Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In addition to the new changes in the Dev Blog, I would like to propose the following changes.

Drones skill: Increases range drones can be scooped by 500m/level. //Work in progress, I can't think of anything else other than removing the skill completely.

Ships now have a new attribute : Drone Control Circuits. Works like a turret hard point, ship can only launch as many drones as it has circuits.

Number of drones are no longer tied to a skill. This allows for more balancing between ships, and doesn't require new players to skill a level V skill ASAP to get the most out of a drone ship.

Ships will also get a VAST overhaul of bandwidth, more on this below.

Since I want this thread to be more of an Idea, I will for the most part leave specific numbers and tweaking up to CCP, I just want to present an overview.

New classes of drones:
Attack Drones: Fast, low damage, high tracking, short ranged, low hp, low bandwidth.
Combat Drones: Slow, High damage, medium tracking, medium range, High hp, medium bandwidth.
Sentry Drones: Stationary, Medium damage, low tracking, long range, medium hp, high bandwidth.

These attributes go along with racial drone attributes, IE: Minmatar attack drone will be the fastest and lowest dps drone while Gallente Combat drone will be the slowest and highest DPS.

Combat drones, by "medium range" I think that they should at least get the range of the average short ranged turret of their class. Such as heavy combat drones getting 10-20km optimal, and medium combat getting 6-14km or so.

I also think Sentry drones should at least be able to move 250m/s or so when recalling, but they should never be able to shoot and move at the same time.

For example bandwidth of the new drones:
Lights:
Volume : 5 m3
Bandwidths:
Attack : 5
Combat : 7
Sentry : 10

Medium:
Volume : 10 m3
Bandwidths:
Attack : 100
Combat : 150
Sentry : 200

Heavy:
Volume : 25 m3
Bandwidths:
Attack : 2000
Combat : 3000
Sentry : 4000

I didn't want to increase their volumes because I didn't want them to be harder to loot and haul when not in a drone bay.

This allows CCP to balance a specific ship to do exactly the amount of drone dps it wants, without affecting every other ship.
It also allows CCP to balance a specific ship to a specific drone type if they want.

Example:
Ship A
8000 bandwidth
2 drone circuits
100m3/bay
100% Heavy Sentry drone damage per level
20% Heavy Sentry Drone optimal range per level

This means that a drone ship can have the bandwidth for 2 heavy sentry drones (8000), but still be limited to 2 light attack drones.

It also means that they could do something like this:
Ship B
20000 bandwidth
10 drone circuits.

This ship could fly 10 heavy attack drones!, but only 6 Combat or 4 sentry drones. It lets them specialize the ships role more.

Also you will note, that no ship that is specialized in light drones would ever have enough bandwidth to fit even a single medium drone and a medium drone ship will never have enough bandwidth to fit a single heavy drone. This is how turrets/launchers work and it is how drones should work as well. There of course would be cases where this is changed, such as an Ishtar having 15000-20000 bandwidth.

Ships like the Cerberus can now have a 40m3 drone bay, with 300 bandwidth and only 3 drone circuits. They will be limited to 3 medium drones, and will never be able to fly a full flight of 5 light drones like they currently would be able to do if they had enough bandwidth for 3 medium drones.

I feel that this idea, which is not perfect I'm sure, with the right tweaking of bandwidth/damage/other attributes could really open up a lot of possibilities. Such as giving a battleship access to only 1 heavy combat drone for a little more dps, but not being able to fly a full flight of light drones so the ship would still be vulnerable to smaller ships.

I've never messed with fighters/fighter bombers so I will leave those up to someone else. They would obviously need to have their bandwidths adjusted as necessary.

For the sake of discussion and the fact that I spent way too long ninja typing this at work >.<, could someone at least point out what they don't like about it or why they think it wouldn't work?

Lots of possibilities there for the future, I too am waiting to see how the current implementation upgrades work out though.
lets see, save your work for a few months time and see what is needed then.

good ideas always welcome. thanks for your time spent.

Not particularly Imbalancing and would improve QOL so this isn't a bad idea.



Already exists as a capital mod. when it was first introduced on the test server years ago you could actually fit it to sub caps. It was deemed too overpowered and then restricted to caps. Adding the ability to deploy additional drones to subcaps is something that will outright never happen. If you were paying attention to the reasons behind the drone assist nerf you would know that drones tend to A$$ R*** the server during fleet fights. Additionally all subcap drone bonuses are designed around only having 5 of them, so giving subcaps more would require a lot of additional re-balancing of ships/mods to make sure they don't outright break the game.



This I agree with. Or alternatively restrict the number of turrets a player can activate to 3; then add a skill that increases that number by one per level for a max of 8 at level 5. At least make it even



No. Just for the love of God;..............no.



And this is why its extremely easy to propose ideas that will outright never happen. Not from lack of merit, but rather from the sheer volume of workload they would impose. There are other areas of the game that need attention too you know.

I kind of like the idea of being able to increase available bandwidth and number of useable drones via high slot modules.

But, that would mean something like an Algos could field 10 or even more drones depending on the fitting requirements of the modules. That would make for a lot of drone induced insta-blapping out there. But with proper attention to balance it's so crazy it just might work.

Maybe with some Medium Sentries the Gila pilots won't be QQ so bad over the new changes.....