Player Features and Ideas Discussion

50 assault frigs, its just that you can only use 10 at a time, damn bandwidth lol.

With 5 drone ships doing anything to a single drone is a loss of 20% of my drone DPS and on a hull with weapons fitted probably around 15% overall DPS loss. Reducing the drones to 2 increases that number to 50% of my drone DPS being affected and probably 30-40% of my overall DPS. I'm not opposed to the implementation, I'm just pointing out that it creates it's own weaknesses. That and it exasperates the failings of drone AI.

Its assuming that cyna is too overpowered at the moment or better than any other pirate cruiser.

The way i understand pirate faction cruisers is that all of them have damage bonus and some kind of 'exotic' bonus to divide then into roles. F.e. vigi has a web bonus, means keep the hell away from that ship cause if youre webbed youre in a bad situation. That dictates playstyle.

Now with cynabal, its abilities are to control engagement range and have low sig radius, while having decent dps. Adding warp speed bonus and lowering its previous capabilities would certainly be an interesting turn, but many will agree that its a boring bonus.

Now having its mwd resistance to scram or webb would be a truly interesting choice, sth innovative and diffrent, sth you could really use in a fight, not sth that is built in already and requires no further skill to use.

because ratting in deklein is all the PVE there is. but thanks for that insight, it would explain the change maybe.

The derp factor of drone AI is understandable, but the whole damage reduction via drone popping is a little off.

As we argued in the Worm thread, having less drones with more EHP means that your enemy will be less able to remove damage from the field. Even accounting for the extra targeting time (which favors 5 drones), until you are able to kill one of the 6x boosted ones you get 100% damage thrown against you. Also, the higher EHP gives you the opportunity to exchange drones on the fly in a close range PvP enviroment, thus keeping the pressure on without having your drones popped.

This is also why the EWAR argument is not that important. If the enemy has to web one of your drones to kill it then that web is off your ship, instantly giving you the "weather gauge" in the engagement.

Also, have in mind that you have another 8 drones like that in your bay, ready for launching.

any PVE with distance between point A and B. if you have to conserve your resources in null then it's worth hanging on to drones, but in other cases it's more efficient to pop sentries and proceed to point B, leaving them behind forever.

If you see a Gila on the field, you know it will be using two mediums. Whether or not they are easy to spot depends on how much people want to use mediums after the drone nerf/rebalance. Most likely, it will still be Lights and Sentries, with occasional Heavies use in special situations. Oh, and the Gila with mediums.

Spot the Gila and (likely) easily identify his drones. Castrate his drones using your favourite method. They will have to slowboat back to him to be scooped and redeployed, with 0 effective dps the whole time, whenever the pilot manages to notice this. Meanwhile, he's doing laughable missile dps and can be ignored until he does redeploy (you lose target lock on his drones).

If you're actually going to go through with these changes to Guristas ships, tying SO much of their damage up into a much smaller number of easily-castrated drones, make those drones immune to webs, paints, ECM, and neuts when deployed by Guristas ships. Increase the orbit speed and agility (and compensate with increased tracking), and lower the sig res.


And also this is where you begin to introduce drone assist imbalances, as predicted in the Frigates thread. In large fleet battles, it's always fun to watch the cloud of drones move from target to target. Now, with 500% bonuses, you'll see target after target melt under that cloud of drones instead of mearly being stressful or annoying. It'll be interesting watching how you imbalance the Rattle when in huge numbers while destroying .. boxing it into a small corner .. ah, specializing it in other situations.


I am curious about the Phantasm though, as it's my favourite ship hull in appearance and it will be nice to see it actually usable. The conflicting bonuses unfortunately seems to indicate lack of thought and planning .

The problem is the ishtar, meaning less use of the current Gila. It becomes the "Domi vs Rattlesnake" just with cruisers, unless you need a bunch of passive shield tank, why use a 'Sanke for pve when a Domi can get almost as much dps with just drones (and more with guns) for 1/4th the cost.

The ishtar isn't that expensive, but after a pilot can fly an ishtar, there just isn't much need for the Gila which is why you see Ishtars doing PVE stuff in Guristas space rather than the actual Gurista's Cruiser. With the kin/therm bonus, extra launcher and bonused to hell hammerheads that are better against small targets close in the Gila actually has something of an edge over the ishtar for the 1st time i can remember.

I'm not kidding, I'm going to fly that sucker till the armor shakes off in Serp/guristas pve..

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You mean like the Ogre IIs i already use in pve? with my Gila and Domi?

Prepare to be amazed then lol. How can so many pve jocks be so clueless about pve? Isn't that what a PVE player is supposed to know about?

Yeah, Gila vs Ishtar (and to a lesser extent stratios) is kinda my point. The Ishtar still remains the generalist go to. Only mission specific min maxers who are in situations where cruiser level agility is preferential to BS firepower and actually prefer the use of drones will SOMETIMES feel the gila to be superior. I don't think the design is bad persay, just that it moves the ship from one niche into a slightly tighter one when comparing to counterparts.