Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First of all, you only lost a third of your previous medium and light drone hitpoints and damage.
Secondly, you didn't lose any drone control range, as you are free to not use that new launcher hardpoint and go for a second drone link augmenter.
Thirdly, I don't think that a lot of the "nerfs" are actual nerfs, and the ones that are are outweighed by the buffs. Also, you forgot to mention that the damage bonus applies to all sizes of missiles, so your rattlesnake could be a better RLML platform then a caracal (I think, I haven't done the math) if you wanted it to be one.

With all due respect, the thread dedicated to it is so full of crap that dev have abandoned it and all the feedback there. If you want anything read you post some other palce :P

You realise that the guristas ships all do a crap ton more damage now right?

Im glad that lore and feeling and immersion are important to you... The problem is that the lore and immersion should NEVER come before game balance.

Right now I believe the Rattlesnake is a balanced ship, and just because it doesnt do what YOU want it to do is YOUR problem.

You say that you dont care about missile damage and thats great for you; there are a ton of other ships you can fly, but if you want to convince people that this ship is broken, unbalanced or needs a change you're going to need more than "it doesnt feel right" or "i dont like it"

Doesn't need lights or mediums as you can now fit any size of missiles and have pretty good DPS. You know you can replace those lights with around 400 DPS of RLML now, right? Even so, you can carry them if you really want unbonused drones to supplement your missile damage. Even without bonuses they're still doing 66% of the damage, so combined with the missiles you're doing fantastic damage.

No drone control range was lost. You can still use that high as a utility if you want to. Nobody's forcing you. Sure, you lose 20% of your missile DPS, but that's a choice you have to make.

With regards to losing a larger chunk of damage if a drone is destroyed or recalled, it's a good thing those things now have almost double the EHP. They'll either live twice as long, or you can recall them after twice as much time.

As for the missile velocity bonus, so long and good riddance. The missile damage before was pathetic, and the range was unnecessary. Now the range is still ridiculously long on Cruises, and you can choose any missile type and do good damage. Win-win.

Really, I'm not seeing much/any nerf except for the lost small drone potential, which is made up for with a rack of LML's.

Even drone assist was buffed. Now you can assign literally a wing's worth of bonused Geckos to a pilot and unleash hell with 137.5 effective Geckos that each have almost 26k EHP, or you can assign half a wing of Sentries and deal damage equivalent to a whole wings worth of assigned Domi Sentries.

Noone has ever kept playing a game just because it was perfectly balanced, consider that.

More than people who failed to get immersed and have fun in the first few days/weeks? :)

EDIT: and that is when we even accept the false premise that people actually primarily quit due to balance reasons, and not when their experience ingame becomes bad

If lore is your problem here's a fix:

While cannibalizing most of the electronics for the super drone technology some bright mind found a way to plug missile navigation into the drone navigation processes and the warhead damage application predictions into the drone weapon targeting heuristics. Thus shooting missiles with the Guristas ships feels more like suiciding drones into your targets than firing missiles while still translating your skills for missiles into drone commands for the launchers.

Unconventional, sure, but we're talking about the Guristas here, if it works, to hell with conventions.

Fixed the light % reduction in the main post.

And I can mention it again, the top post has the preposition of using all weapon high slots and that does lead to the loss of drone range. And I for one worked hard to get the 100+ km control and lock range for a MJD jump to the far side, jumping through is not always beneficial.

Regarding Missiles

The damage +% sounds nice, but I for one never liked it (on the Drake for example), I always carry all damage types with me and in my opinion the 50% bonus does not make up for the loss of damage dealt towards high thermal and kinetic resist vessels.
Shooting a target that has 20% therm/kin resist might look great, but shooting one with 80% resist will mean you need +300% damage to balance out the wrong damage type, good luck with your +50%°°.

Another point is, that relying on kin/therm missiles alone restricts not only your options, but also your active gameplay. I always think it funny when player complain about miners doing just afk gameplay - an active miner has probably more active target management going on then a mission running drake pilot. Ctrl+click, hit F1. yeah, missile boats are really versatile compared to the afk drone boats (there are 2 more clicks involved for the most primitive drone action then any other weapon system)°°
It restricts active game play and simplifies choices (or rather tempts to overlook them).
Of course you don't have to, but then you will trhow away a complete section of the skill bonus.

The loss of missile velocity might not have such an impact, if you see it just as a range bonus, sure, but I see it as a great loss in regards to damage (time) on target. Sure, I really don't need the range, but faster missile speed helps a lot to predict how many volleys are needed and when to cancel an attack. Btw. if you haven't noticed, canceling a module is way more beneficial to dps spread over multiple targets then a +5% rate of fire increase per level. Again, active game play over moronic pushing a button, wait till the target dies, hit button again for next.

In my situation, I use 1 volley for cruiser size ships and 2 volleys for BS size, the drones do the rest in the same amount of time. I have no benefits from neither the 5th launcher, nor the damage bonus. The number of volleys is still the same, only I spent 25% more ammo and the target might actually take one more drone cycle to kill due to the longer travel time of the missiles - so much for reality vs theory.

And the argument of now being able to use RHML or other launchers does not count at all, since some deemed the range bonus unnecessary anyway and no other bonus was in effect for cruise or torpedoes - therefore you could have used all other launchers before in the same manner. Being only able to now is a rubbish.

See, the mistake you're making is caring about PvE balance. PvE balance is secondary to PvP balance. The primary concern for PvE balance is making sure that the Risk vs Reward in PvE is kept intact, and that the ISK flow is kept low enough preventing severe inflation. If something gets broken for PvE in an attempt to maintain PvP balance, it's an unfortunate consequence. I'm sorry, but I'd rather have a ship that sucks at farming PvE but is balanced in PvP than a ship that is good at ratting but has a remote AOE Doomsday (for example).

The Velocity bonus was pretty much worthless for PvP. They only applied on Cruises and Torps, and thanks to the (sorta) recent Cruise buff nobody used Torps so it was completely unnecessary what with Cruises having >150km range. Besides, the launchers weren't damage bonused so most people didn't bother with them/used smaller launchers in PvP. The range issues of RHML's and other launchers are nonexistent if you're shooting a target you have tackled, and are easily fixed by moving if someone else has the target tackled.