Ships & Modules

You totally got me on Cormorant front. Though in my defense I think that's just because I may have skipped it. Back then destroyers had a rate of fire debuff and I believe I went straight from frigate to cruiser. But that's still 1 out of 6 compared to Gallente 3 out of 6. And unless I'm mistaken, both Minmatar and Amarr are also 6 for 6.

And Imicus is not really a drone boat in a regular sense. Its bonus, if I remember right, is to drone range and scanning/probes. It's neither a combat ship nor a drone boat in the sense that it has a large drone bay, or a variety of drones - it can field and carry 3 unbonused drones. I don't don't see it as a drone boat. Ishkur you could call a drone boat, at least it has a large bay and can field a full flight. Though I am hesitant to call it a true drone boat, as the bonus is only to drone HP, not damage. More than half of its damage will still come from its 3 turrets rather than its 5 light drones. And once turrets are overheated, forget about it.



Hey, I simply followed the Gallente tutorial, made by CCP. Which said if you want to use drones, train Gallente, and Gallente are kings of drones, and drones are their primary weapon system, etc., etc. It was a choice based on information provided to me by CCP at the time. I don't know if that's still the case, but when I started out that's what the tutorial said. And while it's technically at least partially accurate (no other race has more drone boats than Gallente), drones definitely don't measure up to turrets or missiles, not by a long shot.



Uhhuh. And what do you see used more often, in all facets of the game? I don't see drone boats used much, if at all. I see Tengus all over the place, anywhere from missions to plexing to wormholes. I see drakes way more often than I see Myrmidons. And bombers are incredibly common - 90% of Minmatar militia is running L4s in SBs. Not drone boats.

Sure there's REASONS why that is, you listed a lot of them. What I want is to BALANCE things so that all ships are equally good choices.I want all ships to be equally desirable.



Yes, you can buff around it, in a way. You can un-complicate it, and you can change game mechanics for the better. Other MMO developers do this all the time.

Consider Age of Conan, for example. There are ridiculously strong classes in that game, like Bear Shaman. The downside is that it requires considerably more skill to play effectively. But when played like that, it is beastly.

Same could be done for drone boats in EVE. Keep them complicated a hard to master, but once mastered, make them beastly. Problem is, currently there's almost nothing that another ship can't do better, safer or cheaper.

Further, things like hitpoints, commands, redeployment, etc., could all be much better done, without dumbing them down. Like, being able to see your drone's HP without launching it, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Being able to launch a flight with one keypress would be nice too - perhaps assign flights to F1, F2, F3, etc? It's not very complicated, and would vastly improve quality of life of drone users.

Perhaps changing mechanics would also help things. For instance, drones approach in a straight line with MWD on. How about afterburner instead of MWD (no sig bloom), and approach in a helix pattern instead of linear?



Well, ideally you would have two types of drone boats. You would have a simple type, and you would have a complicated type. The simple type would be accessible to most players, the complicated type would require a lot more player skill (micromanagement), BUT pay off with dividends if you decided to go that route.


What about changing missiles to be more like drones? :) Balance cuts both ways. Keep drones complex, but make other weapon systems just as complex to balance things out. When one guy can bring his DPS to bear to pressing F1, and another has to press F1, select drone group, right-click, select launch drones, and then press F to order them to attack, that is BROKEN. It is not balanced, it is not fair. Call it whatever you want, but it is something that needs fixing. Now, HOW to fix it, I'll leave that to the Devs.



Oh, I do. I love small scale content. But that doesn't mean it's fine that drones should be useless in 1000-10,000 man gameplay and content, where all other systems are still viable and/or dominant. Which is currently the case.

Yttr responded with exactly that. Potential drone speed bonus for Navitas.

Thanks, that's good info. We'll see, though I'll not hold my breath. Its probably too much asking for the thoughts of a Dev on this. Though I'm sure they get sick of all of our incessant questions.

And yes, if you take a look at the front of the EVE home page it still talks Gallente and drones. The "Drone Masters." ......

I think comparing drones directly to the hi-slot weapon systems is a fallacy. Drone ships always use both drones and turrets (neut configs and failfits excluded), and turret damage sometimes up to 50%.

Drones are not a primary weapon system. They don't use any fitting resources or cap. I think this is a critically important point when considering balance- unlike other weapons, you sacrifice nothing when you equip a Domi with a flight of Ogre IIs.

Jame Jarl Retief,

Besides the shiny Drone Damage Amps and the other tech 2 drone upgrades, "Reconnect to lost drones" is a fairly recent addition, which revolutionized sentry drone technique. Drones do get some minor fixes every now and then. I do agree with you on all accounts about the usability issues, but really drones are not any more neglected than say, beam lasers or cruise missiles. My biggest gripe with the UI is the way the drone groups collapse and expand- exactly opposite way they should.

Game mechanics-wise I see no big issues with drone balance as a weapon system. Drones are a great companion to short-ranged blasters, and make ships more flexible.



Tengu and Drake are the two most common ships in game (after shuttles and noobships), so you see them more than any other ship. Does this make beam lasers unbalanced? Or small artillery?

Ships can't ever be equally desirable and different at the same time. Some ships are more desirable than other to certain tasks, and this is also true for drone boats. There are many things that only drone ships can do, or where they are easily as desirable choices as the Tengu or Drake. If you don't enjoy those things, then you should train for ships that suit your preferences better.

Personally, I wouldn't fly anything else than Gal ships Some of my ships aren't drone boats, but even they certainly are awesome because of drones.

interesting thread ....

I switched to drone boats afte the bandwidth change, but I remember the times before (my then CEO was a Thorax pilot, 8 heavies were epic on a cruiser).

A simple fix for drone boats mixed slots:

Let's scrape drone damage mods as they currently are. Introduce a high slot module that works like Drone interfacing skill. each module fited gives 20% drone damage (non-stacking) up to a limit of 5 modules. Let's say it is controlled by the Advanced drone interfacing skill (the more levels the more modules). Role bonus for the module for drone boats or similar to limit usage to drone ships.

This will enable drone boats to go all out drones with highs full of these modules while preserving some utility ( neuts etc). It prohibits non-drone boats from using too many drones. It preserves bandwidth/done caps.

Scrape the concept of drone controll range as a separate skill. Let's use lock range for this (after all you are doing targeting handoff to your drones). This scales with ship class, so no longer is a BS limited by drone control range while a frigate can never use the skill limit effectively. SEBOs become a double use module for drones. Also if you are only JAMMED, your drones still can react within your full lock range. If you are damped, you have the same limitations as the other weapon systems (except FOFs :-)).

Drone speed mod is fine :-) There are other options for improvements (i.e. drones only auto agressing by your overview settings etc.) but let's keep things simple for the start.

Can't say I agree with you saying that Drones are not a primary weapon system. On a Drone Boat they are the primary weapon system particularly the Mrym comes to mind. I suspect that's the same on the Gila and Ishtar. The Domi with the Drone Damage Amplifier can also out dps the blasters if you fit it corrrectly (shield tanked.) So while for most ships they are absolutely just an add on, I just don't see how they are not the primary system on a drone boat.

And while they don't require fitting space to load them into a hold, this is more than offset by the myriad of mods required to make them perform. And CPU is a bit thin on the Mrym, Ishkur and Domi. And lets not forget the Mrym gave up a slot for its drone bay compared to other same tier BC's.

Well I'ved been a drone boat pilot most of my eve life and still love a nice Vexor.

And when all is said and done Drones are OK for pve.

And pvp wise most drones ships also have a main "gun" system wich in my view makes them more or less balanced.

The problem is that dones in pvp due to thier mwd-orbit-mwd if not in range etc movement type miss a lot.

And when I say a lot is about always if a taget is arround double or more of their orbiting speed, and this does not change if you are using drones with more or less tracking.

Against a webbed / scramed target drones of appropriate size still miss arround 20% of the time.

The best way i found is when the orbit speed of the drones is a little above the speed of the target.

So for me in my experience (looking at logs for some time now) is that drones need to hit more to be effective.

The big picture as I see it is that while small ships get buffed all the time bigger ships (cruisers and above) dont have any way of dealing with them because drones are not effective at hitting and smaller ships tend to have more tank with each passing day.

I do like the idea of pack tactics from smaller ships but the problem now is that a single frig can get under gun tracking, dont really worry about drones (shoot them far too easy) and proceed to destroy a bigger ship without much effort.

I think that 2-3 smaller ships should be able to take on a bigger one but 1 smaller ship should be very hard pressed against a bigger one and back in 2007 before the "speed nerfs" a flight of light drones would put a frig sized ship to run, now it wont even be really bothered by them.

Just boosting drone ability to hit would create imbalances so maybe drones should also do less damage, but defently light drones should be a major concern for everything below destroyer.

Overall i do think that drones arent that broken, the ability of larger ships to deal with frig size ships is serious lacking in my opinion.

Your partially right/partially wrong. That's the case for the Vex. But on the Myrm many of the fits, a very good number of them you're drones will be the primary provider of DPS. If you really want to max DPS the Mrym, your right, put blasters on them (shield fit) but the way to max it is to put a couple of the drone damage amps on there along with magstabs. The drones will still out DPS the blasters. The Mrym gets no bonus to hybrids so in particular no other ship are drones so important. Additionally, if your active armor tanking the Mrym which sadly is how its designed to be used again Drones vastly out DPS your hybrids. Though most use guns on the set up because of CAP. Can you achieve a set up on the Myrm where the Guns out DPS the drones? Yes, but properly done you get even better performance with the drones.
The Domi is similar. Its about an even split but if you shield tank it or choose to use the Drone Damage Amp you'll see you can get fits where the Domi's drone performance out does the guns.

As I stated in my OP I haven't flown an Ishtar or Gila but it seems that with the few wpn slots available that drones would more than likely out DPS the blasters/missles respectively. But I'm not sure.

You're down to arguing semantics now. Understand what Gallentius was trying to say instead of discussing wether it's 49% or 51% weapon damage. If i run a drone-boat i definately consider my high slots my utility (or "sidearm") in the same sense another ship have it's drone bay for utility. Regardless of percentage.

What you should note though is that the utility provided by the highslots on a drone-boat is much more plentiful than the drone bay of many other ships. I hinted about that in my earlier post here when i said they were dimensioned with the "drones ontop". Many ships that have a highly focused weapons-role (ie., the Zealot) tend to get less (no) drone bay. The drone-boats are dimensioned with the extra drone slots pro bono. They don't pay for it in other slots.

That's why some drone boats can have awesome utility (and fitting) or deadly speciality, that let them do things like match a full on blaster boat in sheer damage. That's what Gallentius meant, not start a pointless argument about what is it's main weapon, but rather to raise the point that the awesome utility of a drone-boat can express itself in 100% extra damage, where the weapons (or the highslots) make almost half the ship. The same could be said about a neut-Domi or other application of that full unpenalized rack of highs.

The utility may not apply in all situations, but you as the drone-captain have that choice to adapt. It's on you to make the choice count. That also mean it's on you to utilize that utility on your drone-boat to effect.

Drones themselves, much like missiles, also have a different balance than turrets that you need to learn to utilize. When you see arguments about them not "matching up to turrets" or how they should have "high slot damage amplifiers" and such, it's evident that people are not competent using them, do not want to use them (and mostly lament over having made a choice they regret, when they actually wanted to fly something else).

Even prior to the introduction of the existing drone damage amplifiers (which i was against introducing btw), the Ishtar was capable out putting out around 500 dps @ 100km with sentries. That's about twice the damage of all equivalent turret ships. The only thing that came close in potential damage was missiles. Both systems however came with their own drawbacks. You may not like the drawback, you may consider it severe - but the advantage is there; it's a full 100%, not a minor detail; and it's up to you to put it to use.

I understand that in a world of ludicrous Tier 3 BC (that should also never have been put into the game), essentially anything can happen and people are losing their compass. But surely, doesn't a 1000 dps @ 100km Ishtar sound absolutely ridiculous to you? Especially considering how the turret ships put out 250-300 dps at those ranges. There's the power of the drones. Use them right and they do have their advantages.

There are easily as many tactical advantages in drones as there are drawbacks, yet few people understand or use them.

In a world of 100km 600 dps BC snipers with BS sig guns and paper tanks, it shouldn't be too difficult for you to see the appeal in a sig-tanked, high-resist (KN-heavy, vs. HML) drone-sniper. The problem is not with the potential of the ship, drone or setup - it's with the ingenuity of the playerbase. In a world of numbers and "Drakes", out-of-box thinking suffer.

Take a look at the Gila now after the drone-amps, and see all that potential; massive drone damage over a small sig, decent mobility, fitting and resistance bonuses. The options definately are out there.

ed., I realized i'm mostly just repeating the points i raised in my last post here, but since you brought the topic back up i figured it was a good idea to explain some tidbits better and hook them back into the larger discussion.

Noisrevbus,
When I get off vacation I'll have to look you up and if your so inclined you'll have to school me up because as my OP states I've not flown an Ishtar nor a Gila nor a carrier. My observations are based upon exactly what I said. Further, my goal is to offer my observations and recommendations to a class of boats that I believe are unblanced. When a class of ships are vastly under used in PvP its probably not because people are lemmings that just do as their corps say but because everyone seeks what is best to arrive at a successful outcome.

Now that said, I don't claim to be an expert and I have a lot to learn. So perhaps an expert like you can teach me. Your a CEO for a Corps and I'm sure have thousands of PvP kills in a drone ship. Oh but wait. I see zero. Am I in error in this? If so I'll apologize right now but I went onto Eve-Kill and see zero PvP kills for you.

If I'm doing something wrong as a drone boat pilot I welcome your help. But some of your statements just smack of someone who hasn't watched a fight move away from them in about 15 seconds out of sentry range. I do only have 2 years in this game and you have been around since 2007. But as per my OP I've spent the vast majority of my time in a drone boat and my kill mails/loss mails prove it. I have dedicated myself to it and during that time see an obvious imbalance that should be addressed by CCP as this is the year of ship balancing. Nor do I think any of my suggestions would overpower them, simply bring them into competition and bring more mix to the game. Like I said before: not once in PvP have I seen an Ishtar. Strange no?