Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I do. Equip a single Remote reps and/or Target Painter. Ewar irritates NPCs FAR more than any drone.

And the Micro Jump Drive makes sentry-boating in a mission pretty easy.

edit:

Wooooooow. You really believe this?

Open up EFT. Without any support skills and turret/launcher to level 2 or 3 most "non-drone" frigates deal something in the range 25 to 35 dps. At level 5 those numbers are only bumped up by 25%... amounting to a piddling 35 to 50 dps.
PLUS.... newbies are severely hampered by issues such as range and tracking (which are pretty much non-problems for light drones)... and they have fitting issues as guns/launchers require CPU and Powergrid... which forces a newbie to either sacrifice tank or speed... or "downgrade" their weapons (and thus their DPS).

This is in comparison to a drone user that in 7 days goes from 0 to 30+ dps that can't be affected by Ewar, operates and attacks independent of the ship, and doesn't consume ship resources like capacitor, CPU, or Powergrid (allowing the drone user to focus entirely on tank and/or speed).

edit2:

Not on most Frigates, most Tech 2 Frigates, most Navy Frigates, most Pirate Frigates, Destroyers, Interdictors, a few select Cruisers, some HACs, Heavy Interdictors, 3 out of 4 Attack Battlecruisers, all but 1 Command Ship, Dreadnoughts, and Titans.

While not recommended, it is possible to get away with just working up to use light ECM drones and calling it quits there with the above ships (sometimes not even that)... pretty much the same way armor users only train up the skill Shield Management to get a little extra shield buffer even though their tanking style doesn't require it.

Actually it was probably malicious glee because agro switching rats pretty much killed off the AFK mission dominix.

[Tristan - LOLNewbie]

[Lows]
Drone Damage Amplifier I
Drone Damage Amplifier I
Damage Control I

[Medium]
Medium Shield Extender I
1 MN Afterburner I
Warp Scrambler I

[Highs]
(empty)
(empty)
(empty)

[Rigs]
(empty)
(empty)
(empty)

[Drones]
5x Hobgoblin I

Stats/Notes (with no skills applied):
- It's a little over CPU and PG... but nothing that a few levels in electronics and engineering can't cure (or even a rig).
- around 3600 EHP
- burns about 700 m/sec
- deals about 40 DPS.

Maybe not 50 DPS... but close enough. Remember that the drone's DPS does increase by not so insignificant margins with the skills Scout Drone Operation and Drone Interfacing (assuming that everyone gets 5 drones by default). And that even Tech 1 drones have few issues tracking other frigates within a ~25km battlefield (and are independent, use no capacitor, or powergrid/cpu, etc).

And I'd like to see it that Gunnery support skills are only worth as much as Drone and Missile support skills, rather than 3x what they are because they apply to 3 different flavours of guns...

Triple the rank of all Gunnery support skills (double controlled bursts)? Reduce the ranks of Drone and Missile support skills? Split gunnery into Projectile Weapons, Hybrid Weapons and Energy weapons each with their own support skills?


And as for the thread idea: it does make sense, but to make it like it is today you'd have to nerf drones to 1/5th power and have a 100% increase to damage and hitpoints per level (after level 1 a la leadership specialization skills).

Edit: of course, that's not to say that they couldn't do the same as with guns and missiles and only nerf them by 20% and make Drones a 5% damage/health per level skill.

there are currently 3 missing drone support skills (actually much more, but these are core ones): drone RoF, drone speed and drone tracking which should affect drone RoF, out of MWD speed of drones and their tracking respectively.

If we look closely to other weapon systems we'll see that their base skill adds RoF (gunnery, missile launcher operation), so it sounds logically to change Drones skill to affect RoF instead of max drones. Drone speed (out of MWd) could be incorporated into drone navigation or introduced as separate skill along with Drone tracking. That would also help to tone down drone interfacing skill a bit : 10% drone dmg per level instead of 20% with 25% RoF (5% per level from revamped drones skill) will give same DPS (but less alpha).

Drone Navigation boosts drone MWD speed.

If we look closely to other weapon systems we'll see that their base skill adds RoF (gunnery, missile launcher operation), so it sounds logically to change Drones skill to affect RoF instead of max drones. Drone speed (out of MWd) could be incorporated into drone navigation or introduced as separate skill along with Drone tracking. That would also help to tone down drone interfacing skill a bit : 10% drone dmg per level instead of 20% with 25% RoF (5% per level from revamped drones skill) will give same DPS (but less alpha).[/quote]



Irrelevant. They still require a skill other than Drones and are as such not applicable to the issue as per comments by the TC. As I said, I didn't make the rules.



Check your quotes and try again. I never made any such claim.

"Non-MWD speed" is clear. "Out of MWD" less so. People shouldn't need to read carefully if something was typed clearly.

Not irrelevant. Missile launchers also require Weapon Upgrades for the their damage module. It may be in a different tab, but the individual skill itself affects all weapon systems to a certain degree (it IS the skill for weapon upgrades... of which the Drone Damage Amp is).


https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3373061#post3373061


Bolded, italicized, and underlined.


JerseyBOI 2 said...
they are also quite a bit more effort to micromanage.

Indeed. That's an actual issue (and one that I can see being somewhat fixed with a slicker and more responsive UI).

I'm not sure what the problem is, its not a super long skill, if you want you could leave it at level 4 and just field 4 drones. Thats 80% of your DPS. Same as only getting drone interfacing 4 and/or skipping a few support skills.

When you are a super noob most of the ships you can fly can't handle more than 4 drones anyway and if you are getting a drone boat then 5-7 days is hardly the end of the world. When I was a noob I flew a BS in lvl4s for a while with only 4 drones. I could still kill scram frigs with them.

There is no built in mechanic that says your ship will explode when you undock unless you have 5 drones.

In fact I loved the way the drones skill worked when I was new, getting another drone was a massive reward (more so than a bigger number in EFT).