Ships & Modules

Quick question.

Is drone damage effected by target painter's or do drones always do full damage? I'm getting conflicting answers.

Or more to the point is it worth fitting a tp on a drone based ship.

Guns on drones use exactly the same math formula that the turrets on player ships use. Understanding that formula and the many variable will help you make the decision on the TP with drones.

Turret Damage Formula

Drones do benefit from tp's as stated above - it basically improves hit chance and quality. An omni tracking link with tracking script will do exactly the same job, doesn't need to be reapplied to each target, and can be rescripted for range as necessary. I know where I would put my isk for a drone ship, but it swings back in favour of tp if you want to also use secondary weapons or fleetmates.

They do benefit, though it's often useful for drawing aggro in PvE without needing highslot guns, leaving extra fitting and usually a bunch of free-to-use utility highs.

In PvP, TPs can be thought of as fleet EWAR since it helps the whole group (or can help the whole group at least), where as a drone mod improving application and/or projection only affects the host ship's drones and no one else.

Lights, Mediums, and Heavies actually have absurd tracking, but often murder most of it themselves with their own behaviors and other factors. Microwarping, orbiting at full speed, coupled with relatively poor projection compared to the kind of high-end velocities they get up to means that with stock stats they can still hit hard but you can also see a lot of grazing hits too. One volley might slam home then the next can go wide.

Reminds me of this one guy we had on rifle range; he could put half his rounds at the five hundred meter into black, dead center mass and all, then the rest would be too high to mark, berm hits, or "no impact, no idea." Blocks and Coaches used to call him "Mr. Alibi." Oddly, he never had even an ounce of issues at the two and three hundred meter line, rapid or slow fire. At least he had a sense of humor about it. I miss those days. Good times.

In a one or the other option, this is a good call. However, in an armor tanked ship, you may have room for both. In this case, a TP may be better than a 2nd or 3rd omni as the on his would face stacking penalties that a TP plus omni would not.

i used to use a Gila + 2x VNIs for ratting. The Target Painter kept rat aggro on the Gila and off the relatively squishy VNIs and drone.

No.

No they changed it back in 2014, but never said what the new numbers were

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/giving-drones-an-assist/

Wow, didn't even think of that for some reason

Thanks for pointing it out lol