Vortex from FHC
wrote:Yet another topic where I have a large and already fleshed out response to this somewhere. Maybe it was back on the SHC boards, who knows. None of this applies to sentries, which are fine as is.
EM drone damage output is too low, it doesn't ******* matter if they had the tracking and speed of minmatar drones, they would still be horribly useless. To illustrate just how bad they are, a Spec V TII Amarr drone does less damage than a T1 Gallente drone. So no, just making the minmatar drones "fast and low damage" is not going to fix a damn thing - you'll just make a new, useless drone type. Minmatar drones as-is are on the low threshold for useability, and are only viable due to their massive speed advantage over other drones. The Amarrian drones could do 20,000m/s with perfect tracking and you still wouldn't be able to use them - the damage is just too **** to ever matter.
The TLDR of my proposed fixes:
Kin/Thr drones become the high damage drone types. These are the most common damage types with the most common T2 resist profile, making them the easiest damage types to prepare for.
EM/Exp drones become the utility drone damage types. They don't do as much damage as their pure-attack counterparts, but they have something to make up for it.
Gallente drones stay as they are, barring any global tweaks to drone performance
Caldari drones do slightly more DPS than of Gallente drones, but instead fire fighter-bomber pseudo missiles instead of a gun attack, with the worst tracking of all drones. They have high alpha, low rate of fire, and are slightly more fragile and slightly faster than Gallente drones
Minmatar drones stay as they are, barring any global tweaks to drone performance.
Amarrian drones get the same DPS of Minmatar drones, but with higher rate of fire, lower alpha, and slightly improved tracking. Amarrian drones become the slowest drones in the drone fleet, but have (pending balance testing) 50-100% more EHP than the other drone types.
So you wind up with the following breakdowns:
Gallente - best overall performance, highly desirable damage type, but a bit fat and slow
Caldari - Miniature fighter-bombers - best dps and high alpha, but unlikely to deliver their full dps to most targets in their comparative weight class. Terrible at drone v drone combat.
Minmatar - Best drone handling in the game, perfect for getting rid of targets your guns can't hit. Highly desirable damage type is mitigated by their lower DPS numbers
Amarr - Slowest drones, but with an immense tank that makes them hard to get rid of. Their high rate of fire, improved tracking, and raw tank makes them the best drones to have in a drone vs drone conflict.
Bam, all fixed. Now you have two tiers of drones based on damage, and each drone in the category does something a bit different than the other. You now have a reason to chose a drone for damage type, DPS output, and utility. Compared to now, this essentially doubles your number of practical options (yea yea caldari drones get a bad rap, but they essentially split the difference between the two best drones as is, and so you either usually want maximum damage or maximum speed, not half of each). This is a marked improvement to the game, and would take all of one Sisi testing weekend to get the balance right on.