Missions & Complexes

This is a horrible idea. Killing drones is one way to reduce incoming dps in a fight. Making drones untargetable would create extremely deadly ships. An arazu could point you at 40km, sit back and let the drones do all the work. it woukd be far too over powered.

Yep. Heavies are practically dead now for engagements of any range. If you have an Ogre 20 km away, it won't make it back alive if it starts taking fire all of a sudden. If it starts taking fire AND gets webbed? It's gone. Just...gone. Nothing you can do, unless you can fly your ship to it and scoop it up, and even then it's dicey.

Sentries (Domi sitting at zero on top of drones) is still decent, but all other drones (the ones with travel time) are in serious trouble.

Wouldn't a tank buff for the drones help? They don't even have to buff DPS. Just buff the tank.

I would even be okay with 4 drones and a repair bot if the repair bot managed the drones incoming damage just like logi would.

Add new skill - Drone Logistics.

Edit - for this to work, you would have to understand what drone has what aggro. Which means... yes an overhaul.

Regardless of the quick fixes, I fear an overhaul is unavoidable.

i really really liked this idea when i looked at it the first time but a small scale 0.0 miner like me im ****** rats now just orbit me at 60-90 doing max damage and jam the **** out of me i dont have the ability to : 1 target them 2 my drone range is max 60 kms so i have no way to defend my self none the less the can warp scram me from 70 km away ><

So what it all boils down to is that if you warp in on top of frigs, you're probably going to lose a few lights taking them out due to drone aggro.

If you warp in and the frigs are at a distance, the mechanics don't change. They're probably the first to go with your sentries. The other will be the ability to burn things down quickly before they fall in range to do any serious damage to them.

Idk anymore. I'll test it out for myself and then probably resign to using a Tengu from there on out.

Yep, it's fairly simple. Drones are only NEEDED to take out things "under your guns". That is, small craft your guns can't hit. Like frigs orbiting your battleship.

A frigate, for example, does not need a drone bay. And indeed, most of them don't. Why? There's nothing that can get under the guns of a frigate. Same for destroyers - no drone bay needed, they're designed to kill frigates and other destroyers, nothing in the game can get under their guns. BUT moving upwards, drone bay becomes a necessity. At battleship level, they are a requirement - without either drones or smartbombs (which are often impractical, as they hit everything around, possibly causing you to die in a fire by CONCORD) - a battleship has nothing that will deal with frigate size hulls, if they're close.

So the first situation - where frigs are right next to you, under your guns - is the ONLY reason why all battleships have drone bays. It's a flawed mechanic within the game itself, a very poor and antiquated design choice. And yet, it is currently necessary, because it's the only way to deal with frigs, which will web and scramble you.

Now, on top of that older poor design choice (arguably, missions themselves, relying on huge waves of enemies are also a poor design choice), now they added another poor choice - those frigs now, plus all other craft, can and will aggro drones. Drones that are necessary to deal with those frigs if they spawn too close. Results in a double-whammy screwup.

This also explains why drone boats are so seldom used. Look at EVEKill.net, and top 20 most used ships. Any drone boats there? Nope. And there haven't been any for at least the past 5 years or so. Why? Because drones are poorly designed, poorly implemented and have a poor UI to boot. Did you know that to fire all your guns you need just 1 click? But to launch a specific flight of drones and see their HP while they're fighting takes 5 clicks? If you assume 5 clicks take 5x longer than 1 click, and realistically it's WAY longer than that because you need to move the mouse quite a bit in between clicks, drones are obviously RIDICULOUSLY inefficient weapons. And if you factor in travel time before the damage is applied? LUDICROUSLY inefficient.

They need a review. Period. No ifs, no buts.

Antiquated design choice?
That bigger ships have trouble shooting at smaller things?
So from now on, PvP should be done with capitals only?

Missions being a poor design choice the way they are, and adding another poor design choice I can agree with however fully.


I thought the Myrm pops up ton EVEkill.net from time to time.
But this is a mission topic, so why bring in PvP?

take your marauder to a famous lvl4 that has 2 gates to choose from the start and try clearing all out . You will notice the difference

Solution is very simple, Make drones Extremely cheep to manufacture (20K for small T2) etc.

Tada!

Did two lvl 4 so far. Not one drone was even scratched. Admittedly I used 98% sentries. But two times i had to fly to 3 frigs @11 km range.

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My two cents.

If drones will become like ammo, they need to be "fired" like with launchers. They need to be as small as ammo, so you can bring 5000 drones.


And they need to become as cheap as ammo and have a chance to hit like ammo. Would you pay 20k for one cruise missile? They are at like 700 isk each. That would be something i am willing to pay.