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Im Still on board with the Sub Cap DCU group, it is a damage mod, should stay a low slot, but with the sub cap dcu, your drones would do decent damage for PvP, making your target choose between killing your ship and hope to survive or kill your drones and lower your dps first, giving you extra ehp of the sort, which means you can lose a tank mod or two for edas

Considering drones get extra cap usage/needs to reload faster(not at all, actually) with all the balancing of travel time, can be destroyed, sentry drones are immobile etc, 19% seems to be a v.good number, slightly lower than normal t2 dmg mods and it makes the module worth using on drone boats.

Thanks alot CCP , finally some drone love and a drone damage mod is the best thing you could give us!

well the item has been buffed again, to 15% bonus damage and 27 CPU for tech 1 and 19% damage and 32 CPU for tech 2, just so you guys know.

I'm sorry but I just don't get your point.
Who "had mentioned" and what does it have to do with the fact that it is an indirect buff to drone Proteus ( as I stated in my post ) ?

Actually, in retrospect, this thing shouldn't be in a lowslot at all. It should be in a highslot.

Yes, that seems like a no brainer.

There are way more drone boats besides the Dominix. Saying that sacrificing some utility for a drone boat is a sacrifice for a high doesn't even make sense to me either. By making it a high drone users could actually choose to forgo guns and why shouldn't they be able to? They train months and months to get the skills needed to do this. No offense, but are you afraid of loosing some tractor beams for level 4s?

Also dropping one tanking mod to add one drone damage mod is not what most people are after. Most people excited about this want to put as many in these on their ship as possible and I'm not sure why CCP thinks that would be OP'ed; they would drop guns to do so.

What this will actually translate to is that people will be even more prone to skip armor tanks in favor of shield tanks to make use of those lows and that shouldn't be something that is encouraged by CCP. Believe it or not, I've already come up with an Ishtar fit that has an amazing ACTIVE shield tank (VS guristas and serps), and can reasonably fit 3 Drone damage mods.

This being said I'm still tickled that CCP is throwing us a bone, but concerned that to get the most out of it I need to grab some shield mods. Also for an Ishtar or Gila using up those lows in combination with the CPU requirements is just silly as CPU mods are lows, not just tank...

Still happy with what I'm seeing though and if need be I'll enjoy my new ActiveWTFShieldtar with great drone dps.

Alright, another Mal post~

The 32tf, 19% Damage is a wonderful change compared to the 35/15 the module was prior. Having run the numbers on a variety of fits, and tested them out on Practice on Sisi, I can broadly conclude that the module is now in a pretty damn good place.

TLDR: I would not mind either seeing slightly more CPU drop, or a corresponding %HP bonus tacked on, but if the module were to go live as it is right now, I would have no real complaints.

Starting with the Drone-Gun Boats: The DDA (Extrinsic was dropped for Drone, changing the resulting acronym) *generally* provides less DPS gain than a comparative magstab does. The numbers are pretty close though, and it really comes down to the particular fit on how close the two are to one another. Full neutron gank Domis are definitely going to prefer MFS, and that's just fine - you are completely bending the fitting around to stick a full rack of Neutron blasters on - for the DDA to provide more DPS there would be odd.

On the other hand, more reasonable fits such as an Electron, or Electron/Ion mix, tend to be pretty close to within one another. That seems like a fair tradeoff to me, given that the DDA is benefiting a potentially wide range of different drones with a variety of combat profiles, whereas the MFS are *only* useful on the large blasters, which require large targets and close range to reliably hit. You can make a strong argument for DDA, or DDA/MFS splits on these fits, and that is a totally fine place for it to be.

The Rattlesnake is a ship that has always wanted these modules; Indeed, it would have gobbled them up even with the original 40tf/12% stats, due to the vastly mismatched damage source drones represent on that ship compared to it's potential missile DPS. The 19% DDA put's the rattlesnake - finally - onto a ship worth taking note of past lul-tank fits.

Gila and Ishtar are a lot harder to analyze than pretty much any other ship. Their CPU is horrible, and that makes finding the room for these 32tf modules a real fight in the opportunity cost department. The 15%, 35tf modules were, broadly speaking, not really worth the tradeoffs. The best way to get them on was to sacrifice HML or Railguns, at which point you were often at a wash on total DPS output. With the slightly lower CPU, and slightly higher Damage, that is no longer the case, and indeed fits with the highslot weapon systems intact can be made while fitting DDAs in the lows. Both the Gila and Ishtar get pretty thin when you shove all that on, but the resulting damage gains are totally worth it. This represents a significant boost to these ships assuming high pilot SP and good fitting design choices - you can really screw up your ship if you aren't careful.

The Curse and Pilgrim are both somewhat ambivalent about these modules. The Curse in particular really needs both nanos and CPRs to maintain its core ship functions (namely, running away and neuting things), and the DDA cuts into those options. The DDA do offer the Curse roughly another 100dps, which is nice for solo Curse fits, but soloing in a curse is tough sense you are a curse and nobody wants to fight you. I don't really see DDA - regardless of any %value - being a terribly valuable for most curse fits.

The Pilgrim really likes the DDA, as it is a solo-boat with the crippling problem of very bad time-to-kill values. The old 15% DDA value was too low to take it over say, a blaster (in some ways its easier to trade a singular neut on the pilgrim than any of its tank), but at 19% that isn't a concern. Pilgrims will have to carefully balance their tank vs. gank now, but its a fitting decision they will love to finally make. The new and improved TDs should help with this as well, but until they actually work on Sisi you can't test them vs. missile boats (and lets be honest - 90% of a Pilgrim's targets will wind up being missile boats).


I have not tested these mods on the drone frigates, mainly because I hate flying frigates, and because the frigates by-and-large don't have the slots or fitting for them. Ishkurs get equal DPS from their blasters as Hobgoblins (making MFS probably a better choice), and Worms have terrible fitting problems that constrain their options (although much like the rattlesnake, it desperately desires those DDA to increase its anemic DPS). In general, I don't see a whole lot of frigates fitting these unless they go for some sort of shield standoff fit.

"Also if it is a high mod it would be a clear nerf for carriers as they'd have to choose between drone control units and the drone damage amp."

It's my understanding that these mods do not affect fighter damage?

Either way, what's done is done and I appreciate the attention they are giving drone boats. They have implied that this module is not the only thing they are doing to remedy the situation.

Do you want my honest to goodness truth? I just want them to be highs because.... IT WILL SERVE ME. AHAHAHAHAHHA

Not only it has lower resulting output than 10/10.5% weapon modules - it now has stacking penalty.

Not to mention it's semi-useless in low slot for armor boats in PvE. I don't understand why CCP want this to be in low slot unless they planning to add +1 drone module for hi-slot soon. Though "soon" may refer to 2015th and it could be much better to see this module in hi-slots and without stacking penalties (weapons doesn't have stacking penalty)...