EVE General Discussion

It's fairly easy to find out. You just need a decent database explorer that lists the NPC stats in a human-readable way.

Chruker is unfortunately two patches behind, but I don't think the NPCs have been changed in the mean-time anyway, so let's just look at this little fellow — a frigate with this stat listed at the very end: AI_IgnoreDronesBelowSignatureRadius 50m.

He'll happily ignore light drones, whereas his elite counterpart (at 25m for the same stat) will kill the hell out of them.

I just did the first lvl4 mission in a long time, Silence the Informant, or somesuch, in a Gila with 1 DLA, 2 DDA's and no Omni.

One Bouncer sustained some armor damage because I was slow to retract them. Hobgoblin II's popped the incoming frigs and drones.

Drones are fine, but you need to pay attention.

The last time one said "Pull!" And I launched it off my ship like a clay pigeon.

Not really, no. They reduced the aggression the AI had towards drones by fiddling with the sig radius limits, which was really the only iteration needed. Beyond that, the strategies for keeping drones alive had been built up since Apocrypha and they remained a perfectly decent weapon system even back then.

“Inferior” in the sense that they do more damage more efficiently.

…except of course that neither of those things actually happened. Sentry drone use is just as applicable now as it ever was and the omnilink is still in the game and fully funcitonal. The only difference now is that you can step it up and down depending on the relative distance to the target (which is actually kind of handy). And off couse, null blobbing had very pretty much nothing to do with the omnilink rebalancing.

…also, finally being able to overheat drone stats? A-a-awesome.
I can only hope they give us more “nerfs” like that.

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Only elite type ships aggro drones. Normal ships still have the old AI when it come to drones.

As per usual mission tactics. just try and kill frigates and elite ships first then your drones will have trouble free fun.

See what happened was CCP Falcon was sitting around one day and said "I, in my greatness and infinite glory, shall name a ship after myself, and there shall be much ganking of newbs!"

So he sat around in his Falcon at a gate but noticed that some ships were warping away before he could scramble them. Then he said "This cannot be, for they mock my awesome leetness!" and he added a warp bubble to the ship, so he wouldn't have to actually target people to catch them.

But then someone had a sooped-up speedy ship and they outran his bubble, and the Great One cried "No! I cannot allow this, I shall make my namesake insanely fast as well" and it was done. Now he could catch every hapless newbie that came past and pwn them.

Then something terrible happened - someone fell into his bubble who could actually shoot back! Reeling in terror, CCP Falcon said "No! How dare these pathetic newbs shoot back at my leetness! I shall fill my ship with uber ECM buffs and put an end to this heresy at once!" And it was so.

Alas, even this was not enough. One day a drone ship fell into the bubble of CCP Falcon's namesake ship and launched it's drones. Even though it was bubbled, outrun, outmanuvered, and permajammed, it's drones kept on attacking anyway and his ship actually took a point of armor damage!

This insult simply could not be allowed to stand, so every patch since then has - as punishment for our wicked transgressions - has slowly but surely been grinding drones away to utter uselessness.

My Armageddon does completely fine with the drone/omni directional changes.

I've even learned to watch my cap better because of the changes. HTFU

maybe because they did the math and found that even overheated, the stats are still worse than pre patch?

if you factor in that, in pve, overheating is not a thing (unless for tank in very bad situation), it is a direct nerf