Ships & Modules

Double posts! Horrible forum!

And if you look at the odd EoM NPCs, their sheild holes are EM and Kin (and they shield tank).

http://games.chruker.dk/eve_online/mission_view.php?id=11

Look at the Hydra resists:
EM The Kin Exp
45 65 43 67 - Shield
60 25 25 10 - Armor
I think I'll take the Caldari drones...

Ogre Resists:
50 70 45 68 Shield
60 25 25 10 Armor

Death Lord
55 75 48 69 Shield
60 25 25 10 Armor

In that case, I find the Kin drones to be useful as they are now.
You can't reasonably tell me that you'd still take Exp or The drones over Kin on that mission.
Similar arguments can be made about some T2 ships, especially for ships where one has a large enough drone bay to carry multiple types of drones

The EM drones might be useful for the smaller ships on that level if they did more damage.
The cruisers on that level have these shield resists:
33 55 40 65

And the frigates:
13 33 33 62

Many ships can carry an extra set of lights. I'd sure rather be going against 13% resists with the reasonably fast EM drones than 62% with the Exp drones.

13% vs 33% (ie applied damage = 0.87 or 0.67 * damage) isn't enough to make the EM drones worth it when their damage modifier is only 1.15 and the Kin drones get 1.45 (keeping in mind that you've got the non-tanked armor as well to deal with)

Well, if you fly a domi/rattler/gila/ishtar/ NVexor, you probably would be killing those rates with drones.

My point is that its not simply Exp drones or Therm drones, Kin drones are viable too (note that serpentis, a much more common NPC enemy, also has Kin as its lowest resist).

EM drones are the only drones that aren't viable/competitive in any situation.
This should be changed

Faster (less Travel time), more tracking, only slightly better DPS..... clearly not a viable drone type, of course!

Its already been mentioned (many times in this thread) that there really isn't anything racially specific about these drones (note I have switched to using "Kin" and "Exp" rather than a meaningless racial designation).


Are Kin drones great? no.
Are they at least balanced from an objective point of view? yes.
We can see a clear balancing concept that CCP implemented, more drone speed(and tracking to compensate) for X less damage.
Kin drones fit that balancing concept, EM and Exp drones do not.

Is it the best balancing concept? perhaps not, perhaps the speed advantage of the Kin drones is insufficient.

But at least its not blatantly broken, at least there are clear tradeoffs so its better on one area, worse in another.


Minmatar already seem to be dominating (and one could perhaps argue that their speed + sig superiority is out of whack with the speed+ sig differences among the other races), and Gallente seem to suck (wtf is with their BCs being the 2nd slowest?) for a variety of reasons that don't come down to simple tradeoff tables.

But then under the guise of "fixing" the Gallente, I see an area where the Minmatar are blatently (without any tradeoffs whatsoever) made better than the counterparts of the other races (dramatically reduced falloff bonus for close range T2 ammo)

Forgive me for pointing out blatant examples of broken game balance where your concept of "good in some areas, worse in others" does not apply.

As to my post on the other thread about the advantages of the minmatar, that was provoked by someone claiming the *only* advantage the minmatar had in combat was speed.

No they aren't. They're balanced in the sense that the numbers line up on a spreadsheet, but I would argue that if you want to argue about balance from an objective standpoint, you have to actually define what said balance is. Perhaps you disagree, but I define balance (from an objective standpoint) as something to the effect of:
An item is considered balanced if its advantages in a given role are inversely proportional to the relative frequency in which that role is deemed useful.

That is to say, an item useful more often holds a smaller advantage over its competitors than one whose niche is very small.

It's not a concept you can really assign a number to, because if you could, every game would be perfectly balanced overnight.


It's better in one STAT, and worse in another. The drone itself has no real ROLE, which is why it never sees use. Simply swapping numbers around does not make an item balanced (can you imagine if blasters had the same DPS advantage over pulses that pulses have over blasters wrt range? You'd have 3k DPS megathrons running all over the place) It's a broken balancing method, and asking to have it forced onto the drones because right now ONE of the drones is bad (and you want to change it by making drones as a whole worse) is showing that you're not really thinking logically when it comes to wanting balance; you just want to see minmatar nerfed.


It DOES apply though. Actually BALANCING drones is more important than having them balanced numerically (see my above blaster/pulse point).


Go back to that thread, I just did a comparison that shows rather conclusively that this point is fairly spot on (for the ships in question anyway)

please dont


cause then id have to train amar drone spec

Just going to throw this out there - balance is subjective, not objective. And given that you think it is kinda makes the rest of your post seem... well stupid.

The fact of the matter is that no one uses the EM or kinetic drones. That you could find only one type of NPC rat that the kinetic drones even technically have an advantage on sort of shows the point. Also the tracking difference means literally nothing as they are all so high.

If we take "balanced" as meaning 'all 4 types are regularly used' then I believe that the drones as a whole need to be looked at. (also, under that definition, the kinetic drones are *not* balanced).

I'm inclined to agree with Liang entirely. Plus he/she said it much better than I can.

Quite a few posts ago, I gave a suggestion that did not nerf the "good" drones at all, but instead buffed the EM drones with a 0.3 damage miltplier boost and the The & Kin drones by 0.15 (this also makes the damage ratio between Kin and The drones closer to 1, ie 1.75/1.6 = 1.094 instead of 1.6/1.45= 1.103, making it more likely you'd choose the Kin drones over the The drones based on target resists or speed)
So as far as you statement of "continued insistence that we should do nothing but nerf the good drones" is a lie, plain and simple.

As far as I'm concerned, the drones could also be made exactly equal except for dealing different damage types.
The choice between drones would thus be lke the choice between Phased Plasma or EMP (or Thunderbolt vs Scourge missiles)
I also like the idea of two groups of drones, fast drones or high damage drones. THen within each group you have two drones with essentially equal stats but different damage types.

Selectable damage types is a well established Eve gameplay concept, and since we have drones with different damage types, I think it should apply there (Thus giving many gallente ships selectable damage types).

But it doesn't really apply because we have an Exp drone that is simply better than the EM drone - while I think the Kin and The drones are basically close enough*, you seem to argue otherwise, which only supports the argument that the drones need to be changed.
I would have liked to have seen a change to drone stats as part of the Gallente Buff.

* an aside about the Kin drones, perhaps the mission NPCs aren't the best example (in passing, I did make a mention of T2 resists).
Take an Broadsword, its base Shield Kin resist is 40%, its native The resist is 60%, thus every unit of Kin damage counts for 1.5 units of The, more than enough to overcome the 1.6/1.45 damage difference. (its even worse once you get it into armor).
I still think Kin vs The drones are close enough that damage type selection makes the Kin drones useful


On the other thread, not once did I suggest nerfing the Minmatar, I was complaining that they were getting yet another Buff, at a time when it was widely considered they were already OP'd, and that Gallente + some Caldari ships needed a buff.