EVE General Discussion

Drones do indeed need either a buff or revamp.

Because they are moving at, you know, mwd speed?

The drone hate is a little excessive, but most of the problems are just people being bad at eve,

In smallscale PvE, you are correct. People are lazy, don't know/care about drone MWD sig bloom, don't pay attention, etc.

But for bigger sites and missions, it actually is gamebreaking.
> Ishtar/Gilas can't be used in certain combat plexes - at all. Sentries get one-shotted, smaller drones - even if you get within 2km of every single damn NPC - still gets one-shotted.
> There is plenty of missions where it was well known you could not deploy drones until you had all aggro, as drones would pull entire room. So you used to pull entire room, then release drones. By now you often had 25-50 NPCs on you. If you do the same today the drones get one-shotted. So you have to kill off as much you can with conventional weapons, then use drones to pick stuff off at the end.
> Many PvP boats don't have the luxury of tanking (neither their ship nor drones) vs PvE content. If we try gank someone running PvE content, we might not be able to use drones at all. It basicly means there is PvP scenarios where you can't use drones - at all -. What does this add to the game? Is there any benefit/gain? For what loss?

That's just three examples. This greatly reduce the speed of which you run some sites/missions (i.e. is in-effective), and is not a matter of players being bad. It's a matter of CCP making one of the games primary weapon systems useless. Drone boats, even with +hp, is not enough to keep drones alive even when they are sitting right next to you and never MWD. Simple NPC firepower alpha them to oblivion.

I predicted this actually, since I did test it before it came out and I did report this was going to happen. Sites where I used to use droneboats (Ishtar, Gila, Navy Domi) I now purely run with HML Tengu. Even alot of cases where a good tracking platform (like Nightmare) is now not working as you can't use its drones vs frigs, unless you get enough range at the start. Try this vs NPCs that TD or jam you. It also means ships like torp-Golems now are made near-useless in some PvE content (which is what it was designed to do, no?) because you can't use it drones if there is enough small NPCs. And you need the drones vs the small NPCs, or you are just sat there not being able to do anything at all..

The real effect of this is even MORE PvE content is (by good players) run by Tengus. I'm not sure this is the development CCP wanted. For good players, this means less ships are useful, a complete weapon system broken, and not a single good reason has been given as to why they'd want to do this. Personally I'm quite gutted that something that should be affecting PvE (NPC AI) is having a big impact on PvP as well.

oh sure... AFKing with a golem -.- also recalling drones wont help them, if your drones are 30 kms away killing some frig, they will die on the way back due to MWD signature increase and because they fly on straigh lines.

No, I can't say that I have. I've noticed that MWDing rats are easier to shoot though…
So the question is, how are you measuring this?

…I also haven't been able to have my drones one-shotted (especially not sentries, which never seem to get any aggro), so I'm kind of wondering how people do that too.

guess I will have to fraps it to show it to you, will do it later tonigh to show what I mean, btw to those who mention the do nothing, I run sites and missions on a golem, there is no such thing as doing nothing on a marauder.

Get the equations, plug in some numbers, then come back and show your work. Torps do pretty crap damage to things that are moving fast, even if they're big.

With an explosion velocity of ~100m/s, and a target moving at 1000m/s, you're looking at a 10x modifier.
A BC (Brutix) with MWD on has an ~1800m sig radius vs. torps' 337m explosion radius, a 5-6x modifier.

Speed wins in that rough calculation, and 1km/s is on the slow end for a MWDing BC.

you still miss the simple point, what do you do when your drone dies on 1 single shoot or when your drone is at 30 kilometers and the Agroing npc webs it?

also you want battleships to lock drones? you do know that takes roughtly 2 minutes right?

is not about taking care of drones, sometimes there is just no way to care about drones, missions like Intercept the sabouterus have over 50 frigates at warp in, and every single one of them will shoot instantly at your drones as soon as you deploy them. its pretty much blob alpha strike warfare on mission scales. all i want is to be able to carry more drones to replace the lost ones mid mission, its just impossible to keep all your drones alive in some missions.

Note: This post is based on the presumption that the new NPC AI acts in the same way as Sleeper AI. I have not done a single mission since this expansion.

* I think the lack of information the NPC behavior is a problem. It does not really have to be stated, but right now I can understand that it can be extremely frustrating to not really understand how the NPCs aggro works.

* Some ships are being hurt more than others by this change. Everyone knows not to bring a myrmidon if you are planning to farm in wormholes, drones as a weapon system against sleepers is just worse than other options. Now this is affecting the same ships in missions in the same way.

* My experience tells me that as long as you WEB the frigates, they will not immediately change to drones, and by having a web you can actually complete sites that has frigates in C1 or C2 with a battleship. Without that web its a big risk you wont ever be able to get all frigs down before your drones are depleted, and I can just see how much worse that can be in missions with some spider drones being even more annoying and actually scrambling people at their first experiences of this AI. Note: The web will not guarantee that your drones will not be targeted, but it seems to delay it quite a bit.

* From the point above, fitting a web on certain ships hurts them more than others.

* The missions were clearly not made with this in mind, they should have been rebalanced from the ground up at the same time that they do such a big change. I'm not saying that they need to be easy or that all has to be changed, but as of right now they didn't even do a pass to see how it would affect them?

* Is anyone really feeling that this change is good for anything? Sure it might be good to make it mostly impossible to afk missions, but the AI could be 10% as aggressive and still complete that, and would still be a threat to the weaker small combat drones.