Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I don't believe there are stacking penalties at all for neuts or webs.

Damps, TD, and painting, yes.

I had a similar idea I shared once. No change to small, medium, or heavy drones, as I believe they are well balanced as is. But I suggested that sentries, fighters, and fighter-bombers all take capacitor from the trigger ship to fire. Numbers adjust to preferred balance, but I believe that simple change would have brought them into great balance and fixed a lot of other problems where the devs are trying to fix to not always a graceful solution.

Like Skynet. Can't use an interceptor as your trigger ship if the amount of cap needed for a fighter to fire its weapon is greater than an interceptor even has. You'd have to use bigger ships, a small gang or fleet even to make it work, but you could keep the assist mechanic (as was the entire point with carriers to begin with) while still putting a gentle nerf on a rather lopsided and controversial tactic.

Likewise, you couldn't use a small ship of any sort to be the "trigger bunny" for masses of sentry drones if the ship doesn't have the cap for it. Plus firing every four seconds for all those drones...pretty taxing on even a large ship. The meta would still exist, but you'd have to adapt it to make it work. A full force of 50 sentries might be too much cap for even a subcap to handle. Heck, if the numbers were in any way meaningful, a subcap probably couldn't fire off more than about 10 or 15 with a full capacitor charge. You'd have to split up the drone assignments (teamwork and coordination!), or use Minnmitar ships for your alpha. And there'd be more opportunity for disruption.

I felt that amazing balance could be had there. But it went over like a lead balloon. Your idea is a bit too gentle; it would require a rework of the code (like my idea) to make that cap drain happen for launching drones, but then still changes almost nothing during the course of a battle. If you need a change to happen, it has to provide results to be worth the work involved.

Drone boats are currently too strong in my opinion. Tristan, vexor, vexxor navy, ishtar all best in class. The active tanks on myrms and vexor/vexor navys are pretty ridiculous. Drone boats are basically ewar immune, and shooting the drones doens't do much with the huge drone bays they have. They just outshine too many other ships, have way too much ez fitting because they don't use the highs for weapons, and can ignore or pay little attention to many of the shortcomings of other weapon systems (like dmg application, ewar, range, target selection, damage type) They can just carry a wide range of drones and kick ass in so many situations. One of the best ways to fight sentry drone based fleets right now is bombing, but it's not even that effective, because they can just launch more. Drone boats need a nerf. They will still be good, but now you actually have to manage your cap, and your drones more, people who are bad at that will be punished more.

Arbitrator and algos may need some kind of bonus as to dodge the nerf, maybe "drones do not require cap to launch" added to them.

-1

Bad ideas are bad ideas.
For most of my time drones ships were essentially useless in this game, now that they come up to par everyone wants to nerf them back into a useless state, as a drones pilot I say no to that horrible idea.

Adapt and overcome, or simply die it is your choice.

I believe I mentioned exactly this in a thread regarding the Ishtar.....

Your idea hurts non drone boats (laser and hybrid especially) that use drones as a secondary than it does drone boats.


As you say...drone boats have fitting freedoms. Putting on cap mods or cap rigs not going to ruin them. This was in fact the hallmark fit of AFK domi's before NPC aggro shifted. Strong tank, cap mods to permarun it, get room aggro on domi, launch drones....and walk away. tank the whole room....and not die.

Drone boats would just squeeze in cap mods the tl;dr. Not full blown aft domi of old....but enough to get cap to run prop mod pulsing if only to gtfo fast after dropping the drones (and maybe assigning them).


Where as with my laser and hybrid boats to keep my high slots firing, tank mods running and prop mod pulsing I play quite a few cap games. For this already I have cap mods in place. Enough to have run times not suck ass basically.

However...I also use mediums as a last line of defence versus small stuff. With your idea I launch some mediums its gonna suck massive ass cap wise. My fits already squeezed any cap mods on for my current need. To get more I quickly enter the gimping zone.

" Webs and Target Painters have a stacking penalty, as do Tracking Disruptors (not that there's a drone for those) "
Yes there are, and they get stacking penalties which makes them terrible. Who's misinformed?
https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Item_Database:Drones:Electronic_Warfare_Drones

But you are right ecm drones have no stacking penalty.

Also, sub BS ships that aren't drone boats, use light drones, which is why it was suggested that the light drones use"almost nothing" or perhaps just make them not use cap. Tristan would need some other nerf, it's WAY stronger atm than other t1 non faction frigs.

The lore behind it is that drones have some sort of magnetic launch catapult (someone asked about the reason lore wise) Much like the U.S. military uses a catapult to launch its fighters from aircraft carriers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLVQE2Ml9z8
It would make sense to use an energy based system in space, over a piston based system, which would require you to carry the gasses with you.

A lot of people in this thread are being way too dramatic. It's about BALANCE, drone ships outshine way too many other ships in their classes. I'm not suggesting making them useless, it's just a small nerf to tone them down a little.

The versatility a large drone bay provides (you carry multiple damage types, sentries that are good at multiple ranges, with multiple levels of damage application, and some ecm drones because why not, and switch them out at will for 0 cost) as well as the massive drone bonus's many of these ships, all for 0 fitting. THEY ARE OVERPOWERED.

A good place to hit them would be in the cap. The numbers would have to be worked out as to just how much cap they use. Again the idea is that getting your drones shot down would actually matter more because the launching would cost you some cap, currently ships with these huge drone bays can just keep launching more till the fight ends with no fucks given. This would also help against the super-tanking multiple repper drone ships. As well as the 'drop sentries and burn around forever' ishtar style.

Battle cruisers should as they are cruisers capable of mounting battleship class weapons. Anything below that I'd be fine with dropping sentry bonuses and replacing with heavy drone speed/tracking bonuses instead. Any ship should still be able to launch any drone if it has the bandwidth for it but nothing below BC should get bonuses on them.

Drones are overpowered on battleships. Letting smaller ships use them just makes it worse. Seriously, compare the DPS/range profile of Bouncers/Wardens on a Dominix to that of any of the turrets on their own respective BS hulls.

Other drones are also very overpowered.

The thing is, heavy drones used to be near-useless. They'd orbit in so close and so fast that they'd wreck their own tracking, and would never do their paper DPS even against a stationary target. This has since been fixed, and the only reason we haven't seen the effects much is that sentry drones are even MORE overpowered that nobody bothers to use heavies.

Even with sentry drones taken out of the picture, the Ishtar still does close to 900 DPS with heavies and these heavies now have the tracking to about two-shot interceptors. Don't even get me started on the bullshit that is stuff like the Worm which does 6km/sec cold while doing 250 DPS from tracking-independent weapon systems.