Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Best counter to drones? Drones.
I'm pretty sure a large majority of ships have at least some drone bay, and frigates are great against them with a web or 2. And good without.

Since when was the last time you reactively fitted a smartbomb onto your frig in the middle of space because of a drone boat? Since when did shooting drones become an effective tactic against T2 drones with your tracking issues because of their close orbit, while they can just spam out additional drones to replace losses, while you're taking 500-1000 damage a volley from their drones?

Since when have you ever played EvE if you think shooting drones down is a viable alternative? I hear this "shoot the drone" theorycraft so often, where's some youtube videos of a frigate actually successfully shooting down drones from droneboats rather than dying horribly in a fire?

just make ecm work against drones ..you jam the mothership and the drones go idle

They could just give smartbombs a little buff instead. Reducing their activation cycle by 1 or 2 seconds would increase their DPS and make them more useful anti-drone weapons.

There's no point making a new anti-drone weapon when we already have one. If people aren't using it then maybe it does need a little buff.

LOL

So yes, it is in fact an entirely different module, with the express purpose of countering drones.

Good God man.

Pretty sure a Smart Bomb covers this...

It doesn't have to counter 5. To my knowledge the only frigates that can use 5 drones are the Tristan and Ishkur, which are specially designed to use drones. Every other ship that can use 5 drones is a cruiser hull or better. Cruisers should be able to easily kill a frigate, so I don't see the problem. In fairness of keeping frigates balanced with each other I could maybe see nerfing the Tristan to 20 bandwidth if it's such a big deal, but I don't think it is.

I don't think a single frigate should be able to cripple a vexor in a fight using a magical anti-drone gun. This idea gets -1 from me.

If you are coming up against a drones ship that can fly full squads of either lights or mediums than you are fighting a cruiser class vessel in a frigate, I wonder how much that has to do with the outcome. I know this for fact because the Ishkur and Tristan only have 25 band width which would only get you 2 medium drones and neither of them have enough drone bay for 2 full squads of lights much less a full squad of lights and one of mediums.



Again I say no to nerfing the damage output from drones. As I stated after nearly 5 years in the game drones are just now becoming a viable alternative for many PvE activities. If they are OP, and still do not believe they are then add buffs to other segments of the game. Maybe increase resistances, base tank abilities or some other stats for the non-dedicated drones ships. And I reject the argument about EVE being a PvP game so that is all that matters, we PvE folks deserve some love once in a while. And after nerfing the usefulness of the Rattlesnake as a PvE ship for some god only knows what PvP related reason they need to leave our drones alone thank you.

Oh and you really need to go back and study drones before you complain any further about them, you see drones do not receive a bonus to tracking speeds from the ship, velocities yes, but not tracking.




Says you, I have about 4 years worth of sparing with non-drones pilots that says otherwise, and yes I am smart enough to know the differences between our sparring into structure between friends and real PvP fights till someone goes pop.

In real PvP action my son and 6 of his friends I know that play the PvP side of this game have never lost a true one on one fight with a drones boat, so maybe there is a trick out there that you need to learn yet.

It is 11/16 at 5:00 in the afternoon here on the west coast of the US and a simple look at the top ten killers on the Battle Clinic kill board says you are wrong as well. Of those only 3 of them have more than 5 kills using a drones ship. Add in the pilot with 3 kills in an Ishtar and you get 4 of the top 10 that even fly drones ships. Even for those 4 characters the kills using drones ships are a very small portion of their totals. If drones are so OP how come the top ten killers on the Battle Clinic board are not using them?

So you may be tempted to argue that those are solo kills and you are talking about fleet engagement. My response to that is to ask the simple question, are the drones truly OP or just OP in the fleet engagements that you have been in?

And last is the most obvious of all, if drones are so OP why are you complaining about them instead of joining the party and using them?

EDIT: This post deviates a bit from the main topic of the thread, just a warning.

The idea of tracking disruption/sensor dampening/target jamming applying to drones is interesting, although that may open the door to letting tracking disruption affect missiles.

On the point of that, AFAIK these are how drones/turrets/missiles stand in terms of modules (not rigs) affecting their range / damage application

Turrets:
-Tracking Computer [Requires Medium Power Slot] - Active module, hence can be loaded with scripts
-Tracking Enhancer [Requires Low Power Slot] - Passive Module, hence cannot be loaded with scripts.
-Is affected by tracking disruption

Drones:
-Omni-directional Tracking Computer [Medium Power Slot] - Active module
-Omni-directional Tracking Enhancer [Low Power Slot] - Passive module

-Targeting drones specifically may allow tracking disruption to affect them, never tried.

Missiles:
...nowt, really. No modules increase their flight velocity, flight time, explosion radius or explosion velocity, and consequentially no e-war affects these attributes either.

---

One idea would be to merge the two tracking computers/enhancers so when used they both buff your ship's tracking and that of your drone's. This might lead to balancing issues though. Anyway this would then allow for the logical progression of tracking disruption affecting both a ship's turrets and the ship's drones. And similarly for remote tracking computers.

Likewise, you could consider having a sensor booster affect your drones too, likewise sensor damps and remote sensor boosters targetted on your ship hull would affect your drones.

Would you consider the same with ECM/ECCM? This is where I think the idea begins to fall apart. One idea mentioned was when jammed out you lose your bandwidth, but the implications of that were already mentioned. Two variants of the same idea occur to me.

A:
When your ship hull gets hit by ECM, your drones react as if they were hit by the ECM too - and are all treated individually in terms of jamming, i.e. your ship itself might remain unjammed, but two of your five bouncers were jammed. Two sub-variants:
A1 - Drones maintain their old sensor strength values
A2 - Drones inherit the ship's sensor strength values (Already sounds like a bad idea given what happens when drones are abbandoned, and this would also screw with combat scanning down drones)
In either case, since the effect of the ECM is shared between the hull and the drones, so would any local/remote ECCM effects.

B: When your ship gets jammed, all drones get jammed.
This already sounds awful, as one of the key issues with ECM is the binary, discrete nature of it - either you jammed, or you ain't. All other e-war has a more continuous function. This variant would even further that on/off problem.

I'm trying to see past my bias in this, as A) I'm a Caldari pilot who'll be trained up enough to sit in a falcon soon, and B) I don't really care much for Ishtars Online.

---

PS: Tried thinking of my responses to the more immediate discussion, nothing I can think of that hasn't already been said.
Drones are incredibly versatile, as you're able to (within limits) adjust your damage type and damage size with enormous ease compared to turret/missile ships. Not to mention drones have no fitting requirements... should this be changed? Personally I don't think so, as it has the chance to detract from the versatility of eve, but yeah... about that Ishtar.... wat do?

This might be because the Tristan is a well balanced and flexible ship, it still gets outdpsed or tanked by most other tech 1 frigates, and because there are a lot of alternate fits available for it.


I don't know why this is relevant, other to allude that you have some weird deep down hatred for drones, I wouldn't trust a newbro to have a good understanding of game mechanics and balance.



As someone who has killed and fought larger ships in a frigate several times, this is basically a trivial thing, and I see nothing wrong with drones as a system having an advantage that makes them unique from other weapon systems.

Also comparing light combat drones to the absolutely broken mess that is RLML is ridiculous.



What do you mean "see drone boats everywhere"? Are you implying that they're a usable weapons platform and that's a bad thing? People spamming ishtars has absolutely nothing to do with combat drones and everything to do with sentry drones.

Also the reason no one uses EWAR drones (which isn't really true but whatever) is that all of them are terrible except the ECM ones (which are still mediocre) and people would rather have DPS than garbage amounts of webs or terrible low amounts of tracking disruption.



Combat drones are kitable and killable, and this is standard operating procedure when fighting against cruisers. I fail to see how it's a problem at all, there are innumerable advantages that cruisers have over frigates and light drones is the least of them. webs, neuts, and RLML are all way more problematic.