Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So everyone's crying about drone assist fleets these days. I agree that current drone assist doctrines can be a bit OP, but I don't agree with everyone saying that the mechanic needs to be nerfed. It's a valid tactic; hell, I love my Slowcat IMO, the issue isn't that drone assist needs a nerf; I think the real problem is that there aren't many real counters to it.

I say leave the drone assist mechanic alone, and instead introduce a new module, the Drone Bandwidth Dampener (DBD), that would affect an enemy ship's drone bandwidth; this would mean that if a ship's drone bandwidth drops below the amount that would be required to field the number of drones it currently has in space, that ship starts losing control of its drones one at a time. If a drone's owner loses control of the drone, it can no longer be assisted to someone else. In effect, these drones would be abandoned, and could be recovered by their owners through the context menu like normal once the ship's bandwidth is restored.

Think of the current large fleet meta that uses squads of Celestis' to apply remote sensor damps on enemy logi (either range or lock time): this new mechanic would work much in the same way, only you would start limiting the number of drones being assisted to the person being drone assisted, through the new mechanic of damping out the drone's owners. Game balance is upheld through the fact that you can only bring so many damping ships in a fleet and still maintain a good fleet comp, and of course through stacking penalties. You want to completely damp out ALL of the Domis in your enemy's fleet? Better bring a ton of damping ships!

The DBD would be a mid-slot EWAR module, working in much the same way that a Remote Sensor Dampener works, without the ability to script it: it would give a certain penalty to a target ship's drone bandwidth per level. This module would require a new skill to be trained in order use it, which would boost the module's effectiveness by a certain margin per level. All ships that currently have a bonus to RSD's would also receive a bonus to the DBD.

I think the following example would be a good implementation of this new module/mechanic: The module itself would have a small base amount of bandwidth damped. With the skill trained to level one, a single hull-bonused ship could interrupt the use of 20% of a target ship's drones (one drone for a flight of five, two drones for a flight of ten); at level five, you could interrupt the use of 100% of a full flight of drones. The total effect applied by the module, skill, and any hull bonus should take stacking penalties into account so that interrupting all of the drones in a full flight would require the skill to be at level five with three or four DBD's fit on a bonused hull. Unbonused hulls should never be able to damp 100% of the target's drone bandwidth. It needs to be a percentage of the target ship's max drone bandwidth rather than a specific amount of drone bandwidth so that the effect scales with various sizes of drones (i.e., a flight of light drones vs. a flight of sentries). This skill would need to be a rank four or five skill, so that training level five would really have to be weighed against training other skills. With these restrictions in place, I believe game balance can be maintained. Again, this isn't intended to completely kill drone assist, but merely to offer a decent counter to it.

On a smaller scale, the module could be used in a solo/small gang setting by pilots who are specifically targeting drone boats, if they're willing to dedicate one or more mid-slots to the module.You might not be able to completely damp out all of a Vexor's drones, but you could deny the use of, say, two or three of them with two DBD's fit, drastically reducing the DPS you take (again, just an example). And, considering many ships utilize a mix of two heavy/two medium/one light drone (75m/b bandwidth), smaller drones should be affected before larger drones.

This is really just a rough idea, and definitely needs a lot of refinement. I'm not inclined to do the hard math behind it to really flesh it out that far; I couldn't even begin to suggest what percentage the module should have as a base, what percentage the skill would boost by, etc. But, if it can be implemented in a balanced way, I think this new module and mechanic could really offer a good counter to drone assist fleets, without completely negating them, and could open up some interesting possibilities in the solo/small gang arena. Feel free to offer your comments/criticisms in this thread, I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this. Trolls are always welcome, of course

That's the point I'm trying to make...it doesn't need a nerf or to be removed, it just needs a decent counter.

-4/10

That's why I proposed that the effect would be against a percentage of the target's total drone bandwidth, not a straight amount of that bandwidth. Interrupting one drone out of five would take the same skill level/number of DBD's, no matter if the target's bandwidth is 25 or 125. So against a Tristan, a Celestis (bonused hull) with four mods fitted and the skill at five, yes, would take a Tristan out of the fight. With the skill at level one, probably 1-2 drones are interrupted.

One module on an unbonused hull, at skill level five, might interrupt one or two drones out of a full flight of five.

Problem is not in drone assist, but in slowcat format overall: all those drones just lag the system and are reason for crashed nodes. Bottomless drone bay should go away. Solution for this is not simple: CCP might have to remove +1drone/level from carriers, forbid carriers from using normal drones/sentries, buff fighters and make DDAs/Omnilinks affect fighters. Same treatment for supers.

yeah, the drone lag is stupid, fleets can unintentionally or even intentionally crash nodes by dropping hundreds of drones at the same time.

when drones control went from 10 drones to 5, they added ADV drone interfacing to "duplicate drone effectiveness". i guess its time for another drone crunch.

Impossible to smartbomb in vicinity of station

I see a need for two different modules:
- A standard sized one, that can fit to any mid slot, which simply blocks a number of drones from a targeted ship from acquiring new targets (so they can still be returned to the drone bay, but can't engage anything new), based on the amount of bandwidth being damped. This provides a suitable counter to small gang drone assist, that is situational enough that it probably won't be brought to every fight, and not so overpowered as to completely negate drone assist. Affected drones would show an "interference" state in the drone window.
- A capital sized one that fits to a high slot, and instantly dumps a massive amount of capacitor into an AOE drone command jamming effect, disconnecting ALL drones in the area of effect, hostile, friendly, or otherwise, and making reconnecting impossible for a short period of time (a minute or two). This discourages drone assist doctrines on the sort of large fights where it's really problematic, since the tactic would be easily countered.

Another solution, perhaps more radical, is to basically limit the total drone control on grid, and when that's exceeded, the drones take longer to receive commands, with only a percentage of the drones on field acting on each tick. The more crowded the field becomes with drones, the longer it takes them to respond, So, if the limit is 500 drones per tick, and each of 1000 players have 5 drones out, then each drone would take up to 10 ticks to respond, with the available command limit spread evenly amongst the drone boats on grid, and the excess commands being queued. That nullifies the present advantage of large scale drone assist, since the perfect coordination it allows would go to hell in a large battle, and it provides a strong way to mitigate the performance impact of huge numbers of drones, by introducing a mechanic that directly limits their resource usage