TrouserDeagle
Beyond Divinity Inc
Shadow Cartel
266
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Posted - 2013.06.12 20:33:00 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Rise wrote:Hey
I'll see what I can do about painter cycle time =)
As far as drones, we've actually been talking about it some recently. I can't get it to the front of the backlog, but I can keep it from going to the back. Everyone wants to work on drones, its just going to be a very big project and we have to figure out where it fits in to the bigger picture. I'm with you in hoping its as soon as possible.
I would also like to suggest the insane idea that I have no racial favoritism. As a player my 4 favorite ships over time were probably Stabber -> Typhoon -> Harbinger -> Armageddon -> Ferox -> Talos -> Caracal. Also I don't make design decisions based purely on personal biases. Sooo yeah.
Hey Rise, you're pretty bad. Painters are fine, people just want to be able to grind incursions harder with them. I've sperged out a big list of how you can fix drones. It's probably better than everyone else's suggestions.
- Set medium-sized drone ships to 50 bandwidth and larger drone damage bonuses to bring them up to the same paper dps as they have now: that way, a ship's drones will go faster than it and be able to hit equivalent size targets, which is how it's supposed to be. Currently these ships apply damage really badly (like a trimarked, plated blaster ship using electron blasters, but with the tracking of spike rails) and the drones get exploded all the time, cost loads and use up loads of bay - easily the worst weapon system.
- Make heavy drones go faster. I'd intend that they be used by battleships, but seriously they're just too slow to use on anything.
- Make drone pursuit AI better, so 5x 7km/s drones with a tracking bonus can actually kill an untanked condor going 4km/s. If this is too complicated to implement, you could simply increase the range on drones from 1-2km up to 7-8km, it would have a similar effect I think.
- Make drone modules make more sense - look at what slots they all go in and the crazy amounts of CPU they all use (faction DDAs would be nice, I doubt I'll be able to afford these nonexistent officer ones).
- Make drone rigs less bad - a general damage one would be nice, and change the penalty to something sensible (a proper rig rebalance is in order, but it'll never happen because there's a tonne of rigs and nobody cares).
- Nerf drone assignment somehow - make it count against the number of drones you're using, so you can have up to 5 assigned to you if you have none of your own or something. Make it possible to do in lowsec - it never works here.
- ECM drones are horrible and should be removed. Other ewar drones, either do something with the stacking penalty so they're less bad or just remove them. Balancing this stuff looks really complicated, and I just don't see what they add to the game other than annoyance and badness.
- Add cap transfer drones to go with rep and shield drones.
- Better UI would be pretty nice, but I could live without it. Something like a designated drone group you could launch on a hotkey or click of a virtual module would be cool.
- Make it so they don't fly off and shoot sentry guns.
- Also make it so you can tell them to just aggress something that's aggressing you, when you are jammed or damped out and cannot lock - currently if you get jammed/damped before you launch them, they are useless and just sit there. I've also had a fight where I got them out in time, and they went after the ECM frigate, but they decided to switch target and go shoot someone else right before he would've died. I was pretty mad about that, it was awful.
- Oh yeah, make it so the different damage types are good.
- I'd probably go with making it so sentries benefit from/require racial drone spec. They don't at the moment.
- Navy vexor's speed bonus means heavy drones (lol good luck with that). Dominix's optimal bonus means sentries. It would be nice if they could both do both effectively. Tristans are pretty awful too, and algos - whose idea was it to put medium drones on a destroyer? Those new destroyers are all weirdly slow, I don't like it.
Something general to compensate for the power creep all other weapons have had would be nice - everything else has faction/t2 ammo, overloading and general buffs over the years, and ships have links and go very fast now, while drones haven't really improved except for DDAs and sentries - they are left in a worse position. I've no idea though, other than nerf that stuff (links), but you won't. Sometimes they're really good (sentries with DDAs and omnis), but that doesn't mean they should be bad the rest of the time.
Regarding Odyssey, your attack battlecruiser nerf was really disappointing, go do it again but properly this time. I get that you think they're good for small gangs or whatever, but they're really massively broken. Remove or think up something new they can do. |