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[Duality] NPC aggression against drones and Safety persistence changes

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Funky Lazers
Funk Freakers
#141 - 2013-01-07 20:51:23 UTC
Hakan MacTrew wrote:


Who am I kidding, I don't want my missiles affected by TDs...

Although it seems fair that they should be...


Well I just wanted to know that so I can start moving my other chars to the minmatar space.

It is very sad TDs make your ship useless unless you use Drones and Missiles (soon just drones).

Whatever.
Mika Takahoshi
Doomheim
#142 - 2013-01-07 22:22:18 UTC
When balancing drones, please keep in mind that you frequently balance them as if they're long range weapons, treating drone boats as if they need limits to counterbalance their ability to fight effectively at range. But with the AI changes, drones have become, like blasters, a short-range only weapon. The trick to using drones is to recall them when they get aggro, since they're so utterly ridiculously fragile, but you can't effectively do this if they're at range. Drone boats can definitely still be used and used effectively, but they're more like blaster boats than railgun boats. Their weapons cannot be used at anything beyond short range without being lost, and without massively bigger drone bays or the ability to load new drones from cargo on the fly, you can't just treat them as expendable ammo. Blasters are fine weapons too, and drones won't stop being used simply because they lack range now, but they need to be balanced as if they don't give you any kind of long range ability, because sentries aside, they no longer do.
Mund Richard
#143 - 2013-01-07 22:50:42 UTC  |  Edited by: Mund Richard
Mika Takahoshi wrote:
When balancing drones, please keep in mind that you frequently balance them as if they're long range weapons, treating drone boats as if they need limits to counterbalance their ability to fight effectively at range. But with the AI changes, drones have become, like blasters, a short-range only weapon.
Well, there are two kinds of drone(boat)s: full flight of sentries(forcing you to sit still and take that much more damage, or treat them as disposable, like ammo), and the rest (forcing you to stay in range, or treat them as disposable).

After the change, I'd rather field a Thorax with 10 lights.
Mediums may do more damage, but not by that much, and certainly less so once I have to babysit them and recall all the time due to frig/cruiser agro, plus loosing one is dps lost, loosing a full flight of lights one can still have a spare in the bay (if they were T1 that drops like candy).

Might also consider reviewing the tradition of giving drone boats one less slot maybe?
Since now a (further) slot is taken up by hostile EWAR in an attempt to keep rats off the drones?

"We want PvE activities to require active participation and mirror PvP more closely." Stacking penalty for NPC EWAR then? Lock range under 9km from over 100 in a BS is not fun. Nor is two NPC web drones making me crawl 10m/s. PvP SW-900 x5: 75m/s.
Rengerel en Distel
#144 - 2013-01-07 23:17:57 UTC
Mund Richard wrote:
Mika Takahoshi wrote:
When balancing drones, please keep in mind that you frequently balance them as if they're long range weapons, treating drone boats as if they need limits to counterbalance their ability to fight effectively at range. But with the AI changes, drones have become, like blasters, a short-range only weapon.
Well, there are two kinds of drone(boat)s: full flight of sentries(forcing you to sit still and take that much more damage, or treat them as disposable, like ammo), and the rest (forcing you to stay in range, or treat them as disposable).

After the change, I'd rather field a Thorax with 10 lights.
Mediums may do more damage, but not by that much, and certainly less so once I have to babysit them and recall all the time due to frig/cruiser agro, plus loosing one is dps lost, loosing a full flight of lights one can still have a spare in the bay (if they were T1 that drops like candy).

Might also consider reviewing the tradition of giving drone boats one less slot maybe?
Since now a (further) slot is taken up by hostile EWAR in an attempt to keep rats off the drones?


Just being able to add drones from cargo would be enough, though it does have pvp implications. If they're going to be treated as ammo, you should be able to reload and switch them just like ammo.

With the increase in shiptoasting, the Report timer needs to be shortened.
Kenneth Skybound
Gallifrey Resources
#145 - 2013-01-07 23:31:33 UTC
Mund Richard wrote:
Mika Takahoshi wrote:
When balancing drones, please keep in mind that you frequently balance them as if they're long range weapons, treating drone boats as if they need limits to counterbalance their ability to fight effectively at range. But with the AI changes, drones have become, like blasters, a short-range only weapon.
Well, there are two kinds of drone(boat)s: full flight of sentries(forcing you to sit still and take that much more damage, or treat them as disposable, like ammo), and the rest (forcing you to stay in range, or treat them as disposable).

After the change, I'd rather field a Thorax with 10 lights.
Mediums may do more damage, but not by that much, and certainly less so once I have to babysit them and recall all the time due to frig/cruiser agro, plus loosing one is dps lost, loosing a full flight of lights one can still have a spare in the bay (if they were T1 that drops like candy).

Might also consider reviewing the tradition of giving drone boats one less slot maybe?
Since now a (further) slot is taken up by hostile EWAR in an attempt to keep rats off the drones?


Maybe it needs to go the other way instead.

Most gun/missile boats have only supplementary drone bays (more often than not, to take out the smaller stuff that gets under their guns/ past their missiles).

Specific drone boats could potentially have their guns/missiles reduced down to 1 or 2, but maintain a good number of high slots. Those utility highs could be fit with new drone enhancement suites.
--A module with moderate cycle time (maybe 20 seconds) which can assemble a drone from the cargo hold into the drone bay.
--Another module which could be a drone repair unit - specifically for drones and can repair them at extreme ranges.
--Another module may be a rapid recall unit; Again, moderate cycle time, modest to good range (25-75% of your drone control range, based on skill level to use the module) and would return a drone at VERY high speed - somewhere around the 10km/s mark. Could only be used on one drone at a time though no locking needed, and would scale in speed based on drone size. Return that unfortunate heavy at 2.5km/s and perhaps even haul in sentries at 500m/s.

It's all too easy to build the ships to be the same, just with different flavors. Instead of making drone boats the chocolate ice cream to turrets vanilla, let's make them waffles. With syrup.
Kenneth Skybound
Gallifrey Resources
#146 - 2013-01-07 23:31:39 UTC
Giving T2 drones T2 resist would go a long way to making drone boats more effective too. One shotted drones is as bad as perma-jam NPCs. No one has fun and everyone limps home with their ear hanging off.
Mund Richard
#147 - 2013-01-08 00:18:21 UTC  |  Edited by: Mund Richard
Quote:
Maybe it needs to go the other way instead.
Most gun/missile boats have only supplementary drone bays (more often than not, to take out the smaller stuff that gets under their guns/ past their missiles).
Well yes, but in the case of ships with 50/50 and moreso with 125/125 bandwidth and bay, a hard choice, since on cruiser and battleship level respectively they aren't there just for utility, but for cold hard dps against equal sized targets as well, with increased vulnerability the way the AI is now.


Improved resist and extended range drone repair module pops up every once in a while in the suggestion subforum.

Problem with the first is that the racial profiles don't match the enemy you fight in the case of amarr/minmatar (thus not really helping in PvE), "problem" with the second is that it requires extra coding for the exclusive targeting, which isn't really benefiting the lore/flavor (not that enforced non-aggression of NPCs based on signature is), so I rolled with the suggestion of a Rogue Drone faction battleship Infested Dominix, with extended range on reppers.
...Which would totally not solve any of the issues for the rest of the ships, but would be cool, and improve the drone region yet again.

The drone tractor beam beam would require a lock just like a repper, which may be problematic with both a flight of 5 both due to max locked targets (moreso on a carrier), and locking time, but at least webbing a drone wouldn't make it dead.
Now... pulling sentries... that gets tricky... I'd love it for my PvE activities, but not only would it take away a drawback that was intended, it might have "unfortunate" side-effects in PvP...

"We want PvE activities to require active participation and mirror PvP more closely." Stacking penalty for NPC EWAR then? Lock range under 9km from over 100 in a BS is not fun. Nor is two NPC web drones making me crawl 10m/s. PvP SW-900 x5: 75m/s.
Tatiana W1sla
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#148 - 2013-01-10 10:00:40 UTC
Jame Jarl Retief wrote:
CCP Fozzie wrote:
Mund Richard wrote:

CCP Fozzie:
Is that mechanic here to stay for good (since it seems to be the switch that made drones not die horribly all the time), or will it get taken away once something else is made working, such as rat remembering who did how much damage?


All options are on the table, but there are not concrete plans to remove the size restriction mechanic at this point.


If there's no immediate plans to fix the AI, are there at least any plans to improve drone UI, and drones themselves though?

The reason I ask is that Retribution made drones more complicated to play with. And the UI has been unchanged for quite a while. Plus the UI is pretty badly outdated - it doesn't remember the last state it was in, and things like that. For example I gotta click "Drones in Bay" dropdown menu to open it each time I undock. Then when I need to deploy drones, mouse over to the drone group I want, then right-click on it, then left-click on "Launch drones". And lest we forget, there's still no hotkeys to do any of this stuff, so I can't be launching drones AND doing something else with the mouse like I could in a non-drone boat. By the time I do that, all other weapon systems that require a single F1 keypress have already fired their first volley. And drones didn't even start moving yet, it'll take half a second for them to materialize, and another half second at least to react to you spamming the F key to get them moving towards the target.

Not to mention silly drone stats like 100 sig radius of heavies and sentries, when ships carrying 3+ of them have sigs of 120 or so? Or the fact that T2 drones have the exact same resist profile as T1 drones? Or are you guys totally fine with this?


this, and as it has been already mentioned, the increasing use of drone boat is due to the TD change, that makes running missions/anoms/plex with a gun ship really frustrating
HaydenJD
War Crime Syndicate
#149 - 2013-01-15 03:53:43 UTC
I live in 0.0 so I don't know or particually care about how missions are effected by this. What does bother me is the fact that drone boats like my Ishtar and my corp mates Rattlesnakes are now useless to do ratting in 0.0 be it either anoms or plexs. This is has been an over the top nerf in my ,and many others I know, opinion as the current HP of drones doesn't allow them to survive long enough to pull them back in to save them and unlike missile or gun boats you have finite drones and once they are gone you do no damage. Heavy missiles were nerfed hard too I'd say, I know they were pretty OP before the nerf and it's pretty much the dram nerf all over again(OP becoming reasonable and it feels like much more of a hit), so I'm left looking at gun boats to rat for money now.

I just suggest making AI ease up a bit and making T2 drones have more HP than T1 by an appropriate percentage could possibly work so have a look into that please. I'm all for making drones no longer an afk income but at least still let them be viable if you are at the keyboard.