Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I guess you'd be happy if my stabber can fit a full rack of 1400mm then also?

1400MM are a battleship weapon. Sentry drones and heavy drones are not.

They have the range and damage of battleship weapons. The only thing they get from medium is the tracking properties so give me BS weapons on HACS with medium tracking and it will be even...

Do not reduce dronebays on any of the drone boats. For instance the base Vexor and VNI are barely workable atm. Reducing dronebays would be a sure way to nerf these ships into unusability. If anything the VNI could use 25 more bay.

As for drone hp, this would also be a kick in the nuts. Unless you married it with a buff to the drone durability skill. The current 5% could easily be buffed to 10% or 20% per level if you are going to hammer drone hp. You could make levels 1 - 4 having less hp that the present but level 5 of that skill put one slightly ahead on drone hp as one is now. This would make training drone durability 5 more worthwhile (another sp time sink that would help the game, even though I personally would not enjoy it).



About the only suggestion I've liked in this thread is having some ewar effect on drone control or abilities. ECM prevents targeting, not communications. And it is already and always has been the most heavily used ewar. It needs no buff in this regard (and will be interested to see if you are actually changing the concept of ecm).

TDs could maybe gain a third script to affect a ships drone tracking or range (probably tracking). One could still hit the target ship with the TD but that ships drones no longer would receive the full benefit of the ship's tracking computers. BTW, still waiting for some missile TD modules or scripts.

Damps already can affect drone control because if the damped ship cannot lock a new target there won't be any commands from the damped ship to attack some ship that is out of targeting range. Drone independent AI might still target an aggressing ship if set to aggressive. But the ability to direct drone activity in this regard is already affected by the damping.

This leaves my favorite. Painters. Painting a ship lights it up electromagnetically one would assume. You could say that aside from increasing the sig radius the painting interferes with that ships communications to it's drones. One could give it the same reduced drone tracking effect as the suggested new TD script above.

This would be buffing two relatively underpowered ewar types. And accomplishing a small sentry nerf at the same time.


As for the other HACs. Take a utility high off the Munin and give it another medium. Give the Zealot 3 light drones. And Switch a high or a mid to a low on the Sac or something.

And please increase the agility and warp speeds on BCs and BSs (and freighters etc. for that matter), the nerf on large ship mobility was overdone.

Sorry to say, but you are soundign like one that abuses a lot the current OP status of drone cruisers and want the status quo to continue.

The other ships using sentries are also very overpowered. The dominix is still a monster as is the Eos and Carriers.

The correct thing IS hitting sentries.

Ewar against drones is bad idea.
Remember that you can still assist your drones to someone if you get jammed or damped.
The only thing what is needed to overcome all your jams and damps are :
- fleet chat where non affected people can X up
- civilian gun on each isthar - usually there is plenty of higs empty.

Ishtar have very high DPS and easy scalable between all hacs.
Yes , proposed changes will be affecting it in the battle, but not to degree CCP thinks.

But the moment you have enough of them on grid.
Nothing will change.

One of the drones will hit ceptor , as it will be moving on the right angle for those few drones.
Cruisers , they are big enough and 1 painter and web is usually present on battlefield.

Now lets not forget about the most important thing .
Those are drones.
They don't use ammo - perfect ship for all pos bashing.


Changes to isthar are needed, ship is next drake.
But like drake , many people are using it for PVE, and other activities.

Why not instead of nerfing its dps or drone tracking , lets nerf this hull by limiting powergrid and CPU .
So in order to keep current Tank ( both shield and armor ) you will have to use faction mods.

Something possible in roams, and small groups, but the moment when you want to put on grid 150 isthars that have faction mods 150mil each situation changes.

Especially when those 150 ishtars die.
Next supply of faction mods will cost you 190mil per isthar.

Next dead fleet.
250mil of the same faction mods.

Supply will be base limiting factor for ishtar.

Ship without possibility to mount enough LSE or 1600 armor plate - is worthless on current battlefield.

might make lasers used a little more.

I agree, I think drones need a complete overhaul in the way that they work. It is an ancient mechanic and hence why all these problems are cropping up.

For now though, something needs to be done about the Ishtar in the short term.

They've been rebalanced since and are good battleships at some roles - but not all.

I don't think anyone has said domis were overpowered since their last nerf.

It is perfectly possible to tweak the Ishtar so sentries are unattractive or incur fitting compromises without buggering every sentry user out there. To not do that and just gut sentries is to make sentries into 2014s heavy missile nerf.

It's not possible to have a HAC with identical sentry capability to a battleship balanced without destroying the battleship in the process.

Hell man, dominix is T1 and insurable, if they could remotely compete with ishtars, they would be used to win the isk war.



[[Edit: What I want to avoid is utterly destroying sentries as a platform for everything but the ishtar, which would then get nerfed anyway - which is what I mean when I say I want to avoid another round of "hml" nerfs. Because that's what happened there. CCP gutted HML because of drake, people warned that was a mistake yet it went in anyway. End result? Drakes then renerfed later, all other HML ships cease to undock/refit to RLML.]]