Ships & Modules

Please use sentry drone. My sentry drone Gila/Rattlesnake is doing fine running lvl 4 mission without losing any drone.

i dont even have time to bring them back, when they are at 30 km range, they get shot off before they are back

I haven't had any problems with sentries. I have had problems with my light drones (I normally mission in my Amarr BS's). When the little guys get aggro, its 1 shotted, 2 tops. And when the frigs are so close to me and under my guns, I can't draw any aggro onto myself (hence the light drones).

Still working at it, but so far this is making me want to go back to missile boats for missions, or sentries, rather than having a selection to chose from. ;(

yeah, um.....you do realize that if you launch heavies, EVERYTHING will go after it, right?

So launch lights, clear the frigs. Recall lights, launch meds, clear cruisers. recall meds, launch heavies, have them clear out any big ships your missiles haven't taken care of yet. PAY ATTENTION to the drones you have launched, and recall them (Shift+F) soon as they start taking damage. If you're losing drones, pay attention to what you're losing and pack extras.


Having trouble with frigates at range? Don't launch drones until the rats are as close as they're going to get.

it's called drone management, and you have a 400 m3 drone capacity (Rattler, right?). Not quite 2 flights of every drone, but damn close.


Heavy drones are slow as ****, and will get murdered if there are (m)any ships shooting at them.

... Increase range for normal drone is beyond me. Range is only good for 1 class of drone and that's sentry, please train for it even T1 is light years ahead of T2 heavy. Don't listen to EFT warriors about higher DPS of heavy drones, because they have never use heavy drones and never understand how sloooooow heavy are. My sentry would have blown up most ship at 80Km before their heavy could dealt its first damage.

i do lvl 4 missions on a ratlesnake, a navy mega and a nightmare, after the patch and the new AI i change my fits, in order that my drones survive the missions, i use a target painter in all my mission ships, that way my drones are not target.

As often happens in EvE (as in RL) the situation changes and your tactics need to evolve to match the new situation.

There are simple solutions already emerging for the problems you are describing, several in this very thread.

As the old saying goes, either adapt or die... or in this case leave... as apparently you don't deal well with challenging situations.

The new Drone AI does seem a bit more aggressive. I don't remember my Drones being Webbed in the past. I noticed two frigs were each Webbing a Drone in an L4(can't remember which one - might have been Silence the Informant, Room 02). Neither of these two frigs were aggroed. They were in a completely separate, non-aggroed group. I did lose one Drone to the Webbing frigs. The other one managed to "limp" home...

This new Drone aggro has made Missions more interesting and challenging. It has caused me the "trouble" and challenge of altering the fittings of my various ships. This equates to more fun when it comes to finding more pieces to this wonderful puzzle called Eve Online.

I have run dozens of level 4 missions since the patch with very few problems. Lost a few drones here and there mostly due to my not paying attention.

But yesterday the enemies abound chain came up. I figured Since I had no issues so far it should be doable. If it was to hard I could always not do the 5th mission in the chain as that was the only one I had trouble with in the past.

Well in the first mission all my drones got insta popped, the elite frigs locked me down with webs and scram. I lost my faction battleship. I though It was my fault, I messed up my agro management. Went and got my back up ship. Same thing drones insta popped and I got locked down. I could hit the elite frigs but did not do much damage to them. Then the elite frigs were getting remote reped making them unkillable. I was locked down by ships I could not kill, and eaten by the remaining 7 battleships. Way to much DPS when you are web and scramed by ships you can only kill with drones that get insta popped when launched.

Has anyone completed the enemies abound mission chain solo without help since Dec 4th? I have 45 million skill points and I got ravaged. Now I have lost both my mission battleships, and do not have the isk to replace them. I will not go back to noob content to make isk to replace them just to have them blown up before they make enough isk to cover the insurance cost. I did like the challenge of the new A.I. But this is ridiculous, If the A.I. is going to be left as is, then there are some major bugs that need to be fixed in some of the harder missions. I can handle drones getting agro'd, I can handle Elite frigs that are hard to hit, I can even handle NPC's using heavy remote reps on each other. But when it all happens at once it is just to much. The rewards of level 4 missions are not near high enough to have a difficulty comparable to sleeper sites.

It would seem that the different aspects of the A.I. are somewhat random. Elite spawns that some times insta pop drones, NPC's that use MWD's and AB's to avoid getting hit. NPC's remote reping and spider tanking. But when they all trigger in the same mission it gets insane. Combine that with a mission containing 9 battleships and 6 battlecruisers with elite frigs and a solo pilot has no chance. I have run sleeper sites that were easier with 5 times the reward.

Are you sure it was remote rep and not local?
Random is random, so is their rep and agro swap.
When too many elites are around, insta-pop can happen in any mission.
Heck, even had issues in a L3 with deploying light drones (shields dead before they got into orbit of the elite frigs). Not that I cared much, were T1s for one and flew a ship that could handle it without drones, but still.

Sleeper sites... prolly this change is a nudge to go that way...
Heck, it works, I want to try WHs now more than ever before!