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Is this effectively the death knell for the Navy - regular Dominix for level 4 mission running?

Real men drone tank :-)

Don't worry, it'll disappear soon

No.

I've run C1 and C2 wormholes with a Myrmidon and not lost any drones. If you keep an eye on them you can keep them alive.

Sleepers are often quite slow to re target. Sometimes you can recall the drones when you see the sleeper go from red to yellow and force them sleeper to switch back before they have even locked the drone. Sleepers also hate ECM, so a boat with a couple of ECM mods can keep aggro off the drones as well.

If you tank with the drones you can reduce a lot of incoming DPS. A Dominix has room for a lot of T1 drones to use as cannon fodder.

This is the death of using drone centric anything for PvE.

I'm all for revamping the AI, but it needs to come with tools to deal with it.

Pretend this is a sandbox game, and I'm not a pathetic carebear for prefering the following playstyle:

I play with a few RL friends who recently joined. I take a mission, they come in with a couple of frigs or maybe a destroyer or cruiser or something. All completly Lolfit because they are both less than a month old, and of course insist on trying out things for themselves rather than taking my word for it that 'this is how things work'. Essentially I tank the mission, they shoot objects in space till all the red crosses are gone. I send my heavies out to deal with battleships and leave the frigs and cruisers to them no matter how long it takes, or until I run out of BS anyway. This is fun for us, and slowly they begin to learn what sorts of things they enjoy doing in the game.

This change will end that entirely. I dont think this is a truely bad thing, but it highlights a few items that will need addressing.

1. Bigger ships need a way to defend smaller ships in PvE. You can't hide behind a battleship, and it can't afford to tank and rep at the same time. Something needs to be in place to allow bigger ships to anchor a mixed fleet. Offhand I'd say allow some form of damage mitigation based on comparitive signature size and proximity----shifting damage from the smaller target to the larger target. Something that would allow a Frigate to stay in close formation with a battleship and make use of longer range weaponry. The further you get away from your anchor, or the bigger you are, the more of your own damage you take. For best effect, make this the inverse of speed tanking---the closer you match your anchor's speed, the better the mitigation you recieve from it---but the anchor takes more damage because you are taking more hits.

2. Drones will need love in every way imaginable. To start, give them onboard Armor and Structure rep ability. Calling them back should be an opportunity for them to restore themselves, not just to duck aggro for a second. The attrition rate is going to be huge regardless. Dronebays will need to be increased by about a factor of 20. We will need nearly as many 'reloads' of drones as other ships carry additional ammunition (I commonly carry about 8k rounds, so we are definitely going to need a bigger bay). The UI for drones will need a rework to allow them to be used as effectivly as other weapons systems---the current UI is barely usable for ships not focused on drones that only have a single flight to deploy and recall.

3. Rework drones entirely. Make the drone you put in your ship be a drone system. Upon docking, the system begins repair and replenish operations on the drone, which will cost spare parts. In the event a drone is destroyed, the system begins assembling a new drone of that type. Now drones have an ammo cost, as measured in spare parts, you can see drone stats by clicking info on the drone system, you can group systems like weapons to create flights that launch upon activation, and unless you run out of spare parts you don't get stuck because your drones got shot. Even better if the drone systems can use raw ore, metal scraps and salvage to create the spare parts so that a drone ship could still concievably operate nigh indefinitely, replenishing it's supply of drones from what it hunts.

^^ This
10 years of remaking the same game. Redo graphics, redo AI, hardly any new content.
We have 10 years of playing this game, 10 years of history, a great back story to work from that is hardly ever tapped other than the time one Jove got splattered all over our hanger bays. We could have new cool ships, events, modules, new space to explore, a new race to play or cross-train on, but you rather tweak the mechanics we finally have down pat instead? I really could see all new missions separate from existing ones, with new fancy AI* and new loot tables and NPC's.

Right now you are only scaring off customers, risking breaking existing content, and creating new bugs.
Free evaluation for you and its fix:
(A)New missions, with (B) new NPCs, (C) with new AI* capabilities

*breaks no old mission content
*Creates new content
win/win

else sadly this time its
bye/bye
People usually get paid for this stuff.

WOW this is going to revolutionize PVE. You're right, it's one of the oldest-surviving pieces of the game!

I see it affecting miners a lot. Especially all those guys who bought Retrievers to leave them AFK mining.

Sounds like you're still under-utilising the NPC ships though. I'm busy pummelling them with my Raven's 6 or 7 missile launchers, but they only ever fire one missile back at a time, so I can tank multiple battleships. Things would be quite different if they were unloading 5 or more at a time at me!

Keep up the good work!

What Mike Voidstar said above:

"3. Rework drones entirely. Make the drone you put in your ship be a drone system. Upon docking, the system begins repair and replenish operations on the drone, which will cost spare parts. In the event a drone is destroyed, the system begins assembling a new drone of that type. Now drones have an ammo cost, as measured in spare parts, you can see drone stats by clicking info on the drone system, you can group systems like weapons to create flights that launch upon activation, and unless you run out of spare parts you don't get stuck because your drones got shot. Even better if the drone systems can use raw ore, metal scraps and salvage to create the spare parts so that a drone ship could still concievably operate nigh indefinitely, replenishing it's supply of drones from what it hunts."

This is a great idea... using up stuff from your cargo hold to repair drones and what-not (and in real time). Great opportunity for more skills to train. Great idea overall!

Some missions are completely bs even when solo. Like my Raven Navy Issue that was jammed by 2 cruisers and being scrambled by 6 frigates and get blasted by over 8 battleships and I aggro nothing and moved away from the spawns for 5mins then got autoaggressed.

I say fix some of the missions with some ew and not so much. Make some new NPC types, increase the isk in some of them especially the battleships are close to the same isk as a cruiser. Bring back speciality ships that you taken away in several missions that has 1-5mil isk bounty and drop cheap deadspace loot. Level 4 needs a big boost... you can finish a mission fast and almost get the same amount of isk if u collect the loot and bounty that are left in level 3s.

Also add unlocated Loyal Points for killing NPCs.

Friagtes - 1 point
Destroyers - 2 points
Advanced Frigate - 2 points
Cruiser - 3 points
Advanced Destroyer - 3 points
BattleCruiser - 4 points
Advanced Cruiser - 4 points
Battleship - 5 points
Advanced BattleCruiser - 5 points
Advanced BattleShip - 6 points

I'm sorry but are you playing the same game that we are? If you're relying on a drone ship like Ishtar or Domi to run plexes and let's say you're doing a guristas plex... usually you target a ship and let your drones do the work while you get jammed to hell (or dampened by serpentis).

With the new changes your drones get shot so you pull them in. Now you have to sit there for 5 mins until enough of the damps / jams drop to target again. I can tell you from experience it's going to take 2x as long. So again, are you playing the same game?

Even worse... do drones now get jammed too? If so you've just gone from 500dps to zero as all your dps is drone dps and all of them are jammed.

You're making AI smarter.... well gee how about making drones smarter so they can start shooting things that are in range even if you're jammed. Is that AI tier 4 (aka. unattainable for CCP?).