I'd still like a satisfactory answer as to why drone ships are -1 slot count. If its because of the tired argument that drones offer utility, then the obvious argument there is that ships that have primary weapon systems other than drones are afforded a tremendous amount more utility with their drones, because they don't have to sacrifice any damage potential in order to use utility drones. Yet, drone ships that use drones as their primary weapon system have to say "ok, I'm going to not do any damage and use EC drones instead." Why is it that a Drake, for example, can use all 6 launchers AND a flight of EC drones AND get +1 slot count over a similarly-classed drone ship?

Because these are still not on SISI I substituted it with a myrmidon. Its 6th low was a Nanofiber Internal structure.

I ran a Serpentis annex (not sure how they compare to a 6/10 TBH)
When fit for all in one exploration with an onmi tank, did ok but had trouble when it got too much agro.
When fit for combat and rat specific tanking, it did better but ultimately failed.

Coincidently enough, 4 unbonused lasers do about the same amount of DPS a the lost drone.
Remove the Turret hardpoints and please give us back our drones.

Pretty creative to use a Myrm. But, this is where you failed to account for the power of a resist bonus I think. Regardless, yes, we really can't know until these things are available for testing.

Agreed. Why give it split weapon bonuses in the first place?

... Armour bonuses (amarr) and drone bonuses (gallente) along with the specialized ability to use a cover cloak was already enough to qualify it as a pirate faction cruiser.

as massively OP more like

Alright, after a lot of feedback and discussion I'm going to share what will likely be the last set of tweaks to the Stratios and Astero before launch.

We feel that while there are significant weaknesses in the cruiser that do balance it against major abuse, it's simply too strong in its current state. The combination of the covert cloak, black ops portal access and extremely high damage potential make for a ship that does a bit more than we are comfortable with. To tone it down slightly we are going to lower the drone bandwidth to 100mb/s and the drone bay to 400m3.

The ship will still have very high damage potential and will certainly still be very powerful overall.

This also makes me feel better about some other small changes that improve the ship, so we'll also be increasing the virus strength bonus to +10 and changing the laser cap use bonus to a medium energy turret optimal range bonus of 50%. We will also extend the virus strength bonus to the Astero.

Please post with feedback, but keep in mind that these changes are made after processing tons of feedback from the forums, my visit to EVE Vegas and a lot of internal discussion.

Thanks

It's because drones can't be killed and can be overheated to do stupidly op damage . . Seriously though the -1 slot on drone ships doesn't bother me as much as the squishy-ness of drones themselves. Even when you have a 10% per level hp bonus on them they die all too easily. Drones on a ship (like my comet :( ) that doesn't have a drone hp bonus melt in no time. Maybe the balancing team could increase the base hp stats for drones a little?

However, I agree with Fozzie's decision to drop the bandwidth to 100. Having a cov ops cloak and 125 bandwidth would basically obsolete the Ishtar.

I am not sure why you guys are so hung up on the whole "100 mbps drone bandwidth" thing. So what if it can only launch 4 sentries? How does this negatively affect anyone? I mean, I guess if you were to dedicate a character to exclusively flying this ship and had trained Drones 5, you might find some way to take some level of offense over having trained Drones 5 unnecessarily, but at rank 1 it's not exactly a whole boatload of training time at 256k SP.

This change was necessary and brings the ship more in line with competing options in the Sin and Ishtar. If you can't find a use for a covert cloaking cruiser with a myriad of effective gank and hotdrop fits doing 600-700 DPS across a wide berth of effective application ranges, I think you need to close the Proteus window on EFT and remove the whiteout on your monitor over the "weapon range" column and think a little more about it.

Some people wanted to run 7/10's in a covops ishtar and make bank, completely ignoring the fact that doing so is pretty unbalanced. That's what many people got hung up on.

Some people wanted to run 7/10's in a covops ishtar and make bank, completely ignoring the fact that doing so is pretty unbalanced. That's what many people got hung up on.

Um, actually, 6/10s as suggested in the OP.

until then I don't quite think this ship is Ishtar levels of performance.

The adjusted stratios has no issues running a 6/10. It won't be the fastest ship to run a 6/10, but it will run it just fine. Nor should a covops ship be better at blitzing 6/10's than dedicated non-cloaky combat ships.

Good, It should never have been close. In it's current iteration the stratios runs 6/10's just fine. Working as intended.

What 6/10s are you even talking about here? Like, a Drake can run a Guristas 6/10 no problem.