Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Explosion radius helps apply damage better - especially if your target is moving faster than the missile explosion velocity.

Still weapon bonuses.

Nester isn't a droneboat.

The Nester is a RR specialist with lasers and drones with advanced probing abilities. Its far from a dedicated droneboat.

So the Geddon is a droneboat, but the nestor isn't, despite having the same drone capabilities save for bay space, in which the nestor is superior?

On another note, seems the Barghest will be interesting without necessarily fully stepping on the RS's toes for brawling. I'm feeling like the RS still has plenty of room to exist personally.

If were considering focus to be something that can only be related to weapons sure, not that I think that is fair. But in that case I guess the RS was never a drone boat. After all the nestors laser focus mirrors the current RS's missile focus.

It also doesn't counteact the fact that a drone boat is marginally out droned by a mixed focus ship, thus making the idea that the RS needs to be limited to what a non-drone focused ship's drone capabilities are meaningless.

At this point only the industry changes have been delayed.

Let me give you people a scenario of a way the Snake is played other than a sniper, a role done better by other ships.

Any mission.

The fit is Torpedos with 1 target painter, giving you greater dps against Battleships than cruise missiles. With this fit I have a 30000 hp shield tank with ~187hp per sec shield regen.

You arrive in the pocket and you lock onto one frigate, one cruiser and the rest battleships and fly towards the next warp gate or mission objective.

First you target your torpedos and target painter onto the Battleship and destroy them one by one. This is will be very easy to do since there are few battleships and will not have to worry about switching targets often, nor waiting for long lock times. With he +50% velocity bonus, javelin torpedoes can hit out to about 50km with implants and no rigs.

Next launch your light drones, select the frigate you locked and press F. Every frigate will pop at incredible speed. Put your light drones away once the frigates are all gone and then use medium drones and do the same thing, press F with the cruiser you have locked. With +50% bonus drone damage and hp, frigates and cruiser die to light and medium drones very fast.

All one need do is lock onto and destroy battleships with torpedos and the drones do the rest, all while flying towards the next objective.

With the new iteration of the Rattlesnake, this style would not be nearly as viable, having lost +50% missile velocity bonus and +50% drone damage and hp.

It is rare for a ship to have range on their torpedoes and I don't see why the snake has to lose that. The few people who do fly it would be much better served by more high/mid/low slots instead of these drastic changes.

The fact remains that heavy drones still suck, even with the changes. Their damage application is slow, meaning lower overall dps, and they can't be used in many situations. Other ships do sniping better.

Your definition of 'Droneboat' is ludicriously narrow.

I would define a dedicated drone ship as any ship capable of fielding a full flight of drones, with a hull drone bonus (almost universally the 10% hp/dmg bonus, except on Gallente frigates).

The Amarr drone boats bonus disruption and drones while supporting full racks of unbonused highslots. The Gallente Drone boats mix hybrids and drones, with recent changes dropping bonuses elsewhere for secondary drone bonuses.

The Dominix is one of the few truly dedicated drone ships, and that is recent. For most of EVE history its bonuses were the same as the Navy Issue Dominix.

The Nestor clearly is a dedicated drone ship, and if its price wasnt comparable to a carrier I am sure it would see plenty of service in PvE along with most similar ships.

This is always the justification presented, but in reality Black Ops have a different role and a Covert Ops cloak isn't essential to their operation. The Nestor can't really function outside of high-sec without a Covert Ops cloak, as it's the slowest and least agile battleship - period.