EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Drones are overpowered in the tournament setting.

Damage from drones is dependable and difficult to disrupt. This has been partially solved in the tournament setting by making the Dominix and Ishtar cost more points, but that adjustment was done to balance their tracking bonus for the sentry drone meta that was popular in last year's alliance tournament. Since then, other ships have had drone tweaks, most notably the Worm, Gila, and Rattlesnake. Their bonuses make light and medium drones very powerful.


Drones shrink the skill-gap between teams, making dynastic teams more vulnerable.

It's no coincidence that many tournament favorites appeared to struggle this year. Drone compositions are powerful, even in the hands of novices. Consider the popular meta from a few years ago. A skilled team (think PL or Hydra) flying around in Sleipnirs and assault frigates would have a significant advantage over a less skilled team flying the same composition. This is because communication, manual flight, and spatial awareness are needed to make such compositions work well. Now consider both types of teams in a Rattlesnake/Gila/Worm setup with a Golem. The advantage of a skilled team is reduced considerably since drones are nearly idiot-proof DPS. Assign the drones to the Golem, orbit your team's command ship, and watch enemy ships die. This is a bit simplistic of course, but my point stands: drones setups are powerful and easy to fly.

In their last few matches, PL seemed to ignore the all-too-obvious fact that drones outperform turrets. They stubbornly held onto the idea that their skills will win matches, and they floundered, bringing things like Vagabonds and Zealots. It did not end well for them.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Ships like rail Astartes, cruise Typhoons (with plenty of targeting range support), and Sleipnirs can work at times. Additionally, the Camel Empire Widow setup was quite ingenious, but ECM isn't going to consistently counter the drone meta in the tournament setting, and jamming individual drones isn't a viable tactic for large-scale 0.0 warfare.


Solving all of EVE's problems (regarding drones, anyway)

So what should happen for the next alliance tournament? Most likely, the Worm, Gila, and Rattlesnake will have their cost increased. While this may initially seem like a good idea, I would argue that it's a mistake. Increasing ship cost to balance their effectiveness is a slippery slope, and the Dominix/Ishtar points bump was unfortunately the start. What if the Gila costs more points next year? People would bring more Eoses, Navy Vexors, and Vexors. What if their cost was increased, too? We'd probably see domination by the Sleipnir/Vagabond meta. Should ships with bonuses to shield boosters cost more? Where does the balancing stop?

A better solution is bigger and much more useful. CCP needs to change two things:

1) Eliminate drone assist. This is a bizarre mechanic that has been taken advantage of in nearly game-breaking ways. Archons with sentries form massive blobs in 0.0 warfare, and drone-based teams dominate the tournament setting. Eliminating drone assist would go a long ways toward fixing this, but another change is still needed.

2) Require a lock to maintain drone DPS. This means if an Ishtar is jammed, its drones stop firing. Drone-based ships should be susceptible to ECM and damps. I understand that this could increase server load by adding a check before every drone volley; a partial solution may be to double drone damage and halve their firing rate.

These two changes would balance drones setups not only in the tournament setting, but also for much of 0.0 warfare. There would be no need to nerf the tracking bonus of Ishtars and Dominixes (this is a band-aid on a much larger problem), or to increase the points cost of any drone-based ship in a tournament. We'd see a resurgence of control, kiting, rush, and ECM setups in the tournament setting. In 0.0, Archon, Dominix, and Ishtar blobs would still work but could have their DPS disrupted by damps or jams, opening the door for innovative counters.

TL:DR - Remove drone assist and make drone boats susceptible to jamming/dampening to help balance drones in the alliance tournament and 0.0 warfare.

- sevyn

#1 I agree with, particularly with the marauder class now being totally unblockable (removing marauders as an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in breaking up the meta COULD be another stopgap/temporary solution, btw, but I think they only seriously break when combined with drone assist, which basically means all damage always applies unless your opponent is going >3km/s or so).

I think you go to far in #2, however.

Drones being a counter-Ewar mechanic in normal TQ course of play is understandable and viable, removing it totally and requiring lock would break the viability of this in situations such as solo'ing / fighting undermanned by using drone ships.

However, already, drones tend to go idle, "forget" what they're doing every so often, etc. Instead of this being a bug, maybe make it a feature?

Either
1) make an explicit (and viewable) drone aggression timer (say, 45-60s?) that requires you to re-aggress only ever so often
2) make drone control range somewhat more malleable, perhaps affected by some e-war? You could lump this in to an ECM change maybe, but that goes back to defeating the purpose of auto-aggressing drones in the first place.


On that note, overall drones still need to gain reliability, they function a bit randomly at times.


The buff to heavy drones might have been a bit over-dramatic, I don't think it's just Rattler/Gila/Worm breaking the tournament. 4-5km/s heavy drones with perfect application to cruiser and above is a bit silly. We literally concepted several teams that fielded heavy drones going faster than most missiles. Because they have near-perfect agility that made them VERY hard to counter. (those ship-fits tended to sacrifice more than we thought desirable at the time).


the worm isn't a huge problem by itself btw, although the ishkur could use a mild buff so there's an armor variant if you insist on keeping it exactly as is; in the tournament setting a 6-strong Shield wolfpack currently basicoutright owns a 6-strong armor wolfpack (roughly speaking harpy+worm vs. enyo+ishkur).

These solutions are why you are bad at EVE.

Here's a better solution: turret disruptors applied to the parent ship affect that ship's drones.

Done. Fixed.

Drones off a Rattlesnake or Gila will still kill medium or large ships. Simply adding tracking disruption to a drone isn't a solution.

as well they should, the gila and rattler are medium to large ships.

bonus points for talking about solo Tranq ganks in a tourney discussion thread.

Eliminating drone assist for the tourney would solve a lot of problems. This was a good tourney, but there was no escaping
The drone meta.