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Q: What's the deal with Drone assist?
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Dehval
Ascendance Rising
Ascendance..
#21 - 2014-01-17 23:00:36 UTC
ALUCARD 1208 wrote:
Well drone shield regen are taking a beating in the new round of balancing maybe this will change things and make some more counters available

Drone shield regen changes will do nothing. It is a minor nerf to sentries and more of a quality of life improvement for players who use light/medium drones. I don't really understand their justification for nerfing fighters however, considering they could use all the help they can get.

When sentries are attacked, they either die instantly or are recalled before they take damage. Having them regen shields slightly slower will have no effect on their combat performance.
trader joes Ichinumi
Doomheim
#22 - 2014-01-18 00:33:39 UTC
Dehval wrote:
ALUCARD 1208 wrote:
Well drone shield regen are taking a beating in the new round of balancing maybe this will change things and make some more counters available

Drone shield regen changes will do nothing. It is a minor nerf to sentries and more of a quality of life improvement for players who use light/medium drones. I don't really understand their justification for nerfing fighters however, considering they could use all the help they can get.

When sentries are attacked, they either die instantly or are recalled before they take damage. Having them regen shields slightly slower will have no effect on their combat performance.


It will have an impact in big long fleet fights.
Taniel Rah
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#23 - 2014-01-18 01:53:06 UTC
Basically it comes down to this CFC is losing super capital fights to N3 so their solution is to try and nerf every one game play.
Kirkwood Ross
Golden Profession
#24 - 2014-01-18 03:49:39 UTC
Drone assist has always been powerful. Once damage amps were added and people learned how powerful of a tool it was and put it into practice it became an issue.
Carla Fastfly
Doomheim
#25 - 2014-01-19 03:14:34 UTC
The problem with drone assist basically boil down to this:
In Eve, ships have upsides and downsides.
Cruisers lock faster and track better then Battleships, but they do less damage and have less range then battleships.

Now here come in the dominixes and ishtars with drone assist.

This turns out for the dominixes that they have cruiser tracking and cruiser locktime because of drone assist.

And the Ishtars have battleship dps and battlship range.

That's the main problem, cruisers should be cruiser and battleships, battleships, drone assist negates that.
Regam Voss
State War Academy
Caldari State
#26 - 2014-01-21 05:18:58 UTC
Just want to point out the OP said DRONE ASSIST and SO MANY people crying about SLOWCATS. As if slowcats are the ONLY drone assist ship in the game.
trader joes Ichinumi
Doomheim
#27 - 2014-01-22 06:41:46 UTC
Regam Voss wrote:
Just want to point out the OP said DRONE ASSIST and SO MANY people crying about SLOWCATS. As if slowcats are the ONLY drone assist ship in the game.


Removing drone assist would definitely require reworking a lot of other mechanics. For instance, incursions without drone assist become much harder.
UkaIS
Dammalin Industries Incorporated
#28 - 2014-01-22 09:42:35 UTC
Akatori Nalelmir wrote:
Okay so I get the slowcat thing, but they were around way before I left. In fact, I even supported a PL slowcat fleet back in the delve "war" of 2012.

Why are jimmies being rustled all of a sudden? It's not because goons are on the receiving end now is it?



The mechanic has been around for a long time but the problem people complain about comes from alliances having the cash to give out carriers like candy. A slowcat Archon isn't worth **** anymore compared to two years ago. Every scrub can afford one and alliances can afford quite a few fleets of them nowadays. And the problem of the mechanic starts kicking in with ridiculous numbers of sentry drones on field.
Estella Osoka
Cranky Bitches Who PMS
#29 - 2014-01-22 15:35:32 UTC
LUMINOUS SPIRIT wrote:
its not just slowcats.

in skirmish warfare, kiting ishtars are deadly.

If an ishtar locks you and starts shooting, your ship will be recieving 500-800dps within 0-150km of the ishtar's drones no matter how fast you go. Meanwhile, ishtar itself is kiting you at speeds close to 2 - 3km /s, depending on boosts/implants. Add to that sensor damps on the ishtar, and 1v1 ishtar is king.

Even ceptors can be killed off with clever piloting by the ishtar.

Ishtars are also not worrying too much ebout ewar - drones are independent more or less.

Clever use of abandon drone and reconnect to drone makes ishtars tactically very flexible.

Now imagine 3 ishtars assisting a ceptor on a gate or something. Big bubble is anchored, drones deployed around the gate at different points. Basically, a ceptor now has control of a makeshift turret set, if you will, that deals 1500dps, at a minimum, within 150km of it. Ishtars meanwhile are hovering safe, 100km+ away from the gate.

So, what do you do? Nothing thats what. Unless you have 2 logi in your small gang, you, whats the polite word, go away, because that ceptor with assist will take down your small gang in a minute.

And its all completely doable with 1 computer. ceptor is the main client, several ishtars are on the second screen just afk-orbiting. trouble? cloak up, recconect to drones later. otherwise, have fun.

No real counter either, drones are tanky as hell, and ishtars can drop 3 sets before refitting.


Now I got the urge to get a fleet of insta-locking thrashers and ishtars, and assist the drones to one of the thrashers. Now that will be a nasty gate camp.
Chuck Sanussi
Southern Cross Monopoly
Flying Dangerous
#30 - 2014-01-23 10:51:54 UTC
trader joes Ichinumi wrote:
Regam Voss wrote:
Just want to point out the OP said DRONE ASSIST and SO MANY people crying about SLOWCATS. As if slowcats are the ONLY drone assist ship in the game.


Removing drone assist would definitely require reworking a lot of other mechanics. For instance, incursions without drone assist become much harder.



Yes, so much harder, because locking the drone tag and pressing 'F' button for a dps in incursion fleet is SO HARD.

Incursion bears, you need to man up for the amount of ISK you can make doing incursions, they already are the best active isk/h in the game, wouldn't mind it being a little bit more challenging. And that comes from a fellow incursion runner.
Garviel Tarrant
Beyond Divinity Inc
Shadow Cartel
#31 - 2014-01-23 13:34:21 UTC  |  Edited by: Garviel Tarrant
Drone assist is a ****** mechanic that should be removed.

If you disagree you might have a arguement for it that i havn't heard, or more likely you are bad.


Edit: Also incursions are arbitrarily easy to run and should not be the focus of any balance conversation.

BYDI recruitment closed-ish

Ace Echo
The Tuskers
The Tuskers Co.
#32 - 2014-01-23 16:19:57 UTC  |  Edited by: Ace Echo
There are some decent counters for slowcat fleets. However, I do believe slowcats are quite powerful, and I haven't seen many slowcat failures except in undersized blobs.

I don't think this is the issue, though.

The issue is that the drone assist mechanic takes fights out of player's hands. Being a 'nullsec soldier' these days requires only:

  1. Warping to where the FC says
  2. Jumping to where the FC says
  3. Launching drones
  4. Assisting drones to who the FC says
  5. Targeting and repairing a broadcasted target, or who the FC says


Ofc that is a minor hyperbole, but it is overwhelmingly just button-pushing activities with very little ingame thought. This is evidenced by witnessing a slowcat extraction, where you'll see four or five carriers go down simply because the pilots have no clue what they're doing.

Anybody and his mother can be a grunt in a slowcat fleet, and it is very frustrating to have your ass beaten in because, even if you have skilled players and a decent counter, the enemy could log in more n00bs with free archons than you could.



By removing drone assist, the fleet's potential DPS hardly changes. Alpha will, perhaps, but if you actually train your scrubs to time volleys, listen to the FC's command, and some other basic skills, you'll find a few things will happen:

  1. Fights will become smaller, as the logistical nightmare of trying to coordinate a non-assist slowcat fleet is much harder.
  2. Fights will become more dependent on players and skill, not just button pushing.
  3. Fights will become more engaging. People say how null warfare is where the fights you're in have large ingame effects. That's not true anymore. Null is where your drones have ingame effects, while you just sit there and land reps every once and a while.

If you can milk it, it's an udder.
Silvetica Dian
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#33 - 2014-01-23 21:31:22 UTC
Huttan Funaila wrote:
The big complaint is about large fleets of Archons in nullsec (this doctrine is called "slowcats"). Essentially, you have a fleet of 250 archons all capable of fielding 10 drones. Everyone in the fleet then has the drones set to assist a fast locking sensor boosted smaller ship like a strategic cruiser. Every drone fires every 4 seconds. Assuming garde 1, no drone damage amps, that is 250 ships times 10 drones times 20 dps = 50,000 damage every second, or 200k every shot. Add in drone damage amps and tech 2 sentry drones and you "alpha" one dreadnaught off the field every 16 or 20 seconds (4 or 5 shots). Smaller ships, like battleships get blown away in a single shot.

It takes no skill of the player at the computer, just large blobs of slowcats. And because it takes no skill, the battle just boils down to who has the bigger blob. Because they are spider tanking each other (remote repairing each other), you have to kill the archon in a single server tick. If the ship survives the initial shot, it will be repaired back to full before you can shoot it again (due to TiDi).

This post explains it from the viewpoint of Goonswarm:
http://themittani.com/news/gsf-ceo-update-omegafleet-rising-0

Tactics to fight slowcat blobs:
1. Omegafleet plus FYF - get hundreds of Naglfars to alpha slowcats. Takes about 100 Naglfars to blap a slowcat in a single shot. Expect to lose a Naglfar every 16-20 seconds. Expect to blow away 1 slowcat every 36 seconds.
2. Drebuchet - Sucker them in to your POS and fling sieged dreadnaughts at the blobs. When the blobs are bowled out of spider tanking range, slowcats can be taken down by smaller gangs of tackle and subcaps using player skill.
3. Complain about drone assist and get it changed.
4. Surrender and train up to fly this year's "fit of the month" - arty Naglfars and Slowcats

My plans are to get blueprints for Naglfars and Archons and make them. The 34th rule of acquisition says that war is good for business.


You missed out bombers and supers.
also we drove off a 5 carrier + T2 armour fleet with 20 nados and took the tower we were attacking.
we killed the support, kept range and wiped out sentries as they were launched. we then bubbled the tower and it is only by getting their pets to change the PW before we killed it that they got the carriers out.
bombers can wipe out the drones or killl the cap of the carriers.
neut ships can kill the cap.
if they only have a few fast locking ships to drone assign then how hard is it to ewar those?
just because an huge blob of your fav BS doen't win doesn't mean their are no counters just means you need to adapt.
yelling to CCP to FIX DRONE ASSIGN NAOW is the nullsec equiv of plz CCP nerf ganking coz mean people killed my T1 hauler with 3 bill loot in it.

Money at its root is a form of rationing. When the richest 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion (50% of humanity) it is clear where the source of poverty is. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/20/trickle-down-economics-broken-promise-richest-85
Ace Echo
The Tuskers
The Tuskers Co.
#34 - 2014-01-24 05:10:03 UTC
Silvetica Dian wrote:

snip



The problem here was that you only were fighting 5 archons. You outnumbered them 4 to 1; You blobbed them with a bigger alpha gang.

Try getting those same results with, say, 20 or 30 carriers. That scales up to 120 nados.

If you can milk it, it's an udder.
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