Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ya that's the way to balance everything, remove features. /sarcasm.

Seriously? I'm not even a drone focused character, nor do I even use the ishtar as much I did before it was buffed. (I used the Ishtar back in the day. But right now my "personal" flavor of the month has been T3s. For quite a long time.

Anyways, we need the additional modules. Drone damage amps, etc. Removing those will not fix the issues. It will create more. Drones finally have nearly all the modules that other weapon systems have. Now they just need another look in terms of balance. Well not drones in their entirety. Just sentries to be honest. As they are honestly OP.

How do you fix it? To be honest I'd say nerf the tracking on them. I agree they can hit all manner of targets at rather insane ranges. So being able to track AND do damage with such "precision" is rather insane. So to fix that, nerf their tracking. You "could" also nerf their damage. But to be honest, we should start small. Nerf the tracking, see how it pans out. If they are still OP, revisit their damage.

We don't need the types of nerfs we used to get. Aka Drake, Hurricane, etc. Where nerfing something didn't mean balancing. It meant making it absolutely freaking useless for ANY application. CCP seems to be finally doing away with "mentality" so let's not return to it. (Well besides skynet but considering I'm NO EXPECT by any means in that department, I won't even comment on it.)

So now instead of ishtars killing just whit sentry drones now that ship will start to kill whith every drone nice :)

I like that this nerf finally starts to hit the source of the problem with sentries, however it will fail to accomplish anything just like the previous patches hitting Ishtars. Which btw, I don't really get why they kept targeting the Ishtar when it's damage was never really the issue. More the problem was with sentry damage application, which happens to be it's primary damage source. Combine that with it's low sig, fast, tanky hull happens to make the Ishtar the primary choice for most engagements.


Let me lay a few things out here for anyone somehow not familiar with them yet.
Currently with the use of a single Drone Link Aug. you can extent the range of your drone's lock range to over 100km. Bouncers can hit that entire range unmodified outside of skills. All that without sacrificing tank or prop mods which allows for it to kite enemy fleets around the drone ball within their drone's optimal. If the enemy fleet sits on the ball just drop the next set of sentries and swing back around, possibly re-scooping your previous drones.

Now where does the problem?
Sentries have amazing damage application over a large range, but so do all sniping platforms which sentries closely resemble.

Why then do we not see more sniper Rohks? Megas? Nados? Nagas?
Because they are immobile, and closing the gap causes them to lose nearly all ability to apply their damage.

So why do Ishtars have so much luck when their primary damage effectively comes from sniping drones?
That's the thing, FCs who sit their fleets on the Ishtar's drones typically take no damage until the Ishtar fleet redeploys another set of sentries. Forcing them to (stupidly) re-approach the new drone ball forcing them through their optimal damage range or flying away and warping on top of the new ball.



Now you have 2 solutions to this that are really fairly simple and I'm curious why CCP hasn't taken the time to do so or overlooked it.

1) Reduce Ishtar drone bay such that it can only hold a single full flight of sentries, possibly down to 150 (1 set of lights and sentries). This removes their ability to kite and drop new drones if their original ball can no longer track. Forcing them to either abandon the fight or stay near their drones and scoop and move when the enemy moves in to brawl (Sentry Ishtars suck at brawling).

2) Remove drone control range and drone link aug. from effecting sentries. Attach specific lock ranges to each sentry past their initial optimal+falloff to allow for better use of omnidirectional mods. Sentries all now have a set ~20km control range, that if the controlling ship moves past they lose connection to their drones forcing the controlling ship to move back into range and reconnect to resume control or drop a new set of sentries.


If you can't tell I'm a fan of the second option. I see sentries as the sniping platform drone, as such they should be subject to the same disadvantages as any sniping platform ship - low tracking and low mobility. The Ishtar as well as any drone platform can currently circumvent this by kiting away from their drones and tricking their opponents to fly within their drone's optimal at low transversal.
This change would force the Ishtars/Vexor/Domi/SlowCat/etc fleets to make a decision:
-Long range, low mobility/low orbit with sentries or be forced to constantly drop new flights of sentries as they get out of range.
-Mobility via the use mobile drones (lights/mediums/heavies) which while their damage application is abysmal by comparison due to flight time, does not lock their ships to a single location.

The first option just seems poor to me and would likely destroy all use of them for fleet combat outside of a hit and run pos bash, but is an option none-the-less.

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TL;DR - Give sentries a short control range forcing ships that make use of them to treat them like actual sniping platforms forcing lower mobility. Giving way to increased use of mobile drones when mobility is desired.

Because not everyone has access to the same gear.

Sentry drones create crap gameplay.

Sit still, ctrl-click, ctrl-F, repeat

or...

sit still, assign to someone else... read a book.

Get rid of sentry drones altogether. Give the Dominix and Ishtar back their blaster bonuses.

Let us fly again!

Agreed, its a feature of the system. Gives the game momentum in development. They'd really have to be clueless not experiment with loadouts before introducing ships and features of ships.