EVE General Discussion

I hope it isn't a baby

Yes because the Alliance Tournament is an excellent place to decide if something is OP

This sounds like grasping at straws. I had a feeling this is what was meant but I was hoping that it wasn't.

If mobility is *really* an issue in your fight, you can just abandon your drones, and put out whatever other drones you want right away. And TBH a large part of the flexibility is in the choice you can make *before* the fight starts (which drones to drop), which is subject to none of these disadvantages. If something changes in the fight and you need to swap drones, then wait the equivalent of a weapon reload timer or abandon your drones if it's really an issue...


Can you create at least a rough list then? I don't see at all how high slots are OP for similar reasons to drones. High slot modules are generally vulnerable to pretty much everything that drones aren't. You want to fit neuts? That comes at a DPS/fitting cost, you can be jammed/damped, you can't assign your neut to someone else who has a sebo and eccm, you don't have massive ranges ubonused, etc.


No, you don't. That's exactly why drones are so good - because you *don't* know their composition and intent, and drones are good vs. pretty much everything. If they're a kite setup and you bring a brawler setup, you're screwed, etc. You don't need to make these kinds of trade offs with drones. This is just like TQ...

You weren't specific about any of the restrictions in the AT. What makes certain drones more popular and for reasons that wouldn't also apply to TQ?

Sure, if you bring smartbombs or bombs you are gimping your setup to pretty much *only* counter drones in the AT (and potentially at the cost of offensive DPS). If they happen to bring anything else, then you're screwed. This is exactly the same trade off you make when you try to counter drones on TQ, so I don't see what your point is.

…and that means the much-vaunted versatility has just received a pretty nasty gut-shot. Even big drone boats will quickly run out of weaponry if they keep trying that trick. And the choices before you start are much the same for everyone: what you bring and don't bring, what you engage and don't and in which relative positions.


- Instant damage projection over long range with rails/beams/arty (or, hell, pulses and ACs with the right ammo).
- Able to easily switch range and tracking and even to some extent damage types without any real delay.
- Highly resilient to ewar.
- BS levels of DPS possible on sub battleship class ships.
- Frigate levels of damage application possible of a battleship.
- Weapon uses no drone slots so you can bring a full flight of ewar or reps or just MOAR DAMAGE.[/quote]

Yes you do. It rather comes inherent with the AT format and the restrictions on what you are allowed to do.

Ehm. I just listed them. Twice.

Sigh. Usually when you abandon your drones it's because you don't want that type of drone in the current fight anyway. E.g. switch from sentries to lights, because there's nothing else you can do with your sentries, or maybe switch to ewar because it's time to GTFO, etc.

What you're saying only matters if you would want to switch *back* to the first type of drone you had out after, and that's not true very often. Sure it might happen, but it's such a contrived and rare case, I would hardly call this a significant downside of drones when considering high-level balance, nor something that reasonably offsets the massive advantages and flexibility that drones provide.


Respectively:
- Sentries provide instant damage projection over often longer ranges (e.g. compare sentry cruisers to arty cruisers)
- Drones have this same ability but have more options for flexibility
- Resistant to ewar? huh?
- BS levels of DPS possible on sub battleships? Ok, but with significant trade offs for those ships that don't apply to the drone variants
- Battleships turrets can swap between low tracking frigate level tracking like drones can? What?
- Weapons use no drone slots, but you need to make much greater trade-offs in drone selection due to the small bay size, and you cannot fit drones to cover all your bases. Drone ships have something like 50%-90% of the high slots of a non-drone ship, yet non-drone ships only have a drone bay 25% the size of a drone ship if you're lucky. Not to mention high slot utility mods are way more effective than using the drone space for utility.

You are also comparing "drones" to "some sort of combo-high-slot module" that can be any turret it wants to be, and ignoring the trade offs within each type. To be accurate, you'd need to compare drones vs. energy turret, drone vs. projectiles, etc. If you fit artillery, you can't just swap to high tracking guns when you feel like it. You can improve your tracking a little bit.


No, you don't. Just because you say it doesn't make it true. You know certain things about your opponent in the AT - you know they can't use your ship bans, you know they can only have one cruiser logi, some rough indicator of what their fleet strength will be based on point values, etc. You did not explain specifically how any of these types of restrictions make drones more preferable in the AT for reasons that wouldn't apply to TQ. I'm calling BS on this argument. It would be valid if you're trying to make some argument about logi or something and the AT limits those significantly. But in this case the argument is just a cop out. Drones as a common setup in the AT is very much an indicator of their power and usefulness in comparison to other weapon systems.

…and each time you do so, you lose the versatility that the drones are supposed to bring. Every time you have to GTFO in a hurry, you have to go back to base and refit. By that measure, there is no versatility because guess what the turret ships can do if they go back to base and refit? Well… except that you don't actually need to go back to base to do those turret refits any more.

• The range of sentries is about the same as you get out of medium guns.
• Drones don't actually have the same ability, actually. Each of them only does one thing. You have to carry an entire flight for every option, quickly filling up your entire drone bay even on a dedicated drone ship. Turrets can just carry different ammo, which offers a lot more variety in a much smaller package.
• The sub-BS drone ships have plenty of trade-offs, in particular in the DPS department, so that balances out quite neatly with ABCs, who have the trade-off of tank instead.
• You can fit all kinds of weapons on a BS that will do very nasty things to frigates — drones are not the only option.
• The trade-offs are pretty much the same: you choose between ewar and logistics and damage. If you go for the latter, you get lower damage out of the drones, sure, but that reduction is often less than the lower damage the drone ships get if they even try to fit weapons in their highs.

No. I'm just pointing out that the supposed “one tool for every job” applies just as well to, say, turrets. What you're describing is how people suggest that drones work, and the simple fact of the matter is that they don't. A full flight of heavy or sentry drones takes up 125m³ — you can carry 3 such flights in the quintessential drone battleship, the Domi. That covers all of three different situations, not the bajillions some are trying to suggest. If you swap one flight out for smaller drones, then you get more, but it also means that you've given up some versatility.

Yes. You. Do.
They can't flee. They can't reposition. They can't set a trap for you. They can't reinforce or refit or otherwise alter the dynamic. They can't play timer games. They will stay in the same area and do the same move over and over. And all of that applies to you as well. It is an entirely static setup, and that is very good for drone (especially sentry) usage. That static nature only exists because of the AT format — throw in any kind of dynamics and the benefit of the drones quickly evaporates.

Yes, but as the butler

Except that the smaller drones are a large part of your versatility. All you really need are 2 primary sets of damage drones. You have all the rest of that space to fit smaller drones. You wouldn't want larger drones to track small things. You wouldn't want big slow webifier drones, or slow EWAR drones that can't catch tackle. You give up very little to also have flexibility. If drone bays were smaller, it would be a different story, but they are large enough right now to provide imbalanced flexibility.


Throw in what TQ dynamics exactly? What TQ dynamic would remove the benefit of drones in the AT and why? You still haven't given anything specific.

The specifics are at the bottom of post 72, you have to do some pretty difficult reverse engineering though.

None of those state a specific reason why they apply only to sentries or drones for that matter. Why do any of those things specifically make drones the better weapon system to use in the AT? Why, if you had to worry about those things on TQ, would they encourage the use of a different weapon system instead?