Assembly Hall

I'm sure many people agree that something is not right about drones in their current form and this was still the case before all the wonderful drone mods CCP has added in the more recent patches.

I will clarify I am an avid lover of drones, so I don't want them to be hit with the nerf bat just because they aren't working and if I seem a bit biased I am.

So lets start

Drone limits.

The current drone limits are slightly problematic as they cause a higher server load as they change 1 ship into 6 (or so I'd guess).

CCP added weapon grouping to reduce load this but since drones still randomly split fire I'd assume this isn't applied to them.

So the next step would be to force drones to group and act as a single unit or alternatively reduce them to 2 actual units and spread their stats from 5 units within those units.

These would hopefully reduce any server load issue.

Drone and Ships.

It has always been a problem in my view that nearly every ship in eve can use drones and this shouldn't be the case.

So setting aside drone boats or drone based ships, as they should be able to use the maximum amount of drones, all other ships should be heavily limited in the amount of drones they can use from 0-2.

Now while this would be annoying to start with it would define drone ships more proudly and at the same time they should be also limited in the high slot weapons they can use.

Carriers and Supercarriers

Remove the ability for them to use drones and replace them with 4 fighter classes.

Light Fighters - 1/4 the damage, hp, size of normal fighters keeps the bandwidth
Medium Fighters - 1/2 he damage, hp, size of normal fighters keeps the bandwidth
Heavy Fighters - What normal fighters are now
Fighter Bombers - What they are now.

The reason for the above is that carriers should be limited in how many drones they can carry, this also cuts into the ratting elements of carriers but doesn't leave them vulnerable missing lighter drones.

A secondary change I'd like to see is a reduction of the actual units with grouping or with merging and spreading of stats, carrier and supercarriers should still be scary with their extreme numbers but not so much that they can fll up your overview completely with several of them.

Drone Grouping

I mentioned drone grouping and I now want to go into more detail about how it could work, firstly it should probably be called squads or something but it doesn't matter too much.

So the idea behind this is the same as how the group windows currently work with drones but instead of them being a way to just organise your drones they are become a linked unit as it were, meaning they all suffer from ewar affects and damage equally but they also act as a single "bigger" drone.

They would be locked to 5 per group and would have to be the same unit.

AOE affects such as smartbombs and bombs would have a multiplier of 5 against them.

While this has many downsides in terms of solo players I believe that in huge fleet fights this would be very useful in reducing the drone lag that is related to it.

tl:dr
Reduce Drone number or their affect on the server.
Reduce the amount of ships that can use drones, while in term making drone ships less able to use other weapons.
Remove normal drones from carriers, replace them with fighter based counterparts.
Implement a way to group drones.

Effectively you could just like if you ungroup your missile launchers you will add to the server load, but no one does it as it's easier.

Ship balancing is mostly because CCP just gives drones out to everyone's ship and it's faction uncle jed variant and it's just getting silly now.

However carrier and supercarrier do need to be addressed at some point.

cant group drones, since they are independent entities.

right now, lets assume you have 5 guys, and an opponent your ganking/fighting has 5 drones, you can either each engage a separate drone, try and kill them, or all focus on one drone and nuke it off immediately. but focusing means your wasting alot o DPS, because the alpha is way more than the drones HP, so no matter how much DPS you have, youll only remove 20% of the DPS. if drones are groups, you increase the damage of each drone, but also increase the effectiveness of alpha, and therefore create a huge vulnerability for the drones.

post is probably completely incoherent, but im tired and will edit later.

If you read my post you'd notice that supercarriers would benefit from this.

As explained many times (seriously countless threads on this topic from 2006 onwards) drones are a problem within eve when it comes to huge fleet fights.

There are a few issues I have addressed but you prefer they get nerfed?



It exists as a way to organise your drones it has zero functionality outside of that.



I agree with your points, however the idea that you can group them would be beneficial in some situations

Here is a picture from B-R5 where it would of been an advantage as the order at the time was to only launch fighter bombers so that they didn't crash the node, now if they were combined that could of made the server stress less.

http://puu.sh/6AnUW.png

Same with grouped guns, you don't hear anyone complaining as it's purely optional.



So having the EHP of a figher, the ability to chase in warp and be assigned is "this is totally not just a drone with a different name even though it is".

However this is a drone revamp thread, fighters are a brand of drones and they also need to be altered due to the way carriers and supercarriers work.



I don't even see how this is a valid point, people use drones because they are easy and with the new changes to NPC AI they are no longer "easy" target painters and webs are the easy way to hit smaller AI ships and the only reason people stopped doing this is because drones were easy.