Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I suggest a new module - high slot, activating it hooks up your sentry drones to your ship and they move whenever you move.

Right now the problem with any drone ship is the vulnerability of it's drones. Whether you send them to die up close and personal or you drop them and run to save your ass a drone ship has no choice but to lose it's "turrets".

The module will let you drag your "turrets" with you, like any other normal ship - in short you will be able to move and shoot and at the same time won't be anchored to a point in space.

Just for the sake of balance every module you hook up could give you 2-3% drop in ship speed . If it's 10-15% for 5 drones I would still use it.

They've got something like this already. It's called 1200mm Artillery.

''Drone repair bay'' sunds really good or may be the possibility of taking drones from cargo bay into drone bay and back, perhaps with some time penaltie like if you are ''moving'' them from one bay to another.

You want drones repped out in space, fit a Remote Armor Repair System.

As for the general idea, as was already stated, the main drawback of the sentry drones is their immobility. One idea I saw about this and could support is an option to quickly stow them into the cargo (not drone) bay from afar.

Which wouldn't be that bad considering no other form of dps can be completely removed

Drones should just have Local Rep for Armor and Hull.


As an Alternative, Maintenence Bots could auto repair damaged drones in the dronebay, and they could give us some structure maintenence bots. Give us a choice on how to use up some of that spare dronebay space in a meaningful way.


Drones just need reworking. They appear to have been intended as a secondary weapons system, but for a small but growing selection of ships they are in fact the primary if not only weapon system. With the new ship balancing adding to the drone ship line up and new destroyers based on drones, combined with the fact that drone bonused ships lose a mod slot to the drone dedication the time has come to revisit drones from the ground up. Their AI is wonky and clunky, they are too vunerable, Ewar drones are nearly useless except for the ECM ones, and that only due to blind luck.

With the recent AI change making NPCs eat them like candy I just mothballed my beloved Navy Dominix (Ogre's Lair) and bought a Kronos for an overal easier time doing most missions.

However, I can tell you from long experience that despite the prevailing common wisdom of Sentries being the best drones, this is only true on either extreme of the skill and equipment dedication spectrum. For ships that have bays but no bonuses, especially larger ships, light drones are your best choice. I get a bit over 90 dps from 5 lights, which is plenty to deal with mission frigates and will eat most cruisers without too much difficulty. With lower skills, the only point to drones for most ships is a little extra dps and frigate control. Lights have enough speed that travel time isn't much of an issue in their intended role, and their tracking beats the living dog snot out of a sentry any day. It's not until you are into T2 sentries and maxxed out support skills that they start becoming a good idea on a ship with limited bay space.

On Larger ships you still get better DPS out of Heavies unless you start dedicating rigs to the sentry damage. Travel time becomes an issue, but on a non-dedicated ship (which almost certainly does not have the damage rigs) with limited bay space I have found that Heavies are more useful because they can still hit all but the fastest unwebbed frigates with enough reliability to be effective frigate control (Damn spider drones are an exception) and still put good DPS on larger ships. Sentries are good for the larger ships and don't lose DPS to travel time, but if you don't get all the frigates and even some cruisers on the way in, they will have a much harder time delivering their damage to those smaller hulls. Before giving up on drones as a primary weapon I experimented with the Microjump and a Drone Link Augmentor with decent results, but the new AI has destroyed their overall usefulness if you are not sitting on them. The choice between heavies or sentries comes down to would you rather lose DPS to tracking or travel time, and that choice depends largely on the ship you use and your playstyle.

Sentries truely shine in only a couple of situations. In PvP, the ability to keep them out of smartbomb range and deliver damage instantly is useful at all skill levels. In PvE they are good if you have some other way of dealing with frigates, be that fleetmates, missles (even unbonused. sue me, I hate being scrammed by the things), sufficient turret skills to pop them on the way in (way easier with the Microjump in a Kronos), or enough webbing to slow them enough so that you can hit the things. If the frigates are not an issue, then the advantages of instant dps and good damage trump what you will get from that flight of lights. Their usefulness drops down as your drone skills improve, until you reach the other end of the spectrum. Once you have max or near max drone skills, T2 sentries, Omni Tracking links, Dronelink Augmentors and a ship with drone bonuses and that has dedicated rigs to sentry damge the things become murderous.

If you are in a ship with sufficient bay space to accomodate both sentries and lights they are almost always worth their shipping weight. If you are having to choose, they really only shine as a secondary DPS method or if you have truely superior skills with them.

Depending on Skills, Fit, Ship, and Situation.

I can easily out damage sentries with heavies if they don't have to go too far and I'm not using sentry rigs. I'm a missioner, so that is dependant on my enemies. I commonly run all CCC rigs to support my active armor tank, so no sentry rigs. If I'm fighting ships that like to close in, like Angel Cartel, then I can use fairly fast drones against them and they don't have to go so far, making Berserkers a decent, if not completely optimal choice. Add a Web to my ship, especially a Maurader that boosts webs to 90%, and the Berserkers have no issue at all hitting frigates while still applying good dps to Battleships. If I'm in something like a Navy Domi, I have the spare mids for a couple of Drone Navigation computers and/or Omni Tracking links, further negating the downside of heavies vs. sentries.

Against enemies like Mordus who love to hang out at like 50k and mail it in, Sentries easily surpass the dps of the Wasps you would be using against them, but you probably want to consider making sure you have a flight of lights on hand to deal with the roughly 40 billion frigates and cruisers those missions have.

Drones are the most versatile weapons system, and Sentries are a part of that. There is no one best drone for all occasions, though there are several that are nearly useless in any occasion.

Sentries are fine, you probably want to use heavies, although those suck. However, having tractor beams affect drones would be funny.

right now drones especially sentries are not in need of a buff.

a large part of the benefit of sentries is that they can be dropped and moved away from. This means you give your target the option of attack you or the drones.

allowing you to move them with you means they may as well just be guns on your ship.

what might be nice is for the to have something like a siege timer where they have to anchor to be able to fire, but can stop firing and be recalled.

I agree that NPC AI is overly agressive to drones atm. and yeah the UI isn't great.

most of the rest of what you want buffed doesn't make sense to me.

- if drones could orbit outside of smartbombs you are make a item which it's main purpose is to counter drone obselete
- ewar drones should not be particularly effective, the 20 second lock break they can give is invaluable I don;t know what the situation is now, but 5 small ewar drones use to completely lock down ships in some fights.
- surviveability is only a major issue with PVE. but this goes back to the point of the aggressiveness of npc ai.
- drone target selection is poor, but should be managed by the player anyway, i'd prefer they went idea after each target.
- apart from t2 sentries the skill requirements for drones is actually relatively low, especially when you consider all of the supporting skills needed for effective guns of missiles.