Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What if sentry ceased to have incredible tracking, what if they required their owner to remain close to them (10km) to properly function?

As it stands currently, a ~17% nerf is plainly ridiculous.

It's not enough but it's a start

Both of these thoughts tell me you never fought with Ishtar something bigger than a rat.
Drones in fleets - or PvP in general - are passive, as you want to control who is attacked. And with the limitation of 25 drones per bunny, the usage of dronebunnys has mostly stopped at all. So 2 points you want to "remove" are points, that would have no effect at all.

This sounded cool at first but the more I think about the sentry bonus nerf the more wrong it seems.

There's a whole class of ships called HACs to which Ishtar belongs. They are generally well balanced. Of all those ships, only the Ishtar is a problem. Why? Obviously the problem is in the weapons system it specializes in, the drones. They have versatility in damage type and range/dps ratio. They apply damage well with tracking bonuses and are very resistant to ewar compared to turrets and missile launchers. Their tracking is not influenced by ship's movement, allowing sig/speed tanking without ruining their damage application.

Now, sentries are the best drones because they don't have to travel around to apply their damage. Nerfing Ishtar's sentry bonus seems like a crude way to solve the problem. It's like curing the symptom. You're introducing an exception to a well balanced system just to nerf a weapon system which has clear advantages over the others. This can't lead to good things.

Rather than nerfing the bonus for specific type of drones, can't you do something about the bonus in general? Gurista faction ships have been rebalanced in a good way, giving bonus to only the drones of specific size. How about doing something similar for non-pirate t1 and t2 cruisers?

My idea is to make non-pirate drone cruisers give drone bonuses only to drones belonging to the same faction. Vexor and Ishtar would only give bonus to Hobgoblins, Hammerheads, Ogres and Gardes. Arbitrator would only give bonuses to Acolytes, Infitrators, Praetors and Curators. This would leave Vexors, VNIs and Ishtars as good brawling cruisers while also not nerfing their PVE role as high-dps, sig/speed tanking ships that can solo most things that can be soloed in PVE.

I wouldn't apply this to smaller drone boats because their limited drone capacity makes them not part of the sentry problem. Also, don't touch BCs and BSs because they already have limited PVP applications.

Sums up the problem, until this is addressed nothing will really change.

Probably because they changed drone bonuses specifically because drone ships were ******* useless in fleet and even in most small gang pvp situations, and they don't want to completely go back to those days. Incidentally, it's a sentiment I share.

I think if you just did a range and tracking nerf across the board on sentries (except Gardes), so that they couldn't really apply dps past 100km, except maybe with Wardens which have **** tracking, then you'd see less of a problem with people finding other ships to use in pvp situations. The problem with the Ishtar is it can hit out at too many different ranges. Wardens with 2x omnis hit out to 120km opt and almost 70km falloff. Those are numbers you can't get outside of the very top tier of BS sniper weapons, and those have absolutely abysmal tracking compared with the Warden's 0.024 on the Ishtar. One or both of these stats needs to be dialed down to be more or less in line with other weapons systems, although I do believe the drones should retain something of an edge since they're immobile and require a lot of risk to pick up, or extra drones in the hold to adapt to the battlefield.

Chiming in to say that nerfing damage does not address the problems that CCP Rise laid out in the devblog, namely:



Whereas

This would at least address this.

not sure by half, gardes might be a little too short range at that point, but certainly reducing optimal range by a good 20% would make sense, gardes might need a little more falloff though, kind of what there doing too bouncers but all round.

To be fair, those ranges are heavy drone territory.

Apparently Gardes are for POS bashes, not mobile PvP.