Ships & Modules

droneboats have big drone bays, just take out another flight when you return to the fight. That compared to blasterboats its a blessing, isnt it?.

Interesting thread. Dread, you brought up some good points, but I just have one question for you - do you fly primarily drone boats? I believe you said you don't earlier. Why? If drone boats are just fine and dandy and balanced, why don't you use them? This is what I find the most ironic about people claiming drone boats are just fine - none of them fly them as their primary ship type. I've yet to meet someone who mostly flies drone boats and thinks they're just fine the way they are.

Next, let me expand the same question to include most EVE players. Data is scarce, but if you look at ships killed, ships doing the most killing, etc., at places like EVE-Kill, you will not find any drone boats listed in the top 20. You might make the tired old argument that this is because drone boats don't really fit into any currently established fleet or gang doctrine. To this, let me once again ask WHY that is? If drone boats are so balanced, shouldn't there be at least one facet where they excel? After all, drones are supposedly one of 3 major weapon systems - turrets, missiles, drones. There should be a 1 in 3 chance, if they were balanced, that a drone boat would be chosen for a particular task, statistically speaking. Currently, their representation seems to be zero across the board.

Next and finally, let me expand it one more step. I have not watched any of the Tournament finals. But for those of you who have, let me ask you this - how many drone boats were in the tournament? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess none. Or a mere handful. And the team that fielded them, if any, probably didn't win. Am I correct? If yes, why, if they're so balanced?

See, that's the thing that bothers me the most about the state of drone boats in this game. People who don't fly them every day say they're just fine. People who fly nothing but drone boats (like myself) think they are well and truly broken and no bandaid solution is going to fix it. They need a complete and total overhaul and rebalance, up to and including the drone control UI and the AI behaviour. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but still.

Someone (I forget who, sorry) mentioned that drones switch to the next closest size target, and so on. In theory, yes. In practice, it's quite random. I have seen drones finish a cruiser and move on to a battleship, with other cruisers present. Further, I've seen them finish a frigate orbiting at 2km, and head for a cruiser that's 30km away, with several other frigates present and much closer than that.

Drones also still split damage, with focus fire option enabled, and they do it often, Especially when there's a multitude of targets in a relatively small space around drones, I've even seen a 3-way split of 5 drones - they went 1, 2 and 3 on 3 separate targets. Granted, this was in a mission, not 1v1 PvP, but this alone nullifies any argument of drone AI being EWAR resistant, because such a split wouldn't even bust through most tanks in time against an NPC, never mind a player.

Also, I see no mention of smartbombs, or a speed tank where drones simply get wiped out or cannot keep up to apply any damage at all. Also no mention of target ship's own drones (which have the same AI, and all the same benefits and shortcomings) going after drone boat's drones, killing them. Remember, on a non-drone boats the drone damage is a fraction of total, while on the drone boat it's bulk. Drone boat's drones have to stay on target.

To further expand this, a non-drone boat can field a full flight of ECM drones only losing a tiny percentage of its DPS. A drone boat cannot do the same without losing half or more of its DPS. Balanced? Hardly.

And finally, remember that in an engagement that is not point-blank, drones will MWD to target in a straight line. MWD blows up their sig radius, straight line approach reduces their transverse velocity to zero. Pop pop, down go the drones. Yes, most drone boats have large drone bays, but even the largest subcap drone boat in the game can only hold 3 flights of large drones. With those gone, the drone boat's DPS is cut anywhere from 50% to 100%, depending on setup. In other words, 3 warpouts and you're heading back home to rearm, and along the way you are defenseless, which is a logistical nightmare.

Further, the lack of drone boats in general is really harmful to people who primarily trained drones. For instance, I'm in FW militia now. And when a gang of frigates and destroyers assembles to run minor plexes, guess what? As a drone user, I end up flying a turret or missile boat I have no skills for, because there are no drone boat frigates or destroyers. Just another big hole that's been there for what, 9 years now?

Bottom line, I see drones as being incredibly broken as a weapon system. Starting from silly AI, to horrendous UI, to lack of ships, to lack of thought given to many mechanics.

continued....


The reason most non-drone user say that drones are fine is because they are protecting thier edge, and dont want to lose it. Its like the people who said the insanely OP original remote Titan DD was fine, untouchable speed tanking flyers in the golden age of nano said everything was fine, and Amarr laser users in the first two years of EVE said everything was fine. They were at the top of their niche in the game and they didnt want CCP to come along and "even the playing field". Looking back now almost everyone agrees the above three situations were way out of balance, but at the time people fought tooth and nail to keep things as the were and the motto of the day was "its fine, l2p noob".....

What great loads of twaddle.

All of them last few posts, that's what happens chatting alone y see.

To be fair, the other guy started it.

The problem is that you, along with Mariner and Dread, who claim to fly drone boats almost exclusively still seem somewhat incompetent at using them. I don't mean that as a slant, it's just that as people who have flown drones "for two years", "since 2004" or "almost only fly drone ships" each of you have trouble seeing the bigger picture. Maybe the problem is that there are no "primary ships" in EVE past a certain point and you are staring yourselves blind at something that just isn't there. Ships in EVE are balanced per functionality, not to cater to a racial choice in such a way.

You ask questions in rhetoric that you should already know the answer to, Dread dabbles in circumstantial details and Mariner doesn't provide a leveled description of the issues he try to raise. That's why i enjoyed (and repped) Windorian's post on page one: it still raises the issues, but do so in a more balanced and credible manner.

Your next segment offer up a good example, so i'll use that as an entry point for discussing the thread.



You are mixing things up. The old tired argument is the use of EVE-kill's top20 list to shoehorn an explanation for an argument you want to use, but is simply not there. Pointing out that it's a flawed approach is the natural retort to a stupid argument and you will see it repeat as long as people attempt using metrics for inaccurate representation. Validity.

If you bothered to look beyond the initial counter-argument you would have seen alot of people throughout the years answering the questions you pose and helping you appreciate your drone-boats more. I'll provide you with some that i have made a couple of times already myself:


So, WHY?

1. Drones themselves, and the subcapital ships that use them are not very easy to use and not very cost-effective so they don't scale and the top20 list is all about scale (Carriers and Supercarriers are also drone ships, they get used).

2. Drones and your ability to control them do not scale very well to performance-demanding situations that occur as you scale up (not only do the drone AI itself become a problem in lag, but your own reaction time as well).


Do we have any historical use to support that?

When AHACs first began to profile in 2009-2010 the two groups most renown for using them in that era (CH and SoT) both built them around a drone-heavy setup (Ishtars). They were purpose built for countering the Drake- and SR BS trends budding at the time, at a medium size or scale (let's throw out 15-100 just to give you a general sense of direction). They were incredibly effective within that environment.

When they were getting picked up by larger groups (such as PL) in 2010 they were quickly outphased to Zealots. Not because the Zealot is a better choice in any controlled environment, but simply because they got scaled up to a size where cluster performance would begin to keep recalled drones in combat, lag- or completely miss issued commands and where the players were faced with slow response on both pilot and ship while things like bombs or warp-in traps that rely on much more simplistic mechanics fare better in that element.

The Sentry Ishtars they used back then are still just as potent in their right element today. They are still excellent at killing Drakes (provided you can muster 150m ships to deal with ships that are essentially free), and since Crucible they have excellent new targets in the BS-turret, high range, low buffer Tier 3 BC. If you look at any actual form of balance (ships and mechanics maintained by game design) you will see this. They are not popular however because they don't scale, they are not cost- or risk-free and they are not trendy. Popularity feed itself, trend is trending.

25-man Ishtar gangs are less popular today as are all HAC and all 25-man gangs.

When you make posts and pull statements out on their own, as all three of you do, you need to see that larger perspective. Sentry drones are a BS-size weapon. You can claim they track poorly all you like, but you need to look at what they actually are and how they present themselves in that element. If BS-turrets assume tackle- and signature support, maybe the drones do too? They become excellent with other Gallente support or when those modules are put onto the bountiful slot-layout of a drone ship itself. Would you need to make sacrifices to specialize? Surely, most ships do. It is at the same time quite an important thing to consider when you spurt out comments like "drone ships have split weapon systems, need utility slots and have fitting issues" since nothing could be further from the truth. Most drone ships are balanced with the drones ontop.

A final, somewhat amusing, observation is this: drone boats are versatile in many ways and one of those ways are on-grid versatility. That is something they have in common with some of the popular missile-tank platforms (such as the Drake). Ships like the Domi and Ishtar have certain specialist appeal to them, while at the same time they are far from helpless when that extreme is overrun.

That redundancy is rarely appreciated at a scale where contingency is no longer in ships, it's in new ships.

All very true, but again, isn't this the definition if imbalance? If A scales, and B doesn't scale, and both A and B are same tier ships (cost the same, take the same time to train for, etc.), shouldn't ship B be made to scale as well? I don't know, maybe I'm clinically insane or irretrievably stupid (or both), but that's just the way I see it.

Bottom line, for me at least, is that drones in this game are incredibly broken. From the ground up. Little things and big things. Consider something like drone rigs. There are rigs to increase sentry damage, but not any other drone type. Look at Sentry drones, T2 variants do not require and do not benefit from racial drone specializations, when lights/mediums/heavies do. That's a huge inconsistency right there. There's mods that increase drone travel speed, and mods that increase drone tracking speed, but not both, unlike turrets where a single mod loaded with different script can perform a different function. Drone damage mod (new one) is weaker than turret/missile counterpart. Drone control range is set in stone by skills, at 60km with all V. This is WAY too much for frigate hulls, WAY too low for BS hulls. Granted, with DLA you can extend that by 20km, but not all ships have free slots or are able to fit it even if their role demands it. Further, why can't a Sentry, with its 100km range, SHOOT at a target 80km away if the control range is 60km, and the ship controlling the drones is sitting 1 km away from them? Makes absolutely no sense.

I could go on and on with all these minor annoyances, but you get the picture. And it's not pretty. Though I freely admit that I am heavily biased. I mostly play 'drone users' in other games, even MMOs. Some of them do it well, some very poorly. EVE drones is an example of "go home and do it again". And I am saying it from a loving place.

You dont have a marauder droneboat, but you have a black ops droneboat, the Sin.

I think you should stop focusing on drone weakness and start looking at their strengths.

I like the idea of ewar drones doing mixed types. Its generally agreed that theyre all pretty useless (minus ecm), so why not match them to someting like... neut/web drones, TP/TD drones?

And to keep ecm on its own, give sensor damp drones an added effect of boosting your own sensors?

This way theyre not particually effective at a single type but are twice as useful...

Neut drones are fine - a full flight sucks as much as the relevant sized neut (5 x heavy neut drones = 1 heavy neut..ish) and they can apply that from 50km away.

ECM drones are fine - not gonna perma jam you like a dedicated ECM ship but offer many little chances to break target lock. Ive had fights where they didnt work at all, and ive had fights where they worked and im fine with that.

Web Drones - OK they are a bit crap and could do with a bit more webbage but the bottom line is that once applied then they are a 50km range web which is its own advantage.

Target Painters and Sensor Damps are kinda poo, but then again so are the modules themselves.

Dont be a dummy, the drones can apply the neut effect anything up to 50km so its not like in every circumstance the drones have to travel that full distance. They can apply it right next to you or they can apply it 50km away or they can apply it anywhere in between.

5 x heavy neut drones = 1 Battleship sized heavy neut that can be used by cruiser sized drone boats with up to a 50km range. If you dont think there is any circumstance when that might be useful then you need to take off your whiny blinkers.