Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ahhh, you refer to obvious choices.

Here is why I specified high slot, and drone must be in orbit. Balance issues.

If the drone is safely in the bay, protected by the host ship and it's defenses, the risk to the drone is removed. You can still put it into the drone bay, but repairing it is too much of a free bonus under those circumstances.

Why? If you had the obvious foresight to bring spares, you are taking the drone out of circulation, replacing it with a fully repaired one, and also fixing the damaged one to be ready to go out again. You could rotate drones in this manner indefinitely so long as you met no overwhelming force.
Simply put, this is way to easy to sustain for too little cost.

Logistic ships define the precedent for remote rep modules being high slot items. This idea replaces three of them with one single module already, which is huge.
It is reasonable that you should need to tie up an available drone position while repairing, especially considering it is automatic requiring you to only call back the drone needing attention, not target it or manually cycle the repper.

After running a few more numbers, it could possibly work, if lag was not an issue, only if the Dominix lost its 10% drone damage bonus.
Sentries with 2 DDAs 858DPS
Light Scout 2 DDAs 283DPS

Edit: Such a modification to the dominix would anger many people, it works fine as is. Would be broken with DCUs leaving the only option as a new hull, at which point why do the DCUs need to be added when the hull would have the chance to be bonused with +1 drone control per level.
In short, there is no effecient way to balance a module with current ships and I doubt there will be a new BS hull coming out any time soon. (Though CCP has suprised me once already they might do it again.)

The old Drone interfacing was an issue because everyone had 10 drones, change only drone boats to be able to field more than 5 drones wouldn't cause much of a issue.

The question in the end is if CCP wants drone boats using only drones without guns.

My issue with making a Remote Rep for drones that shoots rainbow rep streams is that you still have to target the drone to use it.

Of course I would use it instead of mounting both a remote armor and structure rep to save the slot, but to be of real benefit it would have to have a few things adjusted:


1. Lots of range. At base I'd go with 20km, with a T2 variant at least doubleing it. Drones are no more effective than missiles in terms of damage projection, and yet easily destroyed. Of course this can be addressed by balancing drones directly, doing something with their HP, sig, give them AB rather than microwarp, etc. However, if this is intended as a tool to help with drone destructibility so that they can be kept in the feild longer, then it does not need to cause even more travel time issues than they already have.

2. Targeting. If range were to be limited as current RR modules, then either doing something so that the module automagically hit the most damaged drone in range, or else simply projected a maintenence feild around the ship that repaired all drones in range. Drones take about a week and half to target in a Dominix or Rattlesnake, and often a drone other than sentries dies almost immediately upon taking damage. Once again, if this is a tool designed to help with destructibility, the need to target the drones stands in the way of the intended function. Left unresolved, this would simply trade some slight repair ability for the need to keep them all pre-locked, reducing your functional targeting on the ship by 5. This can be addressed in a drone overhaul, allowing a host ship to apply modules directly through the drone interface---logically, the ship already knows where it's drones are, so using active targeting systems on them seems like it should not be needed. A better fix for this issue might be to give drone ships more available targets and some sort of bonus to locking their own drones.

I feel the need for repair modules needs to simply be removed by givng drones local repair on all 3 bars. it does not need to be any faster than passive sheild repair, but needs to be there so that drones do become easily sustainable. That's supposed to be one of thier benefits and currently they are too weak, especially in PvE play. Drones *should* die under focused fire, but should not run out due to general attrition---that's what ammo reliant weapons platforms are supposed to be like.

Bump

I waiting for more opinion about this topic :)

* First post are Updated about newest idea

and you are not even adding the ship bonuses if it is a drone boat!

domi would be one hell of a beast!