Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The problem is every cruiser has a minimum mwd speed of 1500.

Hammerheads will never catch up to an interceptor. Period. Valks perhaps with a drone nav bringing it up to about 5kms- the speed of a ceptor.

Second, a hammerhead will turn it's mwd off for 10 seconds then it will have to mwd back into range before it fires again to fall back out. If your hammerheads are moving at 2.5kms and your target is moving at 1.5kms (the slowest t1 cruiser without nanos), your hammerheads will have to burn for 10 seconds after reactivating it's mwd for a total of 20 seconds of not firing. If the target is moving at 2kms, (speed of a caracal), you are looking at 30 seconds in between volleys. Now try applying dps to a t2 cruiser who can point and mwd cap stable @2kms+.

Simply, you can't. You will be pointed while your tank is being chunked away. Your drones will be doing less than 20% of their paperdoll damage and you will be hopelessly shooting light missiles hoping for intervention. Note: Valkaries improve this somewhat, but their dps is much reduced so the math still stands.

Wall of text incoming. TLDR: Gila loses. Just to flaunt and to show I'm not full of crap, you can start by reading this.
http://themittani.com/features/lifestyles-blaptastic-laserzpewpew

For comparison, let's say I'm in an ishtar and you have choice drones. I go 1950m/s with a mwd on, you go 1750. I have a 50% reduction to sig radius with mwd, you do not. You begin to chase me, I drop curators and burn directly away from you and keep you pointed. You drop whatever medium drones you want and send them out. My curators begin applying 650 dps while your mediums aren't even in range yet. I hope you packed EM resist or you are going to have a bad time. Your drones get to take a shot, then they fall behind. Over the twenty seconds you wait for your drones to catch up to take another shot, my curators fire 5 more times applying ~13000 ehp of damage. You realize you need to apply transversal and break away, I call, overheat my point and turn to match your direction. Your mediums get to take another shot, but since you are burning lateral from my drones, I get to also so your drones fall behind again. Your large sig radius and my drone tracking bonuses allow my curators to hit the majority of the time over the next five strikes. As your ~36kehp of shield depletes, your drones get one last volley.

Now let us consider if I were chasing you. I'm faster, I can maintain a constant point. You get to apply a level of transversal against my drones, but they still get to fire every four seconds while your drones STILL only get to shoot once every 20 seconds. My only danger is you snapping around overloading and attempting to get into scram range. If you get that scram, I'm a bad pilot. If I'm a good pilot, you just died. And even if I'm a bad pilot, I'm still doing 650 em drone dps against your 600 thermal in which I have t2 resists. Not to say apples and oranges, gila and ishtar, but if you are going to choose one over the other, it's a pretty bland pick. One is able to utilize all drones, the other is pigeonholed into a type that can be easily mitigated.

That's fine, the entire point was to show that medium drone damage can easily be mitigated heavily due to the faulty AI while sentries apply dps much more reliably.

Sentries are stronger than mediums for the most part, although they do have their downsides. However showing an example of a brawler getting kited by a kiter is not really an indictment on medium drones. Drone AI does need a rework but I think for the purposes of brawling the mediums will do fine.

Until drone AI gets a rework, the Gila will be more or less limited to brawling when solo. Of course a great many ships have a bunch of options when paired with a dedicated heavy tackler. Of course I think we all hope non-sentries get stronger in terms of AI.

Agreed. This, of course, means that every Gila will be brawler fit with a scram and web, and will have a singleminded goal of getting into range of applying those. In situations where that can basically be guaranteed (FW plexes for example) the Gila will be able to use the ridiculous damage application of mediums on webbed and scrammed targets to burn them into the ground.

Of course, this also means that it will be very weak and suceptible to kiting. This is not something new to brawling ships though. This just has the unfortunate side effect of being a limitation imposed by poor mechanics and AI, and can't be blamed on the ship design itself. Perhaps this exact change is because they expect a decent drone fix within a reasonable amount of time and don't want to rebalance it separately from its peers to match their preferred final outcome.

And if not, it's still a decent change for those who have the ability to brawl (friendly tackle allowing you to get in range, forced warp ins, etc.) but does greatly cripple it for other uses.

I look forward to the day you guys are successful in optimising the code/server so we can have properly representative drone ships back.... i.e. spewing out horde of drones (in this case, 12) rather than having to use this 'hacky' approach of stupendously large bonuses to ‘mimic’ it.

Dislike!

I don't really disagree with this, but you're talking about sentry drones here. I admitted the lack of sentry drones was an issue. However, you also said previously that the Gila's new mediums are worse than heavy drones, which is just ridiculous.

What you're really saying here is "all drones except sentry drones suck."

I still think the Gila's newfound ability to fit an XLASB and maintain very high DPS and EHP will be what sets it apart. It's a brawler and brawlers generally have to get into web range to be good.

Also, the new missile bonus means you can fit LMLs on it and still have the same DPS from your launchers as well as vastly better range and application than you got from a HAM fit prepatch. 116 DPS from launchers isn't much but it will force interceptors to disengage.

that's not the useful kind of versatility, unless you're talking about mobile depots.

Fair enough. Dont get me wrong, I'm excited for these changes (excluding the cynabal. That one has a lackluster uniqueness). I was just thinking back to the Fanfest where they said they wanted to make pirate ships more versatile instead of pigeon holing them into a role. I would like more unique hulls as well :)