Missions & Complexes

Oh and elite frigs and cruisers should drop and salvage T2 goodies, if it's like PvP.
...
After I can bring more friends and logis than Red Crosses on that screenshot...

They do.

But why would they play PvE?
Outside wormholes incursions and the like?
Solo?
Especially L4s?

Why do we not join those?

When I started running L4 missions again, and knew would play hours with them (have a few agents so I can decline a few), I opened a notepad to write down what I had.
Flying one or two accounts, agro snapped between the two battleships mostly.
Random is random?

Since I'm a droneophile (and just as much because small stuff getting in range is annoying) I concentrated on the small stuff first, and in the missions I had, there was pretty much no event that elite frigs got in range unless they spawned under 30ish km (Angel Extra), there I was mostly lucky and didn't get them attack the light ones that I didn't unleash before proper agro was gained on them (painters either work, or the random generator gave me it's blessing).
And then one lonely elite frig in one mission (heh) caught a T2 light, chewed through both shields and armor even though it had 5 drones on it, but the web/scram if he had one on my drone failed through half-armor and it made it back, rat died shortly afterwards.

What I'm slightly concerned with, is that those agro snaps seem to happen maybe once or twice before I finish a room, if it's in one that has the wrong mix for my drones (many rail elite cruisers/BCs, or elite scram frigs if I have lights out), in the bad range ( < 30km), even a sentry could pop "in an eyeblink" (maybe, they can get full room agro, plus double reaction time), moreso freshly recalled light ones with their blooms multi-webbed.

It's not that I can't live with a drone loss, but I prefer to try and play ATK and avoid it. Always have.
Also, I stopped using medium drones altogether (and never used heavies to begin with ).

Apologies for changing subject, but it was in the same patch.

- Create a new char, try to rat in Uedama, give up and move to another area...

We are talking about belt rats in a 0.5 system, I would like to know if that ECM chance is by design.

I think others are right. The biggest problem with drones is that their AI behavior sucks. Sure, allow enemies to dampen me into oblivion. I'll drop some drones and handle them that way, right? Okay, great, but the drones usually end up attacking the precise thing you need them not to like a mission trigger, or a battleship off in the distance when you need them to be picking off cruisers or frigates. And the only way to get them to change targets is to scoop them back in, redeploy, and hope to the heavens that they'll choose a more suitable target this time (after waiting however many seconds for them to start firing on something by themselves).

Suggestion: Allow drone pilots some way to toggle through targets, or at least to let their drones know "Okay, you need to attack something else, not what you're attacking right now." Maybe there could be a right-click feature that said something like "Attack Frigates" or "Attack EWAR" something which would let us determine a priority, instead of having to scoop/redeploy over and over again hoping for the best. They are supposed to offer us the flexibility to deal with the kind of situation I outlined above, but they're too stupid to handle it in anything more than a cumbersome, haphazard way.

As things stand, CCP has smartened enemy AI, but left drones just as utterly stupid as they were before. This is the source of their increasing unsuitability for running L4s more than anything else. Either make drones smarter and give us more functionality, or change the AI back to the way it was before.

I'd been waiting for a reply for quite some time now. Really glad to actually see one about this. Though it was not what i had hoped for and i am sincerely sad that ill be letting one of my other level 5 mission accounts expire (3yrs old) in a day due to the drone thing and the risk increasing and rewards staying the same.

After that little fix-it patch on the 18th of Dec. It is still not possible to recall drones in time from 9km out for one of them to not die. From the response it appears this is now working as intended though L5's were forgotten. There are not that many frigates that point me in most missions, but they need to go down quickly as i am micromanaging quite a bit at that time and balancing the risk of being pwnd by probers and time actually spent in space. Its just not worth it to keep another account pulling missions with how much less i am doing them. Its not worth the effort anymore to me. I can pull t he easy level 4's with considerable less heartache and run them solo.

As a new player with low SP and had my heart set on using a drone boat for exploring I guess I'll save myself the trouble and not renew my two accounts.

Oh well :(

While I understand the drone system may need a little love, I don't think changing enemy AI toward them helped the matter.

It adds a layer of complexity that other ships don't have to worry about. A Mach doesn't need to worry about the new enemy AI suddenly destroying its turrets or a Tengu's missile launchers which is exactly what it's like when an elite frigate decides to change its aggro and pop your light drones.

I may be missing something here but I just don't see the logic about these changes. Ok you think PVE should be more like PVP, in that case you'd need to scrap the entire mission system and start over. Tell me when a single BS has survived against 10+ other BS with cruisers and frigates tackling you? Let PVE be PVE.

The drone change affects non drone boats more than it does drone boats, as drone boats fielding lights kill stuff faster, and have more drone hps, and any drone boat pilot with half a brain uses sentries to snipe frigates at range anyway.

Whilst CCP was at it, they nerfed the tengu fit that had a better dps/projection combo than drones by some 20% dps. ie the fits that are really drone independent are simply not as good as they used to be. Even if you do have to manage your drones, you won't be _far_ behind.

Honestly 2-3 years ago, there were no Navy domi, no T2 drone mods, there was no DDAs at all, the only dps mods that affected drones were expensive rigs, and they only affected sentries, and a maxxed ishtar or dmi was horribly expensive because of navy omnis.

The drone changes, altho annoying at times in my paladin, aren't that game breaking for me. I can usualyl recal lbefore they die...But sometimes they just die in a second without even a chance of recalling.

And the TD/damps/jams really need to be looked into better...This is not some pvp situation where only 1 of em is doing it on you, in some missions you have 10 ships doing it at once(look at my earlier screenshots) and you can't do **** when that happens