Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drone balancing is extremely simple.

The only imbalanced drone is the sentry drone.
It:
* projects a great deal of firepower
* at fantastic ranges
* instantaneously
* with the locking time of a frigate (when used with a bunny) and,
* lands damage simultaneously with all other sentries, creating an unholy, unstoppable alpha-strike.

Simply remove sentry drones. Not one player in Eve will mourn their loss.

I see what you're trying to achieve, which is some sort of parity with other weapons systems.

My view is somewhat tangential to yours - I enjoy drones because they provide an asymmetric complement to gunnery and missiles.

For example, when in a skirmish it is often the case that the fleet's fire power is concentrated on one ship - and then a falcon or curse turns up.

It's often expedient to drive off this force-multiplying (but quite weak) threat by ordering the fleet to redirect drones to him, while keeping gunnery pressure on the primary.

The drone response to this ship can be ECM, dampeners or DPS - all are valid and effective. All you want to do is neutralise his effectiveness while continuing to take down the existential threat of a damage dealer or logistics ship.

Prior to the horrid changes to the ishtar and dominix and the advent of the ill-advised drone damage amplifier, this was the way of things - main DPS was provided by guns and missile while supplemental capability was filled in by drones.

The combination of range-bonused drone hulls (defeating the original limitations of sentries) and drone damage amps (turning drones into a primary weapons system) has literally changed the game, and not for the better.

Previously the advantage was with skirmishers - skilful individualists. Now it is with the ishtar drop-and-scarper drone bunny crowd.

The Dominix is not the force that the Ishtar turned out to be because of the existential threat of bomber wings, which since being immune from de-cloaking each other, are vastly overpowered when used against a stationary fleet.

Drones are not the problem - they used to work well. The problem is with:

* drone damage amps

* drone range bonuses on hulls

* (and because of the above, causing drone fleets to want to sit still) - bomber decloak immunity

roll back the clock on these changes and all will be good with Eve again.

*Knock knock*

Who's there?

Technological limitations of 2015's standards on a single server based already occupied with assets that belong to people. The last instances of CCP touching the server for a day ended in chaos. Remember when one CCP employee had coffee near the server? Or the time they tried upgrading and moving it?

Yeek...

see above - remove drone damage amps and the superdrone problem goes away. drone boats would of course need their gunnery bonuses (and missing high slot) back.

Donnachadh, thanks for your reply. I seem to have explained myself poorly. Drone Control Channels would be a ship attribute just like number of low slots and NOT able to be increased or decreased by skills. Therefore PG&CPU are not a consideration because the Drone Control Channels, just like Turret Hardpoints, are native to the hull. I hope that clears things up. I'm sorry I wasn't clear initially, I'll change the op to reflect your queries. Many thanks

Thanks for the link. In my experience VoC are patient and innovative, and a pleasure to fight.

The video shows a nice use of EV drones which has been made possible because there was only one logi ship (as per the rules) per side. This is why it surprised the commentators. In real fights they are almost never useful enough to warrant fielding.

In reality, fleets involving only one logistics per side are rare. In w-space (and I presume much of null) the norm is multiple cap-chaining guardians, which would shrug off the EV drones easily.

Cap chains are of course more susceptible to damps or ecm (if it's going to be drones, then ECM - the sensor damp drones are awful).

Having said that, not many people carry smartbombs these days (since missiles are no longer ubiquitous and the ones that are used now travel much faster than they used to, smart-bomb firewalls are no longer a thing) so it might be a useful strategy to pack a flight of EV-600s into a spare corner of a large amarr drone bay, in case you do meet an AF fleet backed by a lone scimitar.

Packing a combat utility drone into the drone bay of a ship which gets a drone damage bonus, or does its damage primarily through drones is of course a losing strategy (for example a curse with ECM drones would be about as dangerous as a pet rabbit).

Call me old fashioned, but the gallente back-story involves the use of high-damage, short range blasters backed up with flights of drones to give the ships more capability than merely being limpet mines. The utility drones effectively allowed a change of nuance without a refit.

Indeed, until the maximum drone limit was introduced it would have made sense to mix combat and combat-utility drones in a dominix's drone bay - you could field them all at once.

But then drone numbers were limited to save server bandwidth and ships with large drone bays given drone damage bonuses to compensate - except CCP forgot to also bonus the combat utility drones at the same time... which led to less diversity in drone choice for gallante pilots - why would you give up 1.5 ogre IIs for 1 EV-900?

Now that drone damage amps have appeared the choice is even narrower - no dominix would ever field an ECM or EV or SW drone - you'd lose way too much DPS for the small utility gained from the drone. In any case the dominix is no longer a viable hull to which to fit a gun - there are no bonuses for it, so why even get into gunnery range?

In my view this was all a shame. Combat utility drones used to have a combat utility function when used on drone ships. This utility was a complement to the main damage system - the blaster. Now, if you have a bonused drone bay you're probably best off shield-tanking your ship and fitting as many drone damage mods and sentry drones as possible.

The drone damage mod has increased the value of specialisation at the expense of diversity. The outcome is the nano-bouncer ishtar. Equipped with 1 target painter each, 3 of these can systematically reduce even quite a large fleet to dust while enduring almost no risk - it's the absolute antithesis of gallante warfare, and totally boring for everyone other than the ishtar pilots.

Now to cover your hope that drones should be a primary weapon:

Each race already had a primary and secondary weapon of choice:
caldari: missiles and hybrids
amarr: lasers and neuts
minmatar: autocannons and missiles
gallente: hybrids and... drones.

There is no need for another primary weapons system.

The current (mangled) list would look more like this:
caldari: not used
amarr: lasers or (neuts and drones)
minmatar: still projectiles and (maybe) missiles (but more likely a neut)
gallente: sentry drones and nothing else

The development of the drone damage amp has been a failed experiment which has harmed the game. That's ok - the game is as much a sandbox for the devs as it is for us. But it's time to realise the mistake, correct it and try a new evolution - ideally one which does not break the lore.

Having corrected the error, then by all means look at innovative new ways to use drones... or don't. Why not use the time to carefully balance the finer points of the competing doctrines so that ship fitting and selection diversity is increased? Wouldn't that be more fun and interesting?

Make Heavies use 20MB bandwidth, and Sentries use 25MB.

Reduce medium-rigged ship bandwidth by appropriate amounts.

CCP has already set a precedent with the Gecko: it uses 50MB.