EVE Information Portal

I just want to say that changing Sentry Drone Operation to Drone Avionics is NOT clarify its role. If clarification is the goal then Keep Sentry Drone Operation named as such, since it is the required skill to Operate sentry drones.

It is slightly confusing how Amarr drones are rated towards Minmatar on the slider for mobile drones and towards Gallente for sentry. One would naturally assume they would be in the same place on both graphs.

There is no mention of the disparity in hit points between the different racial drones.
Examples:
Hammerhead II - 710/288/134 = 1132
Infiltrator II - 403/288/96 = 787
Valkrie II - 346/230/154 = 730
Vespa II - 326/211/250 = 787

There is a clear disparity here that should be addressed in any drone rebalance.

That said, if this is an april fools joke, you got me.

Maybe because that's not what they're doing.

Your math is flawed.

Currently you can look at the way drone interfacing interacts with base drone damage as: 1 x 2 = 2
After this change it will be: 1.33(repeating) x 1.5 = 2

just remove all ewar drones. damage and logistics drones (make cap transfer drones pls) are enough.

Finally, Fozzie makes some changes that I almost completely agree with!

But of course I still managed to found few things to complain about - while it's good that Amarr and Caldari drones will stop being useless, you're doing it wrong, Fozzie. People will still use Gallente drones for damage and Minmatar drones when they want speed and Amarr and Caldari drones are still going to be inferior to them (save from some specific situations, like fighting Tengu fleets), unless you realise that there's more stuff in the drone equation than just speed and damage. Why not give the best tank to Caldari drones and best tracking to Amarr drones (or the other way around)?

Splitting the current Combat Drone Operation skill into two new skills is hardly going to make drone usage less skill-intensive, since it's gonna add one more week of training (unless Light Drone Operation and Medium Drone Operation will have 1x traning time multiplier, which I think would be more appropriate than 2x). Yes, I know you could train Combat Drone Operation V to make this issue non-relevant, but there'll be newer players and maybe even your alts coming to EVE after this change and this will affect them.

Changes to fighters and bombers are the most controversial undoubtely, especially how DDAs will now affect them. For Fighters I think it's still a good thing as they need some love. Hopefully this will make Drone regions less deserted as some Nyx pilots will go leaps and bounds just to put an officer DDA on their ship. Fighters still deserve another buff (like +20% damage) since their main use now is to assist ratting Tengus and, aside from being able to warp, they hardly have any advantage over Heavies and Sentries in PvP. also it's good to see Shadow bombers getting some love, hopefully you also plan to buff the Revenant to make it more en par with pirate subcapital ships and less of a Rolex watch. Also can't wait for those faction DDAs to come out so I can put them on my ratting Gila, Ishtar and Rattlesnake.

Morning CCP Fozzie, Any chance of looking into the activation proximity stats? Pretty much all of the non-sentry drones / fighters have an activation proximity that is lower than their optimal / falloff, in theory this prevents drones from applying their earliest damage to a target while on approach.

How in hell does the word Avionics clarify anything, when most people will have no idea what the word even means?

Yes pls. Cap drones would be really usefull

I never understood why you wanted mwd on drones anyways.

Makes them clunk around when trying to engage fast targets.

Take this opportunity to remove drone mwd and give em high top speeds on the order of maybe upto 8k for t2 warriors.
Make there agility somewhat less that a typical fast frig.

Frig runs in a straight line it gets gunned down.
Frig evades, drones have trouble keeping up.

With sentry drone interfacing 4(5%), drone interfacing 4(10%) and without the spec skill(10%) you will be 25% under the max dps. 25% is still a very big amount of dps(comparable to useing meta 4 guns with faction ammo to T2 ones with max dps T2 ammo) and well worth getting, plus the extra range, HP and tracking on T2 sentry drones is a extreme good improvement over T1 without even looking at the extra dps.

Edit: @Fozzy can you give me a feedback on the option to shrink caldari and amarr drones to 4, 7.5 and 20 m³ each and/or give them more tracking and double here EHP in the shield/armor layer to make them a interesting option depending on the drone band wide/drone bay of the ship or if you expect to lose some to smart bombs or solo/small gang pvp, where spares can be very handy, similar as I posted on page 9? I think that would be a great way to make them quite a interesting option, without directly forcing them to compete with mini/gallente drones for max speed or dps.