Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Nobody uses heavies, because they are trash.

If you were to remove sentries, still, nobody would use heavies in 99% of PvP, barring very rare brawling setups like Blasterthrons, Armageddons, or Rattlesnakes. Please note that none of these are cruiser hulls.

A small, fragile, kiting ship that can only use heavies or other non sentry drones is thus, also trash. Nobody would be forced to do anything with Ishtars, because just about everything would be better than them. I would pick a T1 fit hurricane over a t2 Ogre wielding Ishtar.

Heavies are just that bad.

Whut? sentries... 25 m3 space.. 25 mb bandwith. Heavies... the exact same.

*confused head scratch*

You would have to drop the sentry bonus and give the heavies a lot more of a boost for people to use them. you drop sentries, and they start firing. drop heavies and they commute to the target.

And I think we all know how effective mediocre damage that can't hit small targets, can easily get killed by weapon fire, gets wiped out by a smartbomb or two on the target ship, you lose when you have to warp off, erased by an actual bombing wave, and takes several seconds minimum to travel between targets is. Especially when used in a kiting ship that is often not anywhere near the target, so that it can prevent ships from running away.

Completely useless unless it's against structures. About the only thing they can hit effectively are BC's that nobody uses, or solo BS's, because any BS fleet would just bring a firewall to cozy up next to the primary and disco.

My bad. Structures that are not POS's. They can't even do that much.

"The counter to X(n) is X(n+1)." So much for rock paper scissors.



Rattler and Domi don't have the mobility of the Ishtar. Battleships are notoriously slow, and MJDs aren't a substitute.

I'd nerf the drone bay to 250m3. Force Ishtars to make the tough choices as to what to use.

Broken record here so I am just going to start a copy and paste into all the nerf Ishtar threads I can find.

-1

Again with the nerf Ishtar / sentry drone combination. Why is it that everyone misses the most logical first step in balancing this combination and jumps immediately to the nerfs instead?

Based on reading online the most common complaint with Ishtar / sentry combination is the ability to set them to aggressive mode which allows them to attack without the pilot needing a target lock or to set them to assist another ship in which case the Ishtar becomes nothing but a transport mechanism either of these allows them to drop and run away and hide.

While nerfs to damage, control range, bandwidth and various other ideas would solve the problme for the PvP crowd it would have an even larger and un-intended affect on the usefulness of the Ishtar for PvE. We don't care about PvE you say and my response is you should, this is a game that is played by many different types of players and we all have to share the same ships and equipment and the needs of ALL segments of the game need to be considered in any balance adjustment that is made.

As this applies to the Ishtar / sentry combination why start with the nerf bat big time when a simple change to drone use mechanics may solve the problem for the PvP crowd yet have minimal impact on the PvE crowd.
Just one such idea is to remove the aggressive mode and the ability to assign drones to assist another ship, so what does this do for the situation.
1. It requires the drones pilot to have a target lock to be able to shoot anything.
2. It prevents them from dropping drones and running away like a scared baby.
3. It makes drones ships just as susceptible to EWAR as most other ships.
4. It would have minimal affect on the use of this combination in the PvE segment of the game.

So I say give these simply fixes that have minimal impact on the PvE side of the game a try first. When they are tried and IF they do not solve the balance issues for the PvP crowd then we can start to look at other things that can / should be done.

Just nerf the drone control range and all good, meaning got to be 'so close' to control sentries.

That is not necessary. If they provide a counter in the form of sensor dampening that would cut back on the range a drone can target out to, then it allows things to continue and 'aww so sorry' to anyone who neglects to think ahead if they know they are going to be dealing with drone boats of anykind. As it currently stands, ECM is effectively useless against sentries and just acts as a great way to draw their aggro. Fleets might be more balanced if Sensor dampening worked against the drones of the damped ship.

I've never used a sentry on any of those ships once, and I've had an absolute blast in them, while killing things well above my weight. Sentries are a battleship weapon. They should not be allowed on anything smaller than a BC, and those three ships would be much better balanced without them.

The ship isn't the problem its the sentries.