Other stuff: The new circular targets are stupid beyond any statement.
The icons are completely non-intuitive, and the old style was far superior.

I have run a LOT of logi in PvE and PvP, There are going to be a lot of dead ships with this new interface.

Pretty much this. If you want to make PvE 60% more irritating then by all means, go ahead. It's already soul-crushingly awful. But don't go making ratter ganks even fewer and further between. It's already difficult enough to even get on grid with a ratter before they warp out, much less hold a tackle when they start lighting you up. If you take aggro as well based on the size of your ship and whether you use ewar or not then ganking ratters is going to be next to impossible.

It's already difficult to tank ratters long enough to kill them when you're flying the kind of ship that can catch a ratter (bombers, inties, HACs, recons, etc)-- ratters usually do quite a bit of damage. If you then add to that a significant portion of the PvE site's DPS as well there's no way solo players are going to be able to gank ratters anymore, not to mention the fact that NPC aggro potentially mitigates players ability to tackle the ratter at all (NPC jamming or sensor damping is not conducive to point-holding).

You need to find a way to make your AI not switch to players who aren't engaging the rats or otherwise assisting a ratter. Full stop.

In theory this is how it should work but based on Foxfour's earlier comments about solo ganking in a bomber "no longer being possible" and the devblog indicating that rats prefer to target ships closer to their own size, there is more to the switch trigger than just aggression.

I think you're forgetting the fact that the new AI hates / loathes / despises EWar. So once the PvP'er lights up the PvE'er with a Warp Scram / Web and starts shooting... he's going to top the hate list.

Regardless of how much damage the PvP'er deals to the Rats or the mission runner... he's still gaining mountains of hate from all the EWar he's doing. Unless you actually imagine the CCP Dev's are going to rewrite the AI code to help PvP'ers (a group they've already decided can just suck up the change).

Logi's 'healing' DPS boats gain threat vs. rats... so you're way off base if you imagine PvP'ers EWar'ing other boats wouldn't gain the same massive heat spikes.

I enjoy the improved L4s because they're improved. I haven't noticed any nerfs so far.

More engaging and (for now, until the formula has been fully hashed out and beaten) a tiny sense of unknown adventure and surprise as well.

I had to actually kind of occasionally pay a tiny bit of attention to what the rats were doing. Riveting stuff.

Any thought to allowing the movement of replacement drones from the cargo bay to the drone bay in space? Might help to soften the blow for all those drone boats.

I did some testing with a Paladin and a Damnation. Released the drones and they worked well. Most the time the npc were switching between the ships. Damnation went after the (battle)cruisers and Paladin went after the battleship npc. I sent my light drones after the frigates and they were okay. I did have to pull them in a few times and use remote armor repair on the drones after finishing a pocket. I'm guessing most of the people complaining about the npc are talking about large drones?

I haven't tested the large drones. Do you guys find tanking the npc battleships easier without smaller npc? Just wondering because, I'm thinking it might be possible to use medium drones first to get rid of cruisers and battlecruisers then using the larger drones on the battleships?



I like the idea of the return when attacked idea in the post above.


Edit: In the second paragraph I'm talking about using a single drone boat to do the missions. I think heavies would get killed. What happens to the smaller drones in those missions?

Edit 2: I've done a few more missions. Heavies don't die that much. I had to watch them and call them back sometimes. The only time I lost drones before was when spider drones webbed them and killed them before they got back. It'll be the same now except, no more afk missions with droneboats. Plenty of missions before where you had to watch the drones when a new wave of ships came. I just have to take an active role in drone management. I used to do that before anyway, telling them which ships I wanted them to go after.

I'm not sure that drone boats are going to be the worst hurt by this change...

The Golem in particular... Marauders in general already take a lot of micromanagement (select target, activate weapons, select different target, activate tractor beam, select different target, activate tractor beam, select different target, activate weapons, select different target, ativate salvager, select non-target, lock target, select different target...) and the Golem is particularly sucky in this regard because not only must the weapons be deactivated and a volley count kept but the Target painters need to be switched around ahead of the weapons. Not only that but unlike the turret Marauders it cannot attempt to remove all of the frigate sized targets while their transversal is low and is therefore particularly reliant on drones for anti-frigate work.

If, added to all of the micromanagement issues implicit in the operation of a Marauder, the drones must be constantly monitored and maintained, sent to specific targets and recalled...etc.

Light drones in use by a good drone pilot in a well-skilled drone boat are one thing, less well skilled drones without bonuses (or full Drone Durability) are very fragile indeed and regardless of how good the experience of killing NPCs might become the experience of constantly losing ships because a Guristas Koyukan or an Angel Viper has you scrammed and you have no way of actually breaking his tank is going to get old very quickly...

They will start shooting at you, especially if you dare to use a point or scram on the guy who was in the anom first..

How many of you have actually tested a mission? I did. I tried a low SP pilot in L1 missions and a high SP pilot in L4 missions. Tristan and Navy Domi respectively, both strongly relying on drones. Both did multiple missions. How many drones did I lose?

Zero.

I had to recall them a bit more often, that's all. As a high sec drone user, I expect to see a negligible impact to my income from the AI change.

I do plan on replacing a gun with an remote armor repper. I figure it will help fix that one drone I was a little slow to notice, and up my rank on the NPC threat scale as I'm using logistics.

When I was doing my test missions, in one L1 mission the NPCs did switch to my drones more than once. It was a drone mission, maybe they are not bugged?

In W-space the rats do switch to drones over and over. The method I use:

Launch drones. Keep them close.
Wait for drone aggro, pull them in.
Wait just a few seconds, just enough for aggro to switch to you. Then re-launch
You now got about 2 minutes before you got to worry about drone aggro again.

It seems like the NPCs (at least once the bug is fixed) are on a 2 minute cycle. Every 2 minutes they re-evaluate if they want to change targets. If there is no other target to swap to, they remain primed, ready to swap. If a new target shows up at that point, they swap right away. (New ship warping in, drones that just got deployed). This means if you pull in your drones then wait 2 minutes and re-deploy, they will catch aggro right away. So dont wait.

In W space we have noticed that if you got 3 ships in the fleet, drones rarely get aggro. But with one ship when the NPCs want to swap the only thing available is your drones. Be prepared to pull them in and re-deploy on that 2 minute cycle.

So you are basically saying the same as I did, just added a lot more :words:? :)
EvE beeing a PvP centric game, you can't really expect WoW PvE.
Allso having people spending the same ammount of time to reach PvE endgame as you have to in WoW to fund their PvP does not seem resonable either.
Basically PvE works as a punishment, some "work" you have to do to fund your PvP.
This is part of the reason that PvP is exciting, because you know roughly how much boring stuff you have to do if you welp your ship.

Except loss isn't loss if it's not meaningful to recoup... no?

Eve being cold and harsh and all that jazz has bad and especially punitive punishments for losing. That's sort of the core principle. Otherwise you're just playing WoW, except in a submarine... in space.

Remind me... what was the problem again?

AFK player's make fairly horrible income / hour. You park an AFK Domi or Rattler inside a room, and come back half an hour later to find a cleared room and if the mission takes place in a single room, something akin to 5-8mil ISK. Last I checked you can make a TON more ISK at pretty much zero risk in high-sec mining.

Unless the problem is botting, in which case the new AI will do nothing to fix that...

And my impression was that it was both aimed to be fixed (the places themselves), and anyone found doing it banned already.

Obviously I may be wrong, never cared for afking like that.