EVE General Discussion

I cant deal enough damage if i tank and i cant tank if i do enough damage, whoaa drones dude, ill skill my drones and i get a decent balance a week later yeah this is cool...

Retribution is now installed... your drones are now useless.

Thanks for you monthly subs and taking it with no lube !

TP, web, ecm, ecm burst , remote rep ect ect.

They can and do pull aggro off, which doesn't help your dead light drones because you launched them within gun range of a million npc frigs and they got alpha'd.

In incursions most sites have frigs spawn away from you and approach, so you can blap them with artillery Machs in many cases. Regular missions and other content many times have frigs spawn right on top of you, under your gun and if you launch light drones, those drones are inside the npc frigs gun range.

Nothing that can't be over come (by simply not using drones but using webs and/or a supporting FoF missile Tengu lol), but it was an annoying and unnecessary change.

A more proper progression from ccp would be

-Fewer but more powerful pvp-like npcs in pve content
-mission, complex redesign with fewer more powerful npcs in mind
-THEN and ONLY THEN new AI/behaviors for mission and comp-lex npcs

But of course ccp started with the last thing they should have done 1st, and while not game ending, it's seriously annoying. Annoying is bad in a video game.

I completely agree with this.

About the dronebay size, maybe letting them be reloaded from cargo could be a small (temporary) fix.

Indeed my standard setup for running level 4s involved me having RR TP etc. Even sitting still and dropping a set of sentry drones can easily result in a dead drone before I get a target in for RR.

Considering the tears are coming from paying customers, and the anguish is directed at CCP, not other players, I'm not sure I share your excitement.

Okay I'm not usually one to post on forums, but I'm a little confused on how the new AI works. I've played other MMO's before so I understand the concept of threat and aggro, but this new AI doesn't seem to have any rhyme or reason to it. It seems to me that instead of an aggro system it just randomly resets targets every so often. I agree that the old once-you-were-targeted-you-had-aggro-forever way was too simple. When your drones go out to attack a ship it makes sense if your drones pull aggro and that ship switches to attack them. What doesn't make sense is deploying your drones and all the ships in space switch to attack them before they even get to a target.

On my last mission I didn't use drones at all until I got down to just 4 frigates remaining. Then I tried to get creative and to keep the aggro away from my drones I split the 7 launchers of my CNR four ways. 2-2-2-1 so that every frigate was taking at least some damage from me. I then deployed my drones to attack them. That should be enough to keep them focused on me right? I mean I'm actively engaged with all 4 so that should keep their attention right? Wrong. Within 5 seconds of my drones attacking one of the frigates, all 4 frigates targeted and ganged up on one of my drones. Like I said it would make sense if the frigate they are attacking switches to targeting them since they are inflicting more damage than I am. However, what doesn't make sense is the other three frigates switching to attack them when I am doing damage to them and the drones are not.

New AI systems can be fun. It can be really interesting to try and come up with new and effective strategies to outsmart and overcome them. However, the complete randomness of this new AI system takes away that enjoyment and replaces it with nothing but pointless frustration. In addition to irritation, it severely diminishes the effectiveness of drones as a method of dealing damage. Thus completely breaking that part of the game. This needs to be addressed.

Just my thoughts.


PS: hmmm...my first post didn't go through so I'm posting again. Hopefully this doesn't lead to a double post.

Champion read the patch notes perhaps.... There is no afk pve anymore.... AI got more brains..... Jezus high sec players.

hummmm

YES! And have hotkeys for each drone, i.e. each drone can be managed by using 1-5 keys together with shift, control, or alt to instantly command return to drone bay, return to orbit, or attack.

No matter what though, from now on if you let drones get more than 10-15k away they will be focused down. Since range bonus for drones is not very useful now, maybe Scout Drone Operation could be changed to reduce drones signature radius.

The change to drones is a good one, but will require further tweaking to balance everything out. For ships, i.e. arty Maelstrom, that use drones to swat frigates and cruisers that get too close, now they just need to manage the drones more carefully but they can still be as effective as ever in that role.

The broken part is ships like mission/complex running Dominixes/Pilgrims/Vexors/etc. You can't expect them to stay within RR range of their drones when facing NPC blobs. Too much damage and ewar/neuting. PVE ships need damage projection. Ships that just lost that have been broken for PVE. So the solution is to change those ships.

Any ship that is not a dedicated drone ship shouldn't change, but dedicated drone ships need new ship bonuses to deal with this.

Here's my suggestion. Please let me know what you think:

Introduce a new module: Remote Drone Armor Repairer/Shield Transporter.

1) It only works on drones from your own ship. (you can say it's due to special interface)
2) It has long enough range to keep drones alive at longe range.
3) It comes with a new skill that, when trained to level 5, increases the range of the module to match the drone control range of a max skilled pilot using a Drone Link Augmentor.
4) It works like a Covert Ops Cloaking Device: It uses 10,000 CPU and certain ships, such as the Arbitrator, have the ship bonus that allows them to fit it.

With 2 of these repping 5 drones you could get damage projection from drones while keeping them alive, but only if you're paying close attention to the reppers and flying a dedicated drone ship.

Thoughts?