Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Secondary issue but the whole stacking on rigs is the nail in the coffin IMHO. I may be too suspicious but to me, this is actually what appears to be a significant driver behind the Omni/Rig change - http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/what-a-hed-ache/ Discouraging drone use ASAP to resolve server performance issues.

Yeah I get the same impression from the dev blog.. CCP is basically f*ckin' over the pve users in an attempt to pacify the blobbers in null....

The way I see it, sentry drones have been OP in PVE since drone damage amps and t2 omnilinks were introduced. Before that I could solo almost any guristas or serpentis nullsec site with an ishtar, getting 533 damage max with perfect skills, 2 damage rigs, and gardes, at a range of 39+10km. Nowadays flying an ishtar you get 750dps with nearly the same tank at twice the range while also fitting a cloak, a prop mod, and having cap stability. Projection without dps loss, frigate blapping, damage selection, good tracking. The introduction of the mobile depot, MJD, and ishtar/domi rebalance just made sentry drones that much better.

However, a few things needed to happen for them to be adopted as a PVP doctrine. First, you needed pilots with near max skills. Their superior performance (for years) in pve meant lots of people had trained them already or were willing to. Second, there needed to be massive improvements in fleet fight stability. This pretty much has happened. Not only was TiDi invented, but we're a long way from turning our brackets off, and canceling gun cycles by clicking the icon beneath the target. Third, the obvious choices for a sentry-fleet doctrine, the ishtar and dominix, needed to get a whole lot more attractive. And boy did they ever. They got really really useful projection bonuses, the domi got its base stats balanced to match other battleships, and the ishtar got a half-decent capacitor and the CPU issues solved.

Adding onto all this, you have the archon, considered the best carrier by far for years because of its armor resistance bonus. But it didn't need to be the archon, sentry drones synergize extremely well with a carrier blob of any type. You have functionally unlimited drone space, you're already slow and have huge HP, so moving away from your drones, or being unable to move to stay near them, is completely irrelevant. Slow targeting speed is not a downside because of drone assist, and archon blobs scale in both defense and offense as you add more due to having a 60km cap and armor tranfering, resistance bonused hull.

The drone doctrines, and specifically HED-GP, were a perfect storm years in the making. It took a long time for their OP-ness to come to the fore (in PVP), but now that it has, this is just the other shoe dropping, so to speak. As an avid drone user and explorer I hope they're not overnerfed, and CCP approaches this as an oppourtunity to do a proper drone rebalance and rewrite (hint, get rid of "drone control range.')

I have issues imagining the DDA + T2 omni's made drones OP in PvE. They did certainly make them a strong contender, but those factors + the domi's bonuses and the MJD likely were pushing the envelope. Still, this affects several ships that weren't really pushing the upper bounds of drone capabilities with their bonuses.

Really the only thing I can think of that ever really made them seem OP before the bonuses was 125mbit cruiser hulls.

Where you draw the "OP" line is more subjective, the point being that they've gotten nothing but buffs for years. Maybe 125mbit needs adjusting as part of balancing drones. I didn't bring it up because we've had 125mbit cruiser for far longer than drones have been OP.

True, we have had those hulls for a while, it's just that with the buffs to mods, new mods and certain hull bonuses, the capabilities of a full flight of sentries doesn't stand out as much at the BS level when compared with the HAC or faction cruiser level. I still think that it may not be as imbalanced as it appears, with the drawbacks being what they are.

Just an observation, one I don't know if there is any real action is required.

Yea, and all those people that spent 6 - 8 months, more training, well they can just respec. Oh, no wait. This is eve.

You're fukt.

Seeing how null-sec wars happen, and various doctrines on both sides, from n3 and friends and from CFC and friends I can see how the need to balance things is important. I used to fly a rattlesnake, but drone AI changes made the rattlesnake not a great choice for someone who did not use sentries and also was full on active in pve not the afk to win drones user. These changes being reported come not long after a bit of a scuffle in a system that suddenly had a incursion going, people on the defending side were of the notion of "gee someone pulled strings so capital fleets to decimate with sentries cannot come in" Probably untrue, but now seeing these changes, which will affect sentry carriers, domi's etc... That makes me wonder slightly. Test, but by all means get 100% feedback and if the numbers from us, your players don't come anywhere close to good scrap it poll us, see what we think would be better implement that and test. Fozzie, your at the helm of this ship, don't make us force you to wakka wakka the plank!

So it's going live in three days and damn the feedback?

Honestly, that's pretty disappointing.

I'll leave it with this - these are sufficiently heavy nerfs I'm selling pirate drone boats because they're now so far outclassed by a simple dominix or ishtar there's zero point in having them.

This type of drones needs alot more nerfs, also remove drone assist from the game.