Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Premise: drones are fast with their MWDs active, pretty slow without.

Problem: they get rubber banded by ships that are just fast enough to outrun their non-mwd speed.

Proposal: add a lowslot drone overdrive/nano to the game to impact their performance, with the following penalties

1. drone overdrive adds 15% mass for 25% sub-MWD speeds increase.
2. drone nano adds 10% speed 10% agility for -20% drone structure HP.

Since rigs and skills can affect drone speed/hp then modules can too but in the typically more profound benefit/payoff way that modules are supposed to.

Sure let's make them able to defeat the only way you can effectively mitigate then since they don't suffer correctly from E-WAR.

Frosty's is a master of dramatic hyperbole.

People call the kiting meta cancer because it marginalises two weapon systems completely out (and it's too easily pushed with links/implants etc). Is sacrificing lows for some extra drone speed really an issue, when lows are at a premium on many drone ships by default?

New gila/worm losing a low, ishtar becoming an armour tanker by default, VNI and vexor sort of in between, rattler having its own niche by default, some amarr ships getting drone speed buffs as role bonuses but only ever being armour tanked, combat carriers in current meta being sentry ships almost exclusively, supers being used against mostly caps who are too slow to warrent the addition of these mods in the first place.

So no I reject the assertion that this is going to break the game Frosty I think you need to go sit down and think about it a bit harder.

It's a problem because drone AI isn't smart enough to adjust their speed to match the targets. They overshoot and orbit and this means suitably fast ships can manipulate essentially broken functionality.

When I hit orbit on a target my ship doesn't cycle my mwd. Slingshotting (you call it rubberbanding) is a totally valid and quite frankly commonly used practice in frigate vs frigate warfare. Why is it OK for me to use it against another player, but suddenly a problem when I use it on your drones?

The problem isn't broken drone AI funciontality, the problem is you don't like a common and perfectly valid combat tactic. Your work around would be to use a fast ship to catch the other fast ship and put a web on it.

This isn't even a problem. It's a tactic that you don't like.

Can you tell me exactly where I said it would break the game because quite frankly, I re-read my post a few time and fail to notice where I typed that. If anyone is doing hyperbole, it's you pretending I aid something would break the game when in reality I only stated the fact that a weapon system with relatively good resistance to E-WAR would now gain a way to mitigate one of the very few way to reduce applied damage from drones.

Your comment about the kiting meta is fun because nerfing the speed creep would solve your issue at the same time as solving others but instead, you want mods to solve your while letting other issue as is.

Have you actually tried it?

5 bonused drones have roughly 4k raw HP and roughly 5k EHP against thermal+kinetic.
Most T1 frigs have only 4k EHP average.

Orbiting light drones have perfect transversals due to their low mass and agility and have low sig because of which they are downright unkillable without a web (which you have to keep on the host ship or risk him coasting in range to apply turret DPS or Neuts). And this is all whilst having perfect application themselves, right up there with missiles, whilst still being subject to turret wrecking shot chance. I've lost track of how often a Tristan hobgoblin hit me for more damage than a rack of bonused close range turrets have.

Rubberbanding is literally the only counter to drones that can be exploited with good piloting, and compared to avoiding turret fire by increasing transversal and reducing missile range by baiting the missile ship to follow you, it's a lot harder to accomplish.

No to high drone speeds.

Reading the OP, I wanted to say that drone speed mods belong in mod slots, but it also gave me an idea: long range drones! For a while I had been tossing around small and medium sentry drone ideas in my head, trying to balance them to make them both not suck and not be overpowered, and I think I've finally got it!

Full post to follow. Check for it in Features and Ideas Discussion forum, or click this link.