Ships & Modules

From my observation, It can deliver rediculosly high DPS, literally obliterating even quite tough overseers in combat sites. The one I would spent at least 3-5 minutes to kill with my vagabond, after dealing with his bodyguard (or they will repair him and I won't be able to even break his tank), those who pilot Ishtar can easly kill outrigh within 30-45 seconds. I've seen this many times already, so this wasn't some exception. And AFAIK in upcoming release they will boost it even more, wtf CCP, just after finally you've dealed with overpowered Tenga.

ahh, in a ded 5, I have to fly 60km and then drop my drones, in one of the slowest hacs in the game. Otherwise the battlecruisers will melt it.

Vagabond itself has relatively low dps, because its got a considerable speed advantage over an Ishtar, which allows it to dictate range in many PVP encounters, and choose to disengage if losing. If the DPS was equivalent, nobody, would ever in their right mind fly a ship where the drones get left behind, where the drones get shot, and where the thing is too damn slow to trap anything smaller than a bc.

A ded 4 overseer isn't a good test of the overall package for the 2 ships.

You forgot the huge utility/adaptability advantage.

The Ishtar is a pretty good PvE boat these days -- and yes, it's getting marginally better on Tuesday. But it's been that way for ages and all the other HACs are catching up a bit (or in the case of the Cerberus, passing it for many purposes).

This compares to the Vagabond, which is frankly awful for most PvE (though it can race overseers like no one's business, I suppose). Always has been. Damage and tank have never been its role and that won't really change. For that you want to look at the Sleipnir, really.

And so now we have to compare CSs. The Sleipnir is ridiculously good at PvE and both the Astarte and the Eos suck for it now and aren't getting much love with the patch for that purpose. So... boos the Eos?

But at the end of the day, balancing is done around PvP anyhow. PvE is more or less incidental.

but I saw a post on the forums saying npcs are shooting all the drones and drone boats are useless in pve!!!!

now if only there was a way to not lose aggro.....

I'd say your observation fails to take into account ships that actually have high DPS.

Note the applied damage. For example against an AB Ishtar at maximum transversal, Cerb applies about 150dps while rail+Garde Ishtar still does about 430dps at 38km. Ishtar gains dps when transversal is less than maximum, Cerb does not. It never completely catches up against similar sized or smaller targets, MWD or hard tackled.

Neither are op, they are cruisers with cruiser tanks.

PL runs sentries Ishtars fleets for ages now, it's not new but we'll probably see more of them because how ridiculously OP their sign/tank is vs bombing runs and how stupidly drones assign mechanic works on top of the current buff.

You can put 1 trillion drones on a single guy with hyper fast lock and TP to insta pop 200K + EHP battleships, but you can't self repair with your own drones...

Assign mechanic should only work as per squad basis.

Sentries per se are far from overpowered, they have mediocre dps but excellent projection and application, but are destroyable and immobile. It's the perfect alpha combined with departure from normal large gun lock time that makes them very strong in larger fleets.