Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That's all kinds of broken.

Lol here let me scram you 5x with no target lock

What no its not broken what do you mean?

That sounds insanely overpowered beyond any means of balancing...

Hell no.

Lets see what the range and mobility buff do, then we can talk about other ideas.

And no, this is not going to be one of the other ideas.

There's always a way to balance it, unfortunately in this case I feel that the base effect is too strong to make a balanced warp disruptor drone any fun to use. Making it Gecko size could work.


Here's what I think the stats could look like:

Gecko WD-1000
* 50m3, 50mb/s
* 1500m/s
* optimal: 4800m
* warp disrupt strength: 1
* scan resolution: 250mm

Ogre WD-900
* 25m3, 25mb/s
* 750m/s
* optimal: 4200m
* warp disrupt strength: 1
* scan resolution: 150mm

Gecko WS-1000
* 50m3, 50mb/s
* 1000m/s
* optimal: 4200m
* warp disrupt strength: 2
* scan resolution: 150mm


Notes: They must get to close range to have any effect, and the effect does not get stronger with proximity. I gave the warp disrupt Gecko less speed than an attack Gecko, but it's still faster than an Ogre. The warp disrupt Ogre is very slow and will struggle to get to and keep up with a target, but it can be ideal for any slow target or one that is webbed. It can likely keep up with an afterburning battleship. The warp scramble Gecko has poor speed, lower than an attack Ogre, to make up for its boosted warp strength and ability to turn off MWDs and MJDs. The warp scramble effect is too strong for an Ogre with any sort of reasonable attributes. It would have to be so slow as to not be worth putting into the game.

I gave these drones a scan resolution attribute. I am not sure but I suspect that drones do not use scan resolution. It isn't listed in their attribute page and they seem to lock any target pretty quickly. I think they should have a scan resolution attribute, and I set the WS-900 and WD-1000 drones to have a rather low scan resolution such that they will take a while to target any small ships. If the controlling ship gains a lock before the drones do, it nullifies their need to get a lock. It's not a super important point anyway, however, as drones only automatically attack a ship that fired first. Someone trying to bust through a gate camp isn't likely to aggro these drones.

Why should it be absolutely one hundred percent impossible to ever even think about using an MWD or an MJD when there's a BC on grid?

+1 to the "terrible idea, unbalanced no matter how you did it".

These drones would completely replace all the interceptors and frigates in a fleet that normally tackle. Dictors might still see some use but all the other light ships that give a fleet variety and allow newbie players to contribute would be invalidated at a stroke.

The BC fleet would have dps, tackle and very solid tank/EHP all rolled into one ship - the perfect ship, everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE would be flying BC fleets and nothing else.

If you made the range short enough (and hps small enough) that they could be smartbombed, you would just be ensuring that every single pvp ship to undock would have to have a smartbomb fitted. That would not be a step forward. Just for starters, it would skew pvp ship selection massively towards ships that have spare utility highs.

Disruption drones could be setup to significantly reduce DPS of carrying BCs to the point that having smallerr cheaper tackles for large fleet remain a valid option. I totally agree that these points need to be taken in consideration.

The goal is to force kitters to switch targets to the primary threat that these drones would be for them, as the kitting meta is so prevalent today, with very little drawback.

But that small ship can't fit 10 points of disruption

The stats you have suggested could not be effective against kiting gangs. Even a fairly slow cruiser like the cerberus does over 1700 m/s with just a bog standard MWD and real kiting setups with orthrus's and the like do about 2300 m/s or more before any links or implants or anything like that.
If your drones have a short enough range that they can be smartbombed, a competent FC will never put his fleet anywhere near the swarm of warp disruption drones. If they have a long enough range that it is hard to stay out of their range in any sort of standard fleet fight, they they are going to end up being overpowered because one side is going to have to manually lock up loads and loads of drones and start shooting them and during that time, they are getting completely ripped appart by hostile fire and applying none of their own dps to the hostile fleet.
If you put the speed up but keep the range low then you are essentially allowing every BC pilot to command his own fleet of interceptors, even if you limit it to 2 drones, that is giving the BC pilot double the functionality of an interceptor + a massive tank + any dps he has on the rest of his weapons.... It is just broken.

What it boils down to, is that if you make the drones too gimped in speed/range, they will be pointless for anything beyond perhaps some gate camping and if you give them enough speed/range to really apply themselves then they will be massively overpowered because what you are essentially saying is that, assuming an engagement of vaguely comparable numbers, the fleet with these things will be able to disrupt every hostile ship in the fleet and hold them in place on grid. That kind of power is obscene, it is the power of the dictor and they only get to do it in a specific limited area of their bubble, from very close range in a ship with all the EHP soggy piece of toilet paper.

I think one fundamental problem is that with any other ewar drone, the effect is incremental or probability based (ecm has a _chance_ to jam, webbers reduce the speed a _little bit_, etc.), with a warp disruption drone, the effect is total and has a 100% probability of being applied and it is a powerful effect. For comparison, imagine an ecm drone that jammed on every cycle or a dampener drone that reduced the enemies range to zero or a webber drone that reduced the enemies speed to zero - they would all be horrifically overpowered.

The only way I would consider a warp disruption drone was if it's effect was based on an ecm type cycle time and had a probability of working (which would need to be relatively low).