Issues, Workarounds & Localization

So with the new AI, ships that make use of drones (especially those that use them as primary offense with associated ship bonuses) took a pretty big hit. Now there is a current bug that allows the person to pull the drones back in as soon as they take aggro then release them and continue the mission the way you would back before the release of Retribution.

So with a future fix to this being that the ships will continue to switch to your drones every time you send them out, this will open up a new exploit. By using a ship that can use atleast one drone but doesn't rely on the use for the staple of its dps, you could continuously pull in and send out your drones. If timed correctly, you never get locked by the improved AI and you never lose a drone.


Honestly, the best solution to afk missioning and botting is to simply remove the aggressive option for drones. I personally hate having mine on aggressive and have only used it under dire circumstances (sensor dampened to the point that the ships orbiting and dampening me are too far). I find that having them on aggressive tends to cause them to split up (even with focus fire checked) and they can go after targets that are currently too close to other groups. I like to split up my targets so that half selected are frigs, destroyers and some cruisers and the other are BS, BC's and some cruisers. I tell my drones to attack one of the smalls while I use my turrets on the bigs.

Also consider that for the sake of ship balancing, ships that can use drones must use them to be on par with it's peers. Drones are on par with turrets, launchers and EWar. That is, drones can bring a similar effect and the drone ships relies on it to not be gimped when compared to its non drone using counterparts. The trade off is that turrets can be track disrupted, web and other EWar are range limited, drones have to take the time to fly to target and can be destroyed. This doesn't mean that drones should be auto targeted. Unless you want to make it possible for turrets, launchers and EWar modules to be specifically targeted and destroyed or make it so that modules have a chance to take a % of the damage done to your ship depending on where your ship got hit.

Would it be so wrong if actions generated aggro as such is found in many other MMO's? So that frigate that you sent your drones to destroy may try and engage the drones that are attacking it since the damage is coming from them and not your ship. So that if you focus both your ship and drones onto a target you have to be sure to generate more aggro against the target than your drones or the target will start attacking them instead, or be sure to generate less if you want the target to continue to attack your drones.