Missions & Complexes

I know I'm a little slow on the uptake here, but I've been doing Incursions for a while, and I've only just done a mission today since the patch.

So, after the AI update the playstyle that I have skilled for is no longer viable. Only about a month ago I reached my goal of a Rattlesnake with maxed drone skills for doing missions, and now that the patch is out using heavy drones at range is now unfeasible.

The new AI doesn't provide any kind of new challenge, it just forces me to recall drones every couple of minutes, losing time during their transit and usually losing one or two drones, as even with max drone skills heavies don't move fast enough to get back before being killed. For drones that cost around 1,000,000isk each, losing 5 or 6 can halve your profits.

I've never had an issue with nerfs and balance in the past, but this time the ship and drones I have skilled for have been rendered almost useless for the purpose I trained them for. I have 6 million skillpoints in Drones that are now wasted. I 5'd all my drone support skills just for heavies because I enjoy using them, and now that's just wasted time, of course I wouldn't have trained a Rattlesnake if I didn't like drones, so that's another month or so of training time down the drain.

I've also lost quite a bit of Standing, since to complete the missions I accepted I would need to buy a new ship.

I do Incursions for money, I don't AFK in IVs, and wouldn't dare to in a Pirate Battleship, I do them for fun, or when I can't find an Incursion fleet. I can still PLEX and I'm not really losing money, since I can just do Incursions, but it's a real pain to have a few million skill points wasted.

If there were some counter-balance, it would be ok, maybe if the drones were made harder to hit, but no, in a split second ten Battleships can switch to them and they're down to hull in seconds. It's also now very unwise to bring along lower skilled Corpmates to get them standing and some money, meaning the IRL friend I've been training is now limited to Is and IIs until he can grind standing.

I think it's a very ill-advised patch that has sucked a lot of the fun out of the game for me and my friends, in what I feel is a very unfair way. One of the things I like about EVE is that it's Darwinian, I'm not a total carebear, I do PvP roams regularly and I spent some time in a nullsec Alliance (although 0.0 was a little hectic for my taste), however unless CCP lets me redistribute all my wasted skillpoints, all this has done is waste a lot of my time. If this had been done a year ago it would have cut off my cash flow entirely.

Sure I can just not use heavies and not do missions anymore, and sell my Rattlesnake, but I enjoyed playing with them and I can't get that wasted training time back.

Yeah, it seems the more things are nerfed, the more gunboats become the only valid option in EVE. It's like they only want us flying Machs and Geddons. When they removed learning skills they gave us all the SP back to redistribute, I wish they would do something like that here.

Crosstrain Winmatar, the favored of CCP. They shall never be nerfed.

On a related note, was heavy drone usage at range ever feasible? Or rather, any efficient?

I came back to Mission running with my beloved Rattle to, I didnt expect such a massive change to the missioning mechanics, as such I lost alot of drones (to my discredit including sentries) while also losing a substantial amount of armor (Passive shield fit)...

Flying a VIndicator now and all is well (but I do feel let down that my Rattle is now sold and probably never to be touched again...)

or you could, you know, use sentries and stop being bad.
the fact that you no longer prefer to use the rattler does not entitle you to skillpoint reimbursement
you're complaining about your inability to adapt.

I bet the dinosaurs complained that they wanted their evolution points back, since the sudden ice age made surviving for millions of years all wasted effort.

Ah OP, you are being a bit over the top.

I'm not going to say the new AI isn't annoying. But it isn't the end of the world either. I too am an all Gallente, heavy into drones.

Granted I hadn't flown missions in a long while (it's hard to go back to isk/hr that low). But I felt like a change of pace.

So I dusted off my Sentry Ishtar and grabbed some missions.

Yes my sentries grabbed a large amount of aggro, more than I expected. But sentries also tank fairly well. I fit a small RR to my Ishtar and played logi with my drones.

In some ways it made missions a bit easier, as I never had issues with my own tank as the NPC's would sometimes take notice of the drones. Occasionally i'd have to still pull one drone briefly as the DPS was more than I could RR. But not often.

Heavy drones have always sucked in missions. They are only good if you are right on top of your enemy really. Otherwise way too slow.

Sentries on the other hand will blap even frigs faster than I can lock them.

So:

1. Get sentries
2. Fit an RR

Enjoy pretending you are both DPS and Logi.

Wow I didn't notice that till you said it... also....
Just gonna leave this here:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=178808&find=unread

since its 20 pages long and is in the same vein.