Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think that this is an opportunity to add missile launcher hardpoints on the Ishtar. Change one of the bonuses to a rate of fire bonus to festival launchers.

I agree along with other changes this could help alleviate the ishtar domination

Ishtar does have bonuses to BS sized weapons system, or did you not pay any attention to the pirate ship balance pass? Look at Guristas' ships, drone sizes are listed there for our pleasure per ship.

Stupid analogue aside, yes drones have downsides in that you need to fly back to them to pick them up. Oh wait, you have 3 flights + depot with an extra flight anyways. Lose all 4 flights? Just run away from bubbles at 2k+ m/s, warp away, get moar drones.

I've been on bombing runs to take out sentry drones and it takes on average 8 bombs detonating within 5 seconds to wipe sentries, meaning you need 2 wings (theoretically 6 is enough but people can fail). After you've done this against an FC, the next thing you see is 100 ishtars pooping drones into a cloud with dimensions 2-4x the size of the bomb explosion radius, meaning you need to field 2-4x more bombers to do the same damage, yet the drones continue applying full DPS if the FC is intelligent at flying the blob of potatoes.

TL;DR: BS weapon system, hard to get rid of outside of killing the drone owner, too much HP, no real downsides because 4 flights per ishtar.

Tri is the only alliance I've ever seen flying Ishtars correctly, Ishtars are stupidly effective in correct hands.

Unless something changed since a month or 3 after the rat agro change when I largely stopped using drones, no. Both your ship and the target must be within drone control range. It's one of the reasons no body ever complained about Garde range, though they were not used much before the battleship rebalance gave them useful range. Other than Garde, any sentry will hit as far away as you can use, their 'superior range' is largely wasted due to drone control limitations.

On the other hand, the idea of limiting the target range as Frostys suggested would change how they are piloted, but not much in how they fight, drone control range would not change, and if sniped from beyond target range the drones would still respond on their own---the main difference would be that they drop sentries and then fly into target range to engage, which many do already anyway.

It's almost a 'be careful what you wish for' scenario. Remove sentries from the Ishtar and you also have to reassign half it's bonuses to other things---currently the ship functionally operates as if it only had 2 bonuses, because you can't fly full flights of heavies and sentries at the same time. If the ship were fairly bonused, it's drone bonuses would be doubled like the Minmitar boat, or else the bonuses would apply to universal drone attributes that worked on all drones.

Using ECM, etc... to break a ships connections with it's drones would make every drone ship utterly useless. Drones come with enough downsides, and a big one is that they are easily destroyed. If they are that much of a problem, just shoot them--- they are not tough, and a sentry has the sig of a stationary cruiser. As was previously discussed, they are limited by drone control range regardless of the range of the sentry itself--- perhaps it's time to revisit the occasional sniping battleship or assault battlecruiser to handle such things. I see this as more of a failure to adapt to drones becoming actually useful in PvP than a problem with the ships using drones. Until the relatively recent changes that gave a free Omni to a couple of drone bonused hulls and the addition of some damage mods, drones were considered pretty useless except as temporary frigate cover. For the ships with the tracking bonuses, all that happened is more dps moved into drones and away from onboard guns.

Incremental nerfs are ok, and in this case forcing the Ishtar to use one of it's slots to maintain parity is a step in the right direction.

That said, and this has been echoed many times in the thread, have you considered looking at Sentry drones? I understand the Ishtar is meant to be the 'sniper' HAC for the Gallente, so maybe a behaviour change for the Sentries is in order, like making them orbit their parent or assigned ship.

They didn't "fix" it, they made it broken in a different way.

maybe sentries, if regular drones get immobile becouse ewar they'll get instakilled then the ship (now we arent' talking about ishtar anymore) lose its only weapon.
ewar should be temporary, not a permanent weapon denial.

Balancing ewar is a separate topic. Making ewar affect drones just makes too much sense for ccp to implement. There is ECCM which is the counter to ECM. So ecm is not permanent. It can be if you're fitted to make it highly effective. But there are still counters in game for that.

To deal with sentries? Rohk comes to mind, as does any maurader-- large rails will do the job easily, as will beams and cruise...artillery will be in falloff and fire a bit slow for the purpose. Get outside that drone control range--- which is only 100 or less for 99.9999% of all drone boats and you are shooting a stationary cruiser. I don't care how bad you think laser tracking is, they can hit a stationary cruiser which is what a sentry looks like for targeting, and if you can't, it's not like target painters don't exist or are hard to use.

Expensive? perhaps, but it can be done cheaper by the attack battlecruisers. They can counter by picking up their sentries and chasing you, but then they are doing exactly 0 DPS. Stop letting them fight how they want, and this problem will go away.