Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, I was looking at drone rigs, and half(literally) of the drone rigs only apply to a specific type of drone, while two of the remaining four are useless to one or more groups of them.

On top of that, they affect a ship's fitting ability directly, reducing cpu as a drawback. Having a single max skilled rig at -5% cpu can be annoying enough...having three rigs with the skill at 4 (as most people will likely have it) gives a whopping 18% reduction in CPU, enough to gimp most fits to the point where it'd be better to leave a slot or two blank than to add all of the rigs.


So...with that whined about, on to the individual rigs:

1) Drone Control Range Augmentor:
This one is actually pretty good, I think. 15km is a reasonable amount to increase range by, though if you're at ranges where this is really useful you're probably in a battleship or something equally expensive, and it seems to me that there would typically be something better to fit...especially when you take the fitting knock and calibration usage into account. (energy grid rig, tank rig, etc) (exception might be a sniping domi...?)

2) Drone Durability Enhancer:
Again, not so bad, but you have to ask, is 20-25% more hit points on your drones (read: a second or three added to their life expectancy) really worth 5-6% of your cpu, plus a lost rig slot and -100/150 calibration?

3) Drone Mining Augmentor:
Ok, so this is the only mining rig in the game...I can see how that could make it useful. However, with max skills and three of these rigs(two T2 ones, even), they add a whopping 117m^3/minute over unbonused mining drone II's. The first two, I could maybe see being used now and then...but this? Doubtful. It also eats up 100/150 of your calibration points.

4) Drone Repair Augmentor:
The concept of this is actually nice...but 10% added to the already mediocre amount of reps that comes from drones is not a lot. The only time you'd see this create a significant amount of extra reps is with a flight of heavy rep drones...and really, who uses of their bandwidth for rep drones?

5) Drone Scope Chip:
This is obviously intended for sentry drones, and for those I'd say it's quite reasonable. It gives a useful-but-not-enormous boost to optimal and doesn't have ridiculous calibration costs. The downside is...well, you have to use sentries for it to be useful.

6) Drone Speed Augmentor:
This is a nice idea, but nobody is really going to notice a 10-15% increase in MWD speed, and even fewer people are goign to fit more than one of these to a ship : /

7) Sentry Drone Damage Augmentor:
Being the only way to directly increase drone damage, these are perhaps used more than all of the other drone rigs combined, but I still say they're broken. They use the same calibration as weapon rigs (300 for T2? wtf?), and provide a whopping 10% increase in damage each...meaning, on a max skilled ishtar or domi with Garde II's, you can use ALL of your rig space and lose 10-12% of your cpu, for a maximum of an 88dps increase. Wat.

8) Last but not least, the Stasis Drone Augmentor:
These are interesting, because a full rack of them takes stasis drones from 20% to 30%, and T2's take it to almost 35% per drone. That's a lot of webs to throw around, in theory. In practice it's not so pretty....webber drones are stacking penalized with other webs, so you have to spread your webs around multiple targets to really take advantage of this, which is not a simple thing to do, or use the min combination with other drones, making this rig even less useful. And again, cpu hit...for webber drones...



So, what needs to be done?


I can think of a few immediate changes:

overall- Change the drawback to something else.

1) Either make it more effective or reduce the calibration cost....

2) See 1

3) Again, either more effective, or reduced costs. This one I'd just replace all together, honestly.

4) Calibration costs are fine, this just needs to be more effective. 20%/25% would be more reasonable, rather than 10%/15%.

5) Not much to change IMO....it works well for what it was intended for.

6) And yet again, this is not effective enough to be useful. This one is nice in that it has a module to equate to. It's understood that rigs should be less effective than the corresponding module, but this doesn't even come close. I'd say up it to 20/25% T1/T2, and have it affect non-mwd speed as well.

7) If this is going to take 200/300 bandwidth(T1/T2), it needs to do a LOT more. My vote would be to up the damage to 15%/20% T1/T2, and have it affect all drones, not just sentries. That might even be worth the drawback. Alternatively...drop the calibration costs to around 100/150, if that.

8) This, as mentioned above, really isn't all that useful...but this is partially because the drones themselves aren't really very effective, and have such a niche role. My vote would be to have this affect ALL ewar drones, not just webbers. Ewar drones in general are rather underpowered, apart from ECM ones(which would need looking at prior to this), and don't have any ship or module at all with bonuses for them, so even with this rig affecting all ewar drones, its bonus could be set as high as 20%/25-30% T1/T2 and not be overpowered. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing this as a module.

TL: DR- Drone rigs are currently mostly useless and need fixing


So, there's my thoughts and/or sleep-deprived ramblings. I know I'm not the only one to think about this, so please, tell me why I'm wrong, how fat my mother was, and what should actually be done with these. :)