Ships & Modules

Well personally when using Marauders I find I usually squeeze an RR module on them so salavger drones might be a slight buff for Marauders sometimes ...

Setting that aside though as a personal flavor item, let me move on to the OP's question. Other threads have come and gone about a boost to Marauders to put them ahead of piwat BSs for pve (at least missioning). It was always difficult to find a balanced solution.

SHORT ANSWER
The direct answer to OPs question would be add to the description "100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams and effectiveness of salvaging drones".

LONG (better?) ANSWER
Might be a chance to finally introduce the point defence weapon many people have discussed for the past .... oh... 7 years...
options:
(a) a weapon system delivering S class weapons with say 70 dps per high slot. Marauders could fit 2 and only Marauders at introduction. Or make it so high in fitting only capitals could fit them (details TBC) and grant Marauders a bonus to fitting 2 of them.
(b) give Marauders an addtiional 2 turret slots that only fit S turrets and grant them a 300% bonus to the effectiveness of S turrets equiped in those two slots. Tweak with the percentage so they effectively get, say with 2x150II rails, 80-120 dps from these two S turrets.

The point of this would be a ship that can shoot main guns and secondary guns taking out main npc targets and support npc targets at the same time without using their drones. They could benefit form this either by using salvager drones while killing support with point defence guns or by using usual combat drones and gaining an overall 100 dps advantage (if you look at the dps of a Kronos and Vindicator overall the extra 100 is not a gamebreaking advantage)

How to prevent this from making them better at pvp? Well in theory they can't pvp cause of sensor strength as they diaf when they meet a dps ship and a griffin with multispecs or something ... this would still be equally valid... somewhat.

tl;dr
+ Marauders real Kings of PvE in the BS class finally. Marauders in Incursions (long overdue tbh)
- Point defence weapon systems is Pandora's box for some and something that needs to be done very very carefully for all.

How salvage drones will affect Marauders? Not at all. We live in the age of the Noctis. There is simply no situation where staying and salvaging is more profitable than simply moving on and killing more rats/running more missions.

Unless if you are in a Marauder and can get 80% of the BS cans without delaying the mission completon time ...

There is a reason why when you mission in a Marauder in a hub people do not come after your cans...

You reminded me now of a time when level 4 missions would spawn pirate invasions or massive attack (I think it was one of the two... or something similar) 50-80 Kms above system gates... People killed your rats, your rats killed traffic sometimes if you dragged them towards the gate and warped off (remember no warp to 0 then ... a lot of traffic was 15km travel to gate)... fun times :D

^QFT

Call me skeptical. At least the way I run missions, you're losing money every time you return to station, leave your combat ship and begin flying around in a Noctis, because that's time you aren't spending doing additional combat missions. I tend to blitz missions with 2 accounts and don't bother salvaging/looting at all, but if I was going to, dual Marauders would be the way to do it. You don't even need to loot/salvage every single wreck in a mission with a Marauder, but you can just aim for the battleship wrecks and do the others as time permits. That way, you don't ever have any downtime where you aren't killing rats/completing missions.

On the other hand, if you leave the mission and pick up your Noctis, you're incurring additional travel time and while you loot/salvage faster, you aren't earning any bounties or mission rewards (LP being the big one) while doing it. If you want to salvage, you're much better off doing it with marauders and just doing what you can on the go.

My argument is that using a BS pilot to loot and salvage is a waste of time. Even two Marauders would be outperformed by a five day old Noctis pilot. And would be much better off just running another mission.

You honestly believe that 2 marauders is going to be outperformed by a faction BS and a noctis. Oh man, look how stupid you are.

-Liang

Had a conversation about this very subject while missioning earlier.

Conclusions:
- Salvage drones won't make marauders any more obsolete than the Noctis already did.
- It's a BS with half the ammo usage, higher resists, and a better tank. It's not obsolete.
- UTILITY HIGHSLOTS. Drone modules. An auto-targeter. Anything you waaant.

Why do you think the faction hulls cost +1bil ..... Because they are actually wanted.



Marauders just have high buildcost.

Hmmm, I would potentially argue this point. I went from rattlesnake/noctis combo to rattlesnake/paladin. The added dps is quite a boon while nothing is outside of range for the Paladins tractors. However, I would imagine a nightmare/noctis combo would perform better though. A rattlesnake/paladin would be a better AFK option however with assigning its drones to the rattlesnake. and perma running its tank while only targeting bs's when needed.

A much larger isk investment in the 2nd ship however as well as an increase in skill point training time.