Ships & Modules

I did mean legion bonuses, and for just about any gang of 10 or more, they're quite common. Not that it matters, because I made a point of starting off with the non-bonused numbers as they were the most important. That said, It was an oversight on my part to use dominix numbers, and on non-drone bonused ships, the loss would be about 1k DPS worth of drones in exchange for one guardian worth of repping. That's still not worth it, especially since this still entails needing 3 people giving up their drone DPS for something that's less reliable and easier to kill than a guardian (and btw that assumes a 4 rep fit, even though it's easy to run 5 on a guardian)

Drones can be smartbombed, which a guardian cannot. A well placed smartbomb ship applies more dps to the field than a titan, and the effects on a gang relying on rep drones would be devastating. The drones are also extremely slow, making it possible to alpha down targets before reps can be transfered, and let's not forget that guardians tend to be hard to jam on account of their always fitting eccm, whereas most combat ships are not, Drones may not need locks to attack someone but they DO need them to rep someone (wrt switching primaries).

The biggest problem with your argument however is this:
I pop open EFT, slap a pair of EANMs and a DCII on a phoon (not ideal surely, but the exact numbers don't matter here, just how they compare to each other), and here's what I see:
A phoon using drones to rep itself, with t2 heavy armor bots, and perfect skills, gets a whopping 267 DPS tank. By comparison, a 4 rep guardian repping a phoon gives it a 1013 DPS tank. That's nearly 4 times the repping power. 5 times for a 5 rep guardian (and that's without gang links, which would further skew the numbers in favour of the guardian).

PVE? Are you insane? To give you an idea of just how bad RR drones would still be in pve, consider this:
A full set of heavy RR drones does roughly the same rep/second as a single LRAR II. A set of ogres does about 350 DPS on an unbonused ship. This means, using RR drones instead of damage drones is like giving up not one, but TWO turrets on your battleship (or one on a maraduer/nightmare) in exchange for a rather pitiful amount of local tanking.

This applies to pvp as well. The added tank from a set of RR drones is almost non existent at pretty much every ship class. 250 DPS on a BS, 100 on a cruiser, and 50 on a frigate (maybe a bit more since the only frigs capable of launching 5 drones have higher than normal resists, but you get the idea) They lose a LOT of utility in order to gain a rather small local tank, which just isn't worth it 99% of the time (and for that 1%, it'd be a new and somewhat interesting mechanic)

By your own logic people should be fitting RR drones in fleets even now. We both know local tank is irrelevant, so from a larger fleet standpoint, allowing rr drones to rep their owner would have no impact on gameplay. We DON'T see that now, because RR drones are terrible.

Rep yourself with drones is a very nice idea and seems due to those spending so much time training for those pesky little beasts doing whatever they want but what you tell them to !!

Now, those saying that some guy gets his rep drones out and that's it he's invincible...who cares?

ECM drones = less dps, the time the guy is ecm'd you can literally bring no matter who else in the hull if there are not logistics around, drones have a very bad rep amount/cycle.

Would it help a little bit in fights vs ships not able to carry drones?
-sure, those able to carry drones would become more popular, is it bad for the game? -no

The moment you can only rep yourself out of combat it's what people ask, nothing else. In combat you should still be able to use those on your partners but not on yourself (so for combat you better bring ecm because no dmg means no need to rep)

This is no more broken than 2 ships using drones on each other. The only difference is you take out the need for an additional person.

It's like having a local rep that can be specifically targeted and killed. As has been said multiple times not game breaking or major change.

As for this removing an isk sink:

Shield recharge, all this does is change the recharge time to how long it takes to rep it back up

Armor: you can just swap your plate to a rep and avoid the several million isk repair bill

Hull: WHAT? HULL REPAIR BOTS? GIMME!!! They dont exist, neither do hull RR's, but you could just fit a hull repairer same as an armor repper

Basicly: This would nto change the "isk sink" of repair bills as you can currently just fit a rep and fix yourself up. If your in a lowsec/nullsec surrounded by reds, you cant be shot for 30 seconds so you could do a few cycles then dock. Hull, same thing


Honestly i dont think this would be game breaking at all and would be beneficial to people roaming in territory belonging to reds, or a 0.0 region with so few stations like Great Wildlands.