Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I welcome these much needed changes. Drone boats are the primary doctrines of most big alliances and are getting boring to be honest.

Bring back variety! ;)

What happens after your suggestion is that people still able to retain critical mass continue to be overpowered, while smaller entities that can no longer hold critical mass are unable to use ishtars as a fleet doctrine.

The exact same thing counters ishtars, though you potentially need a little less of it, and the exact same thing dies to ishtars, though the ishtars potentially need more numbers.

Every ishtar engagement I've seen or been in has been a landslide in one direction or the other, or a stalemate of not enough dps on both sides.

I think the proposed adjustments are bad .
First because the reason that ishtar is used and is succesfull in big fights is not the damage or tracking . Desudes has explained why ishtars are good .
Second cause its wrong to make adjustments just for the ishtar overuse in big fights because in small fights 2-3 people ishtars are nothing special . Also sentry drones in others ships are not that good .

Still treating symptoms and not the cause.

The cause is cruisers having bandwidth over 50mb. It's not an issue with the sentries themselves.

Sounds about right, and spot on conclusion.

Goodpoast.

Bandwidth. Double bonuses. 375m^3 dronebay so you can spam 3 different flights of sentries, along with a mobile depot for more spares in your cargo.

Enough grid and CPU to fit a full rack of cruiser-class highslot modules, yet the primary weapon system doesn't require any grid/cpu, so instead you can devote those fitting resources to tank or oversized propmods if you want.

CCP never fails to go after the weapon system instead of fixing the ships that use those systems.

Missiles get nerfed because of the Drake and the Tengu. Medium rails come in and the Tengu is back in force because they didn't fix the actual problem, which was the Tengu. But for good measure they did also nerf the Drake to the point where nobody uses it anymore.

Then they do a balance pass on all sub-cruiser class ships, and THEN they come along and completely blow all that hard work away by introducing T3 destroyers.

I've gotten past expecting any kind of sensible changes anymore. Just hang on to something and wait for them spin the wheel, and see what the next flavor-of-the-year ships are going to be. Thankfully after years of wheel spinning I can already fly all subcaps so I don't care where it lands.

Why not just remove them from the game if only hull bonused ships have capacity to make them useful.

Just give all combat drones a sentry mode, and a mobile mode.

Sentry mode
+ Optimal
+ Tracking
- ROF
Immobile

Mobile Mode
+Fall Off
+ ROF
- Tracking
Mobile.

Remove sentries, and the tier the remaining 3 drone sizes to size appropriate hulls
Frig/Dessie Drone Boats, bonused to Lights
Cruiser/BC Hulls bonused to Meds
BS hulls Bonused to Heavies.

Things done to balance sentries
- Numerous hull changes
- Entire new drone system for Guristas
- One previous balance pass for sentries
- Additional changes to drone application modules
- Rework of the drone assist system
- Moving sentries behind further behind a training wall + net reduction in all drone capability
- more direct nerfs to hulls
- yet another balance pass at sentries
- a "nerf" to the Ishtar
- yet another sentry balance pass

Want a silver bullet...press delete.

Just delete the Ishtar

Liking the change. In general I've always hated droneboats. Anything that discourages their use is fine by me. Makes those huge battles much easier on the Hamsters when there aren't 10's of thousands of drones being abandoned into space (sometimes purposefully to induce more tidi)

Ishtar Sentry damage is already in line with ships of their class. This happened the last balance pass on the hull when damage bonus was cut in half from 50% to 25%. They have maximal dps with Heavy Drones which have their own shortcomings.

The tracking/optimal bonus of 25% on the Ishtar Sentries and 37.5% on the Domi ones are significant but not out of line with other ranged systems.

Let's compare 3 HACs, bonuses only:

An Eagle gets: 20% shield resists, 50% optimal, 50% optimal, 25% damage.
A Zealot gets a 50% weapon cap use bonus, 25% RoF bonus, 50% optimal bonus, and 25% raw damage bonus.
An Ishtar gets 25% drone HP, 25% damage, 25% optimal, and 25% tracking.

The Eagle gets 1x tank bonus, 2x range, 1x damage,
The Zealot gets 2x damage bonuses and 1x range bonus
The Ishtar gets 1x damage, 1x range, and 1x applicaiton.

The bonuses are all in line with each other. It is the weapon system that then makes them stand apart.

******************
The problem with drone boats is this: the different ship classes share 1 ranged weapon type with no size variance. It has been brought up in the past that there should be a Medium Sentry and a Large Sentry. And now that Sentries are coming under the knife it is time to address this problem.

Some people complain that cruisers should not be able to use a battleship weapon system. But sentries have never been exclusively battleship and up. The issue is they had to be strong enough for BS and that has caused issues with the Ishtar balance. Hence why they nerfed all the sentry bonuses on that hull.

Are the sentry stats too strong when used by the Dominix and Armageddon? Or are they too good on cruiser hulls? If the latter then the solution is introduce a new set of sentries balanced for medium weapon strengths, and adjust appropriate hull bonuses in line with these new drones.
Then rebalance the original sentry into a BS+ system and be done. No need to put restrictions or new bandwidths in place, if a cruiser is only bonused for medium sentries it will likely not make sense to field the larger size.