Draek Andorii
Black Salmon
1
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Posted - 2013.02.02 05:04:00 -
[1] - Quote
It really is broken in a lot of ways. Granted, drones were kind of mind numbing dps in a lot of ways... but aren't all weapon systems kinda like that? Drones should take a small portion of my concentration, not constant staring and being afraid to blink (because if I do 5 million isk can be gone by the time my eyelids come back up).
I think that we certainly should be fielding the correct drones for the correct situation but the solution to that problem was not to make them evaporate when you aren't paying attention.
I'd also like to point out for some of the above posters and a lot of the forum trolls that just because *one* certain drone is viable 33.2 seconds into a fight if you're an armor tank on a friday in caldari space with 47.3% capacitor remaining doesn't mean drones are balanced. It means they have a ridiculously tiny niche and that's not what drones are there for.
There's no reason for me to be able to let my drones out to 65 km when I can rest easy at night knowing that even if I recalled them as soon as they got there, not a single one would make it back to my bay. Either take away my drone link aug or make it useful, please.
Small drones are vastly too squishy for the amount of aggro they generate and are overpriced.
Medium drones do proportionally bad damage, are *still* squishy, are overpriced, and are probably all dead by the time you notice they've been aggro'd and try to recall them.
The real people who are hurting are the big ships that *aren't* drone boats but rely absolutely on said drones to take out the frigates that are endangering their ship. I ran into a situation in my Raven in Worlds Collide (with the bug where the entire room aggro's) where if I pull out my drones they're instapopped, but if I don't I'm going to be warp scrambled into next month and I'm going to lose my ship. This very situation shows just how broken drones are in this regard players in big ships and *especially* missile boats rely absolutely on those Light drones to keep the frigates off of us, but when their damage is mediocre and they're killed instantly there's not much we can do but watch our ship get torn up by frigates and hope they all get bored of warp scrambling at the same time.
That said, i wouldn't mention all these problems without taking a stab at some solutions:
Make correctly sized drones meaningful by changing their damage rather than their durability. E.g. make sure light drones excel at frigates, but anything bigger than a bc and you won't notice the effect. The same for each other type of drone. That way it still stops people from afk'ing missions (a heavy could never take out a frigate, a light could never take out a bs) and it would also make drone use more engaging for drones boats (they'd need to pay attention and swap drones).
As mentioned above, lock on times for npc's targeting drones needs some fiddling. Additionally I think we would profit greatly from a little red aggression icon next to our drones that showed us when they were being target locked. It seems like a fairly simple thing to add and a pretty understandable request.
Aggression really does need some kind of change as well. I'd suggest having one or two boats per group that target drones of their size and the rest ignore them. As stated in CCP's blog post on the new AI, their AI is in templates so this wouldn't require a redesign or anything; just a new template.
Drones need to slowly repair inside your ship. It just needs to be that way. Not quickly enough that you can just swap them in and out mid battle and never have to worry about it, but quickly enough that they're at full health between missions.
This is my first post on the EVE forums and I apologize for the giant wall of text. I only post because I feel that this really needs a change (and hopefully before I lose my Raven because I've lost 15 hobgoblin II's trying to kill the frigates warp scrambling me). |