Wait, WHAT? I totally missed this.

You're thinking about making changes to content you're not personally familiar with?

In a game as big and as complex as a MMORPG noone can know everything. I've played Dark Age of Camelot for 7 years and yet I only knew about one third of all contents.

NPCs switching targets in some of the more difficult complexes is going to be troublesome for sure.
I know lots of folks rely on being able to manage who the structures/npcs are shooting at.

Sites like

• The Maze (final room)
• Dread Guristas fleet staging point (final stage)
• No Quarter (final stage)

put out an astronomical amount of DPS. A dedicated tanking ship is usually required.

The tank-ship (often a pimped-out Tengu or a capital ship) typically sacrifices dps for tank.
The high-skilled tengu-tanker takes the aggro and lower-skilled players warp in with whatever dps ships they have.

Managing who that structure fires its Citadel Torps or Siege Railguns Batteries at is pretty key.

It is going to be interesting to see how this works out. We're going to have to come up with new techniques on the double.
Hopefully it won't lock lower-skilled players out of participating in these harder plexes entirely.

On a related note: Along with the heavy missile dps nerf this is another hit to nullsec player income. We could sure use an isk buff out here!

Our ultimate goal is that PvP and PvE fits should be the same and a lot of the thought process should be the same. That is... a long way off though.

Right, precisely this. The result is less incentive to live in nullsec which is the opposite direction CCP should be going.

In a game as big and as complex as a MMORPG noone can know everything. I've played Dark Age of Camelot for 7 years and yet I only knew about one third of all contents.

Also, they don't claim these changes are final, nor that they've tested them everywhere. They especially asked us to test these, because we might play completely different, do different things, etc.

These feedback threads are there fore such things. See something the devs didn't think about? Tell them about it and they'll most likely be happy to look at it.

Modifying a game like Eve it's impossible to keep every possible mission, constellation, etc. in mind. It's just astronomically (pun intended).

But isn't the real key of carefully controlling aggression something that should be based on observing the behaviour of the opponent and adjusting your behaviour to suit?

Not just carefully observe the opponents behaviour over a couple of runs and set down a strict tactic that will always work for a given scenario?

I do agree that it will be harder to grind out isk in null by using a well established tactic, but it will at the same time also be harder to grind out isk using a well established tactic everywhere.

However, I do think that forcing people to engage their brain to grind out isk instead of following a given manual is a good thing.

I just tested rattlesnake with heavy drones on DUALITY .. i lost all my drones then got scrambled and couldn't do s*it.
With cruise missiles / torpedoes you can't kill scrambling frigates so i am stuck.
I can just sit back and relax.

I just tested rattlesnake with heavy drones on DUALITY .. i lost all my drones then got scrambled and couldn't do s*it.
With cruise missiles / torpedoes you can't kill scrambling frigates so i am stuck.
I can just sit back and relax.

Hmm, just had a similar result with a Rattler, some adjustment in tactics will be needed ;)

But scrambling rats tend to die quite fast to a flight of light drones.

And with 400m3 drone bay one can carry more than one set of drones.

Its almost like you could add a target painter and a web to a Rattlesnake to make killing tackling frigates easier

When npc's are 70km away... it's hard to recall drones faster, so you loose all heavy drones.

Hmm, just had a similar result with a Rattler, some adjustment in tactics will be needed ;)

But scrambling rats tend to die quite fast to a flight of light drones.

And with 400m3 drone bay one can carry more than one set of drones.

Every mission is the same so what is the point of adding new missions

Well new tactic is to dump rattlesnake / dominix and train for another more usefull ship.
Rattlesnake / Dominix becomes obsolete.

Well right now on the test server they are just killing everything and if you fight back CONCORD smacks you. So we at least tried this. Turns out most our players don't like it.

So if i get stuck like that on TQ ... can i petition GM to "unstuck me" ?

Drone boats desperately need a way to launch drones with a hotkey. And not just a "Hey CCP pick some random drones and throw them into space! Heavy armor maintenance I's and a EV-900? Solid choices!" crap shoot like you get executing "Launch" on the root of the drone tree, but the ability to assign different hotkeys to different drone groups.

This is something that should have been done years ago, but being as we're apparently dead set on making cycling drones an exciting new facet of the engaging PvE experience a new flavor of tedium in a never-ending, soul-crushingly dull grind I'd say it now rates as pretty critical.

you're trapped and out of luck.

I would have to be one of those Drone pilots that is a little concerned.

First off I don't AFK. But regardless, the issue is especially with Heavies. If you have your heavy drones out at 45km and they take aggro, they are so slow that often they will die before they can get back.

Now before you say, "just stay closer to your drones" keep in mind that for say a Battleship class mission runner 45km is probably a good range. A turret based BS would be engaging at 45km so it is reasonable that a drone ship (like a dominix) would be expected to engage at that range as well.

It also hampers drone ships much more, as they will have to waste time recalling and re-deploying, further putting drone pilots behind the curve vs turret based ships.

Luckily I mostly prefer sentries. But still, it could be more annoying. Maybe if NPC's had the ability to target a ships turrets...