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That is not what it says. The two new skills are Light and Medium Combat Drones. Both of these will be derived from the current Combat Drone Operation skill. If someone didn't train Combat Drone Operation prior to the change, they won't magically have the new skills afterwards. If they had it at 3, then they will get those two skills at 3 afterwards.

Scout Drone Operation is merely being renamed to Drone Avionics.

what about mining drones?
will they benefit from new skills?

How the Drone Interfacing change will affect them?

to be honest, im only a 4 months old eve player, most of the things i don unersand yet, but i have to agree with two opinions.
once, i like drones. and i use only gal, and minnie drones, for dps or speed. i never bothered by the cald or amarr drones.
second, i have booth skills at lvl 5. i mean scout drone operation, and combat drone operation. if i would have only one of them on lvl 5, and the other one on lvl 0 , i will have the same skills at the same level. it means, im losing skilling time, ccp will stole it -.-
i think booth problems should be solved.
sorry for my english, i speak it badly :/

could this please be stated in the blog - I've just reread it twice, and found no mention of skill ranks, or that scout drone operation will feature......

Could somebody work out what the 20 days for 2% additional damage from Gallente Drone Specialization 4 to 5 will add up to for Gardes.

I think all specialization skills should be worth more the higher you train. So for Drone Specialization as you train the skill to 5, the benefit increases accordingly. As it is now lvl 1 takes 24 mins and gives 2% bonus, lvl 5 takes 20 days but still only adds an additional 2%.

Drone specializations could work like -
Level 1, unlocks the T2 drone (light, medium, heavy and sentry)
Level 2, gives a 2% damage increase
Level 3, adds and additional 3% damage
Level 4, adds 5% damage
Level 5, doubles the 5% from level 4, to end up with a total of 10% damage increase at lvl 5 as it is now but the 20 days training gives the most benefit.

Unlocks for T2 drones would need pre-requisites of lvl 5 in class.
So to use T2 heavy drones you would need Heavy Drone Operation 5 and Specialization 1.
T2 sentry drones would require, Sentry Drone Operation 5 and specialization 1.

This would actually reduce training times to get T2 drones (a little bit) but also give specializing to 5 more of an incentive for maximum damage.

Oh, my. I do not recall reading that. Doesn't mean I didn't. Just means my memory is doing its typical thing. In either case, it needs to be featured prominently on the front page.

true what that means is you don't need to have combat drone operation at all , which is a bad thing for those who have it trained to V

Can we get some clarification on this point, as the original Dev Blog has no reference to Scout Drone Operation other than it being renamed Drone Avionics...?

Currently the 'free skillpoints' from training Combat Drone Operation (x2) and obtaining Light Drone Operation (x1) as well as Medium Drone Operation (x2) are quite minimal, and not worth training cross map (or even on map for a newer player) and I have been trying to explain to folks that is is not nearly the bonus that Destroyers or Battlecruisers were.

But if instead you get access to Light/Medium Drone Operation from solely Scout Drone Operation (x1) a skill that is universally good for any drones, I will tell each and every new player to train Scout Drone Operation to V immediately.

This seems like an oversight, or just a gift to every doctrine Sentry Drone pilot that never bothered to train anything else.

You will need sentry 5 and racial drone spec 1. Anything else is kinda redundant since SDI already requires drones V.

It was a clarification brought about afterwards and takes precedent over the blog. Reason for the change being if one had for example Combat drone op 4, Scout drone op 5 and all racial drone specs at 2, they had access to all light and medium T2 drones, but after the change they wouldn't as those unlocks would be migrating to the skills split from combat drone op.

So in the nature of if you could use it before you can use it after, the new skills which were originally coming from Combat drone op are now cloning the higher od SDO or CDO. That being the case if you have SDO V there isn't much point training CDO.

So since i have been bringing my drone skills up to all 5 in the past months, you are now telling me that training combat drone operation V was 100% waste of time because i would have gotten it anyway? Thank you very much.

The only reason those people suggested that is "Can i haz free SP, i have scout drone op V but not combat drone op V". I also don't understand this decision in relation to the bonus of the skills. Scout drone op and combat drone op are completely different bonuses and a drone range bonus is used as a base for rebalancing a drone damage skill? What's gonna be next? Getting a free turret DPS skill because you have trained a locking range one that sounds remotely similar?

I also recommended training combat drone op V to friends who then did it after the blog was first released without following this threadnaught...

Guess it is not a good idea to follow those "early" announcements too quickly... things apparently might turn out to be a loss for you.

Also i believe that this is worth an edit in the original blog post if that has not happened yet, since more and more people will fall for it. EDIT: And indeed there is no warning about it yet. Wasted skillpoints ftw.