Missions & Complexes

Did I step into a time warp?

From what I've noticed is the that Elite frigates tend to target light drones a lot more. But honestly dead light drones is just the price of running missions. Keep an eye on their health and replace them every so often. If you think the standard AI is bad you should try the sleeper AI which tends to eat drones like popcorn unless you have 2-3 people running the site.

There isn't a lot you can do about that, other than dealing more dps from the gnosis itself and making the gnosis a source of ewar, and recognising that elite cruisers and elite frigates will kill medium and small drones if they can.

If you have medium turrets on the gnosis then they may well do a lot more damage if you are webbing stuff, and you shouldn't send combats out past web range unless you understand the NPCs drone aggro tendencies pretty well.

If say you were using lasers, you would want a couple of heatsinks and a web on it.
If say you were using missiles, you would want a couple of ballistic controls and a target painter on it.

not a gnosis issue, but thanks for info.

it does seem broken that sentry drones are the only useful drones in pve.

The simplest solution is to never deploy light/med/hvy drones to attack targets > 10km. Only deploy them to targets within 10km radius of your ship.
Your chances of saving a drone which had been targeted and heavily webbed by NPC frigates is almost 100% due to the closer distance - I personally prefer 5km radius.

Mission drone boats should use sentry drones exclusively and pack a flight (or two) of lights or med for the above anti-frig defence. Heavy drones are too slow for effective use in anything larger than a cruiser hull.
Any mission drone boats which rely on lights/meds as its main weapon will fail.

op has a point so,

im not using any drones anymore (do more damage with my gun/missile boats). before the ai change i always used light to get rid of frigates or destroyers, now there r 2 possibilities (with near perfect drone skills). Possibility 1 they get alphad, worst mission i lost overall 10 hob 2 (2nd set was for me to gtf out and refit), the first ones where all the same, go out hunt frigs, get alpha -1 drone. So now my standard fit includes web and tp and no drones what so ever. Possibility 2 they never get targeted.

Sentries still work great, but small combats cant fullfill their role in half of the l4 missions, so the ai is great but the drones lose theire validity for pve.

I wonder if all the people that support the crazy drone aggro would still if NPCs attacked turrets and launchers? You would have to stop firing till the aggro went away. This is pretty much what happens with drones. It's not a big deal if guns or missiles are your main DPS but when you're in a drone ship it blows.

This AI is exceedingly annoying. I came pretty close to being stuck warp-jammed by some L4 frigs the other night - lost a whole flight of lights and had to scrounge for drones in wrecks and load them into my drone bay using a mobile depot. ...The main problem's lights/hobgoblins. They get targeted even if you had full aggro & are still shooting, die before you can recall them, and I'm losing a few of them per mission WITH a remote repper. You put them out to clean up a 6-10 frigs at the end of a mission and they'll end up popped if you don't micromanage them to death. This is supposed to be fun? Seriously? ...Once again here, the big losers are mission battleships using lights to scram frigs off (On top of the warp speed nerf, ). You're really killing drone use and making battleships much suckier with this nonsense. Why give them a 50m^3 drone bay at all? ...maybe I'll use Hob Is, if it's gonna be this expensive.



This is a great point. I'll support drones being aggro'd and destroyed just as soon as you agree that NPCs should be able to target your highslot turrets and blow them up. ...What? That''s totally realistic, people have been taking out gun turrets for centuries, why are you against it in Eve?

This puts a notable dent in my bottom line, involves constantly, annoy micromanagement, and I'm not happy. For god's sake, quit nerfing everything & everyone just to catch a couple people making unimpressive bad money half AFK. If you want to fix AFK drone boats, making lights instapop in missions is a really annoying way to go about it - we don't need to risk losing a drone every 60 seconds. Lower the damage NPCs do to lights or something. You don't have justify it beyond "gameplay balance"; just do it.

It's the elite frigates that are the problem. The moment they see drones, they jump on them one by one and they are very effective to take them down quickly.

Drones and drone ships will be killed slowly by CCP to solve their server load issues.