Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drones are no more secondary than missiles.

Drones existed for years in an abysmal state. They have finally graduated to poor except on a few hulls and everyone stops laughing at drone users and looses their mind.

Sentries have been around forever, and a little extra tracking on a couple hulls didn't suddenly make them OP. It's certainly no worse than other ships with tracking bonuses.

I agree to an extent that there should be sized sentries like there are combat drones, with bandwidth being reduced on hulls that probably should not be fielding heavier firepower.

Other silly suggestions like reducing drone bay or making drones suck again should just not happen until we reduce all cargo holds so that there are only a half dozen turret/missile weapon reloads.

True, but there is no need to ever use heavies in a mission if you have sentries to the same skill level. Even bouncers (iirc they have the worst tracking, though I never use wardens so maybe they are worse) will track orbiting at 5-10k npc BS, BC and even cruisers with just a single Omni tracking link (scripted for tracking)and a painter. The only thing they won't track well, or at all, is elite cruisers and frigs, when they are in orbit. Though they can often be dealt with at range anyways before tracking is an issue. And dealing with aggro on sentries is easy. Return to ship, redeploy. . .

Allso with RR and ET (maybe the painter helps attract aggro also) on ships the drones will hardly ever get aggro anyway. Generally it's just the light drones when I'm finishing up with killing the frigs. So the whole "flight of heavies getting nuked in seconds" is just straight up bollox. Or as I said before they exaggerating to make up for weakness in inn game drone skills or actual player drone management skill.

The biggest issue is not really that one thing here or there was slowly, or quickly nerfed to obliteration. What the real issue is, is that we, the consumer effectively purchased the skills for a said item, in this case sentry drones V (which took over 30 days) to eventually have that skill's value diminished greatly from the original expectation.

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I am left feeling similar to a person who bought a car that turned out to be a lemon. It's like, "um, this was supposed to be this, not what it is now." If CCP changes things so much that they are just a shadow of their original form, then I would like to have the ability also to change where I place my skill points.

I don't weep for the loss of the value of things I once used and enjoyed. I weep only for skill points which are now much less valuable.

Meh. Happens all the time. I was using drones before they were cool, and actually got out of them right around the time they became mainstream because the Battleships Tiericide and the NPC AI changes happened about the same time. I spent a few months traveling around, trying to find some combination of NPC and tactics that would make drones vs. environment worth the hassle, and ultimately decided those skillpoints were wasted then. Now I have maxxed out gunnery support, and am either 3 or 4 in all turret specialization skills, and am working my way through missiles to insure I don't have to worry about that sort of thing again.

Don't follow the flavor of the month, play with something you like.



It's great that you are so 'leet. Congratulations, you win EVE. Very impressive. Really.

I agree that saying all heavies die within seconds is a bit hyperbolic, but they definitely do die plenty often. Often enough that I switched from hulls that cost a quarter to half a bill, to Mauraders with their insane price tag. Even sentries are a PITA in level 4 missions. Truly they do work well, but I myself prefer heavies to sentries because I can move while they are fighting and they are much more flexible than sentries overall for the same training period.

The statement that drones hardly ever pull agro so long as you run you RR and painters or whatever is either you downplaying how much it happens, or you do very little PvE with drones. I have done extensive testing across all enemy types--- there comes a point when NPC AI determines Drones must die, and then they get shot. no matter what. Pull them out, put others out, RR and Ewar all you like, let one die.... nothing will satisfy them. CCP did a really stupid thing introducing agro mechanics without also introducing mechanics to actively deal with it.

As mission runner in Dominix. -1 to this adjustments
sorry.

Sorry for being late to this one but why were the Gardes ever considered in dire need of a nerf again?

It must have escaped me that everyone I know was raging on how terrible overpowered those Armageddon, Nestor, Navy Dominix, Dominix and Rattlesnake fleets are there were constantly yoloing all over nullsec, lowsec and w-space..

Anyone else heard about those? No? Me neither!

So why are you nerfing sentry drones again and can we get another ship slot for the Armageddon, Nestor, Dominix and Navy Dominix in return with a turret damage bonus?

You know, if you take away don't shy away from giving back and if one boat is too strong with battleship drones, maybe don't nerf all battleships that would like to use them but the one that causes trouble.

Wow another drone nerf? Sentries and drones arent even op... its just laziness. Its easy to fly so people do it, and since its easy its effective for most players who arent good. When really those drone boats can be outmatched and countered most times

and how many of those Ishtar fleets use Garde's as main drone?

I like that this is now in the patch notes despite all the negative feedback and almost no conversation from devs

Tachyon signature resolution 400,

Mega pulse laser signature resolution 400.

Curator signature resolution 400.



Want to try that again?


No mention of the drones taking time to lock and fire either? When you tell a drone to shoot it takes a couple seconds before it actually fires. Hence the signature radius stat.