mil in drones, maybe ill look into sentries

True be told, I've just been stocking my bay with t1 hobs, letting them die, and launching more.

I usually just take a fly of light drones with me to take down frigs that get under my tracking and fill whatever is left with sentry drones. Of course that doesn't work when you need to stay mobile. Unless they're a main weapon system, drones are merely utility and not a real source of DPS, imho.

When CCP first changed NPC's to the Sleeper AI, all NPC's were targeting Drones and basically made Player Drone Boats un-usable. After a little while CCP changed the NPC aggro towards Drones to be based more on size. Also it seems that the NPC's will concentrate their fire on one specific drone at a time. I might be wrong and I'm sure there's probably more to it than this but to my understanding this is the basic ratio:

NPC regular Frigates, Destroyers and their Elite class versions will target Light and larger Drones.

NPC Elite class Frigates, Elite class Destroyers, regular Cruisers and their Elite class version will target Medium and larger Drones.

NPC Elite class Cruisers, regular Battlecruisers, Battleships and their Elite class version will target Heavy and larger Drones.

I think all NPC ship classes will attack Sentry Drones.

Anyway, in my experience I've found that if I destroy all NPC Frigates, Destroyers and Cruisers first before launching Drones, the larger class NPC's will not aggro on them. However, if there's a spawn or another group within the pocket, all NPC Frigates, Destroyers and Cruisers will aggro on the Drones. When I recall the Drones, the new spawn will switch aggro to my ship. In the case of the other group within the pocket, those NPC's will return to their original location.

If my ship is webbed and scrammed by a close orbiting NPC Frigate and I can't hit it with my autocannons, then the Drones come out and take care of the EWAR NPC's. I keep watch on the Drones and recall each individual Drone when it starts taking Armor damage.


DMC

NPC's will fire at either you or your drones based on which is a greater threat (modified by the size of drones relative to the NPC in question as an earlier poster stated).

They do however prioritize ewar, so if you use a target painter that will not only help your drones tracking and damage application, it will also take a load of aggro off your drones.

If you are using sentries another approach is to remote rep your drones and use them as your tank.

I found that if there are any destroyers on the field, then your drones will be massacred.

Take out all the small crosses first, before deploying drones.

If you do need to deploy drones, just make sure there aren't any dessi's left.

Some cruisers can hit drones quite well, so either way, you'll need to micromanage them.

Good luck!!

I found when I got to lvl 4s with my drone boats, I gave up and went back to turrets. Sure, I had great paper "DPS" but constantly pulling them in and out effectively cut the DPS in half.

I'll used Drones on my turret BS's for any frigates that manage to get under my guns. Usually doesn't happen unless I'm not paying attention and I'm sitting on a spawn point, but they are valuable then. Otherwise, I just use the salvage drones. Once I've cleared the field of everything but the BS's, I'll pull the lights in and deploy the salvage drones by my MTU and let them start cleaning up sooner so they are wrapping up about the time I'm done with the last BS.

I appreciate everyone taking the time to answer my question, glad I'm not losing my mind.

The reoccurring answer i'm seeing on here is that with a recent patch, drone aggro is different and frigs/dessies are going to be targeting your drones no matter what. A lot of the advice here is "just put them out after those are dead" .. that's all great and dandy but my cruise Golem obviously has the hardest time applying damage to just those ships. Hence in the past I would use drones on the small ships while I cleaned up the BCs/BSs

I may mess around with sentries and I may play around with the idea of expendable T1s with an emergency T2 fleet.

Has anyone at CCP ever addressed this issue post patch? I understand the whole AFK drone boats = bad, but this seems like an overzealous fix that renders drones useless

Three target painters and two rigor rigs on a Golem mean most frigates die with one shot.

The obvious fix would have been to remove the "Aggressive" option but it's CCP