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People will rant at me for spilling the beans, but drifters? A bad joke now. We really got to do something about the incursions. Will sum up. It started with people being able to take less damage and finding smaller ships with less ehp lasted longer. Well finally, I did some testing on Sisi. Something I usually never do for content.

How to beat drifters?

1. Get ship with a 40m sig radius or less.
2. Warp unfit ship in to bait them to warp in
3. Warp in condor with only missiles fit.
4. Do not move, and just keep firing. The drifters cannot hit you. At all. Clear any influx without issue.

Want to do it quicker? Grab the minmi bomber.

I am going to put this up now. Mega boss and burner mission style npcs where it is all either rock paper scissors, or minmaxing? Majority of gamers dislike that play. It is boring fast. How do I say to fix this CCP?

Simple, reduce the number of drifters in all sites by like half. At the eight person fleet size for moderate influxes, have three drifters. Increase their orbit range, but drop tracking a bit. Drop drifter speed a bit.

What this does is if you warp in on small sig, they cannot hit. So small ships can turn and burn, relying on their speed, not the drifters speed to avoid tracking.

This also means that the more brick style of play is a little valid as well. At this time, a drifter incursion is a complete loss. If they hit the frigs with a tracking boost, then no small ship will be usable. Trying to evade tracking with that number of drifters on fields is impossible. There will always be one at zero angular, and a frigate is impossible to take even one hit. Therefore a tracking boost eliminates a whole potential gameplay.

With the high numbers, a ship that can take the hits to allow logistics use has a high probability of dying by doomsday. Reward to cost of these ships means that drifters are nothing but a cash sink. So lets look at what this means.

There are three groups of people who would do these sites.

1. Farming style pve players. Wouldn't do it cause L3 missions earn more (if the zero velocity frig is fixed by buffing tracking/resolution)

2. Lore people. They are most likely to do the counter drifter stuff for roleplay, but only so long til burnout.

3. Non pve people displaced. Face it. I would just move to another system. Drifters in amarr? Caldari space looks nice. A few might counter, but the time and isk loss eventually also would reach burnout.


Ergo CCP, increase the orbit range a bit, drop the damage out put a bit from their regular weapons and half the number of drifters in the influx. Change reward to be more LP to allow incursion peeps to bling using their LP. Yes, it will drop value of amarr LP, but it still would be a non isk influx which would also reduce the issue they are having with incursions being a money farm. In fact, most rewards should be LP over isk imo... talk for another day.

EDIT: Summary. The most effective direction to take it from a player's perspective would be to have no one way of winning. Hence allow speed tank, or logi tank to be viable alternatives. When you hit the larger influxes, this will be even more apparent. Fleet of bombers clearing critical influxes zero losses without even turning on engines? Money in the bank.

EDIT 2: Drop it down even more drifters, add some sleeper and stuff to make a more diverse fleet composition important. That way there are frigs as hazard to frigs, which means need both speed for drifters and the cruisers/etc for nimble ships.

Well, that is the thing, offer both to be viable is best tactic with disadvantages on either side. Right now, you don't even need to kite.

In drifter influx, drifter kite for you!

I'm not sure I get the solo part ... So you warp in, get killed, warp pod out, get condor, warp in, kill drifters?

You are missing the point, Markus, but first off 'Good Job' to finding out how to run Drifter Incursions. Welcome to the club!

The point is not to solo the Drifter Incursions, but to do them as a fleet, or else will you not get any payout. So you are obviously not quite done yet... The actual problems start when you coordinate a fleet of players to clear a site in a time fast enough to be competitive to other fleets. As you have already realized can these sites be cleared with only frigates and therefore will you have to face much more competition than compared to Sansha Incursions. At this point will FCs and pilots start taking risks, not just stupid ones but calculated ones, and this is where the Drifters come in: any mistake you or your fleet makes results very fast in a ship loss or simply no payout.

To give you an example of how deep the rabbit hole goes... Imagine you are in a contest with another fleet and one of your ships is taking the aggro. What will happen when the other fleet starts webbing one of the Drifters or only bumps them? ... Well, that Drifter will nuke your ship of the field, because its turrets can suddenly track your ship again.

A fleet of cheap T1 frigates may then not clear a site as fast as one with T2 frigates, pirate frigates and T3 destroyers, but they can risk losing a ship much more than others. So you are not done yet with Drifter Incursions. It is much like playing with fire or Russian Roulette than just running site after site for ISKs.

I am not even sure if I like all the possibilities. There is so much room for grief-play... it is going to rain tears and will cause so much aggravated drama.

No, I still think that you do miss the point. You expect to get beaten by the game's AI like a chess player gets beaten by the AI of a chess computer, but this is never going to happen in an MMO. The most dangerous AI in any MMO is and always will be the intelligence of other players. Drifters simply deal a lot of damage, but that's it.

Let me know if you want a discussion or if all you want to say is "Look, I can solo this, therefore it is stupid."

It is not a glitch. It is their weakness, which we are supposed to exploit. Drifter battleships fly too fast for their own good and then cannot track very small ships that sit still. This is all. Other than this did Drifters destroy everything we threw at them. Only more perfect than Drifters is the "Self Destruct..."-option.

Anyhow, for players to complete a Drifter Incursion does it need to have a weakness. It is the one thing you should have expected to find when you started doing Drifter Incursions. It may only not be the kind of weakness you thought it would be. What did you expect to find? A clone of the Sansha Incursion mechanic?

Clearly, this has got to be a rhetorical question. I will avoid answering it and will leave you to your complaints


Speaking of tactics, anything you do that has to do with killing NPCs will become a grind eventually. It is unavoidable. Sansha Incursions do already offer a range of tactics that can be applied. From dropping ore, to hacking, to rescuing civilians or dropping mtacs. And look what the fleets make of it? They all try to avoid the more complicated sites whenever they can. And if it wasn't so would CCP only get to hear more complaints. If this is all too easy for you and not difficult enough then you can increase the difficulty by fighting actual players in low- and null-sec, and, at the same time run Incursions, too!

High risk however is what you do get with Drifters. The smart play is what comes next and what we will need to figure out. This is what I was hoping to find in this discussion.

Good luck!

Quite true. The drifters are not being agressive on TQ including with the amarr navy. I did have a counter to that when I did TQ testing. it was to make use of target paint condors to bait them into the warp in. Without the aggression, I was able to burn to the wormhole though and that worked as well if agressed there. Is why on the drifter kill report, will see a stack of condors dead with just a painter. Not perfect as I was testing in a moderate, but sig reduced and in critical, that is a few condors, that are half a mil a piece to get 20m a person site. there is chance of lucky hits, but if you have the link, that is dramatically reduced. More with booster and insanely low if you got halos.

The blap is because they are shooting without the angular. So need to be in a position so that they are at angular while they are locking, so when they open fire, are at max tracking difficulty.

https://zkillboard.com/character/731832753/

The condors there are from my testing. First few were from burning, then from baiting to warp in. After that, took a couple tries, but you can see the time difference between last two. That is when I got them into a successful orbit. So minus a few of them, that would be time spent getting them aggroed with a reshipping on the site beacon. Each pop would go back for dps. Once control achieved, leave that one locked there, rest in dps and blap. In DPS built small sig, the site would be but a quick burst to clear. Two per drifter in high damage, and done right fast.

Ive taken interest into drifters since they came out, and farmed them around jove wormholes when we could sell the element for 12-13m a piece about a year ago.

I noticed this thread, and found it interesting.

So I tried this, with halo set + booster + dramiel and just the TP. 22m sig radius.

On Sisi, I popped after 20 sec. So something has changed ?

Ive noticed the new logi frigates, especially the gallente one, have 4% lowered sig radius per skill level.
I guess 2 of these can probably sig tank with remote reps and cap transfer between themselves in these sites.!
gotta try that on sisi.