EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'm looking to train my character to fly drones better and wanting to get a grip on the purpose of optimal range. So i understand optimal for ships, but when is my drone going to struggle to stay within optimal, is this only when trying to follow a fast or agile ship? Or will this have a more general benefit on my drone's abilities in combat? I'm mainly doing pve and lv4 stuff in my dominix. Should drone sharpshooter be something to worry about?

Ah yes this makes a lot of sense, I had tunnel vision and forgot all about the sentries. My skills aren't quite there yet, but are sentries head and shoulders above regular drones for missions. I quite enjoy watching the little buggers go off to wreak havoc

There are several details to keep in mind for sentry drones that don't apply to other drones.

1. Sentry drones don't fly to their target. When you launch sentries from a ship, they just sit there in space. If you move your ship away from your sentries, to pick them up again you have to fly your ship back to the sentries, they can't come to you. This does have a benefit. Light, medium and heavy drones must fly to their target before they can shoot it, so they spend time not shooting while they are flying to the target. With sentry drones, they just turn from one target to another. As long as the target is inside their weapon range, the time spent not shooting is very small.

2. Not all sentry drones have the same weapon range.

Gallente Garde sentries have the shortest weapon range, approx. 40 km (some skills and modules can improve this but not by a lot). They also have the best tracking and can stay locked onto fast moving target better than any other sentry drones, but they still have limits. A fast moving frigate or destroyer that is close to them can outrun their target tracking. Garde sentries do thermal damage.

Amarr Curator sentries have a longer weapon range, approx. 55 km, but their tracking isn't as good as Gardes. Curator sentries do EM damage.

Minmatar Bouncers are a big step up in range, approx. 90 km, but have worse tracking than Curators. Bouncer sentries do explosive damage.

Caldari Wardens have the longest range, over 100km, and the worst tracking against close targets. Warden sentries do kinetic damage.

Be aware of your ship's targeting range. It's not much use using sentry drones that can shoot over 100 km if you can't target ships more than 75 km away. If you are going to use long range sentries (Minmatar and Caldari), plan to fit a sensor booster to your ship to better match your targeting range with the drone weapon range.

There is a setting you can change that makes your drones "passive" (they only shoot something when you tell them to) or "aggressive" (they will lock onto any target that is aggressive to you and start shooting it without you giving them any commands). The aggressive setting sounds useful, just launch your drones and let them shoot up everything in sight, but there is a hidden danger. In a mission where destroying one particular ship spawns a new wave of hostile NPC ships, aggressive drones may kill that trigger ship before you're ready to deal with the next wave. Aggressive drones can cause you to trigger too many hostile ships at the same time. When you are running a mission that has waves of ships which spawn in this way, it's better to keep your drones on a leash by setting them to passive, and leaving the trigger ship which spawns the next wave to be the last one you shoot at.

You can give orders to aggressive drones as if they were in passive mode, and your orders will override their own targets, but if you don't give orders to aggressive drones, they'll make their own orders up for themselves. You can switch between passive and aggressive mode in the middle of a fight, as many times as you want. You are not committed to either mode when the shooting starts.

Aggro mechanics for drones. Small NPC ships (frigates and destroyers) can target and shoot at all drones. Medium NPC ships (cruisers and battlecruisers) can target medium, heavy and sentry drones but generally ignore light drones. Large NPC ships (battleships) will ignore light and medium drones but can target heavy and sentry drones. You will find yourself needing to pull your drones back into your ship from time to time to prevent them from being destroyed by hostile NPC ships. Since sentry drones stay in one place after you launch them, you potentially tie yourself down to staying close to your sentries so you can recall them quickly if they get too much NPC aggro.

There will be instances (mainly in pvp) where your optimal will matter. Drones are dumb and only have 2 speeds: fast and slow.

When the target is operating somewhere in between those 2 speeds, the drone will pulse it's mwd to get within orbit range and then shut it off when it reaches it.

So the better the optimal you have, the better damage you will apply when your drones are stopping and starting rapidly like this.

CCP balances everything this way: "make the ship or drone function as advertised, when all skills are trained to 5."

So your drones are supposed to orbit at their optimal range with their rated speed, but in practice it's like trying to orbit at 500 with an afterburner on: you'll orbit at about 2k and about 70% speed.

So the answer to that particular question is "all the time".

Little error on how drone control control range works. It's not how far you are from your sentries per se but rather how far the target is from you. Your sentries could be 250km away but if the target you choose is within your drone control range, they will attempt to fire because of that activation proximity attribute you mentioned