Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The drone meta is extremely popular these days, and assault frigates need a meaningful, specialized role to make them useful and competitive with the T3Ds all over the place. How about a specialized anti-drone weapon system?

How I imagine this would work: a high-slot module (let's call it a Flak Cannon for the purpose of this discussion) with a range of around 7km or so that can apply damage to enemy drones and only fits on assault frigates. I'm not sure if it should require a lock on the drones or not, but I wouldn't hate it if it did require the lock, since assault frigates all have decent scan res already. Each assault frigate also already has a utility high slot available as well. PG and CPU on assault frigates is pretty tight already, so even small fitting costs would require you to make a choice about reducing your DPS or tank to accommodate it. Cap usage is negotiable, but I'm in favor of little or no cap cost (to make it meaningfully unique from smartbombs) and using a low-volume ammo with a extremely high rate of fire, and around a 20 second reload. This would allow you to kill a single light drone fairly quickly, but give your opponent a chance to recall drones before you could shred the whole flight. Damage should be omni to apply equally well to all racial drones without having to carry multiple ammo types. If it works out to around 40 DPS against drones only, then it would be able to kill a single light drone in about 10-12 seconds, a single medium drone in about 20-25 seconds, and a heavy drone in around 40 seconds (all calculated before Drone Durability skill or any hull bonuses are applied).

Interesting arguments. A few counters:

In solo or even small-gang engagements, frigate and assault frigate pilots often find fights with dedicated drone boats like the Tristan un-winnable, since the drone ship will reliably be able to project damage with minimal effort while a non-drone ship will be forced to think more about positioning and application. Forcing the drone ship to manage their drones more carefully creates more to do for that Tristan than simply keeping at 20km range with a long point on.

Second, as I mentioned, this would be a utility high slot module (and all assault frigates have a utility high that is often unused right now in favor of bigger guns or bigger tank), which means more interesting choices available for the assault frigate pilot. The fitting cost could be tied to the Assault Frigates skill, rewarding players who choose to specialize in this role.

Third, upon reflection I agree that an auto-target function would take away some of the fun from this module. Forcing the Assault Frigate to target the enemy drones also helps prevent these ships from being used in large quantities to be a hard counter to all drone ships, as you point out could limit the usefulness of drones in PvP at all scales.

Finally, I envision the purpose of this module to make Assault Frigates a reasonable option to fight outnumbered against drone-based frigates, or to have a reasonable chance of winning an engagement against, say, a Worm, and Algos, or a Dragoon, particularly in FW small plexes where those ships see significant use. By allowing an Assault frigate to continue applying damage to the host ship and forcing that pesky Worm to do more than simply keep at range, you make engagements less lopsided and help reinforce the importance of good drone management. I don't think many people truly find "lock target, keep at range, press F" gameplay to be particularly challenging or engaging.

Let's take a look at a practical, real-world example. Tristan vs Wolf.

Assuming all stats at 5, our Wolf (fitting 280 howitzer artillery) gets 216 paper DPS, goes 2.8km/s cold, has 5k EHP and a small ancillary rep. It is cap dead in 50 seconds.

Our Tristan gets 104 paper DPS, goes 3.2km/s cold, has a 6.6k EHP tank and no rep, with just under 2 minutes of cap.

The Tristan will comfortably outrange the Wolf, who will have to switch to Tremor ammo to have any hope of hitting the Tristan, dropping its DPS to 123. Meanwhile, the Tristan's Warrior II's are easily able to keep pace with the Wolf, applying terrific damage into the Wolf's explosive resist hole, and if the Wolf decides to shoot at the drones, even it's tracking bonus won't provide meaningful damage against the fast-moving drones. The Wolf will cap itself out trying to chase down the Tristan and running it's rep to account for the incoming drone damage. Wolf is forced to withdraw, or finds himself tackled as the Tristan sees the Wolf entering low armor and slips into heated point range. Tristan wins.

This IS a real problem for assault frigate pilots. If we switch our Wolf fit to autocannons, we have a better chance of killing off the drones, but that means the Tristan is unharmed and can replace lost drones until the Wolf caps out. The purpose here is to make the engagement more even, since the Tristan can comfortably out-range the Wolf and the Wolf cannot reasonably counter the drones. Even if we overlook the Tristan's bonus to drone hit points, having one utility high slot available to help push the drones off means the Wolf won't need to run the rep as frequently, allowing it to overheat its MWD at the right moment to close the gap with the Tristan and apply damage directly.

Here's another practical example: Worm vs Retribution.

Again, assuming all stats at 5, a slightly bling Worm (which is a reasonable expectation) gets 214 DPS (158 from drones), goes 2.9km/s cold, has 17k EHP, and is cap stable.

The Retribution gets 214 paper DPS with Conflagration at 6.5km optimal, or 153 paper DPS with Scorch at 18km optimal, or 192 paper DPS with Imperial Navy Multifrequency at 6.5km optimal. It goes 1.9km/s cold, has 14k EHP, and is cap stable.

Again, the Worm has no trouble keeping at range from the Retribution. Even if scrammed, the Worm still has a higher base speed, allowing it to close inside the Retribution's tracking range, while applying full damage with rockets and drones. If neither ship is scrammed, the Retribution is again forced to switch to Scorch to apply damage at range, or attempt to shoot through the drones, with their 300% bonus to drone hitpoints while taking full damage from the drones and an additional 67 DPS from Javelin rockets. Worm wins.

Again, if the Retribution has the option to put pressure on the drones without taking damage off the Worm, this could be a different story, but any hope the Retribution has is gone if he makes the decision to go for the drones with pulse lasers.

I am interested in your interpretations. I conclude that drone ships are unevenly matched against a ship class that is supposed to be specialized against frigates, with their tracking bonuses and strong tanks, and that it is necessary for some type of counter against drones, just as energy neutralizers exist as a counter against active tanks and cap-intensive weapons.

Edit to add: in neither of these potential engagements does the module I propose become an instant "I win" for the assault frigate. Both the Tristan and the Worm get bonuses to drone hit points and have ample room for spares, but it makes the fight not an automatic "I win" for the Tristan or Worm by forcing them to decide if and when to recall drones being attacked, or be more careful about dictating range.

2nd edit: There is precedent for balancing things around having a skill at level 5. Logistics, for example, generally REQUIRE at least level 4 to work effectively, with most fits requiring level 5 skill. Force Recons are also geared around their ability to fit Covert Ops cloaks, with level 4 being a requirement for most fits and 5 being required for plenty of others. Blockade Runners and Covert Ops frigates also have cloak CPU requirements tied to skills, although they are somewhat easier to fit without a mandatory level 5 skill.

And I'm going to stop you right here because this assumption is just false. Small arty will *shred* Light Drones if used properly. They will only rarely hit for full damage (which by the way you can pull off by burning in a straight line and pulsing your prop mod) but they don't need to because Light Drones don't have much HP and have zero active tank to speak of. They're also dump as bricks and have two modes: "run away, and sick-em".

This forces the Tristan to pull in his drones or lose them, which reduces DPS which gives the Wolf time to either try to close range on the Tristan, try to break the point, close range, regen cap, or any number of other things.

It's also assuming that the Wolf pilot is Arty fit rather than ACs wasn't able to point and web the Tristan on his initial overheated AB pass, which he should be trying to do against someone likely to pull range on him. Heck, he could just bring ACs and this whole thing becomes a bit of a moot point because Light ACs will shred the drones easily and if he's locked down the Tristan then he's next.

The Wolf also has the base EHP and rep capacity to tank the drones for a good long time if he's smart with his ASB and doesn't just cap himself out like an idiot, which your hypothetical scenario seems to assume.



You're still letting the ship hard-counter an entire weapon-system with a single high-slot module. Even assuming we restrict this to a single one per ship you still have the potential for a small fleet to utterly shut down any drones fielded against them, and for that module to be a reasonable threat to the drones it's going to be dealing *at least* an appreciable fraction of the ship's own guns' damage from a single module.



I didn't say there wasn't precedent, I said it was pointless. Modules like the cloak and Logistics fits have interesting decisions and progression between Logi 4 and 5 and Cov-Ops 4 and 5 and both are relatively longer trains compared to what they offer. In this case though AFs 5 is a shorter train for a T2 ship skill and if the module is to be restricted to the single ship anyways there's not really a compelling reason to tie fittings to ship skill in this instance. With the cloaky ships it allows a single module to be balanced for multiple ships and creates interesting fitting decisions since the module's relative fitting cost for each ship is different. For AFs it's not balancing anything, it's just creating an arbitrary incentive to train the ship to level 5 in order to make it viable.

An equivalent effect would be if ships got fitting bonuses to guns based on ship skill level, where you can't actually fit an 8th gun in most Battleship fits until you're maxed. That just wouldn't feel fun and would make the 5th skill level feel mandatory rather than a nice bonus.

Nah.

We already have dedicated anti-drone systems in the game. They're called smartbombs. Giving AFs a smartbomb fitting/range/damage bonus with a cycle time increase on top of their existing bonuses would effectively achieve what you are trying to do as well as achieving the goal of making them highly efficient at their intended purpose of being top tier frigate pvp ships.

Basically, this turns AFs in to a piloted,reusable,lower damage guided bomb that is also a competant PvP frig. With the new defender missiles, this could be a valuable fleet role as an alternative to bombers, firewall battleships, or even escorts for bombs in transit (they're fast enough to smartbomb off the defender missiles and turn around to escape the blast radius of friendly bombs) and a lot of other uses.

They'd also be quite good against drones, but without the silly drawback of being only niche effective against drones and **** at everything else. In stead they'd be good against drones and effective point defense escorts for larger ships or cheap ISK force multipliers in subcap blob fights without the associated problems with bomb CCP tried to address with defender missiles, since unlike bombers the AF gang is marginally less tanky the more they AOE strike a single point, but more effective the more they spread out and aoe over a wider area due to high transversals, speed, and reusable AOE.

Thank you! I couldn't remember that weapon right away.