Manfred Sideous wrote: Despite what people think we simply use whatever ship comp we need to use to be able to handle the task at hand. When you are fighting a foe that brings Domis , Phoons , Tengus , Ishtars , Bombers , Ceptors & other fleet comps at the same time and outnumbers you on average 4:1 you need a durable fleet comp. Slowcats & Wrecking Ball provide that . The hostiles knowing we are going to bring slowcats have a multitude of options on how to deal with us. The most obvious one is using there own capitals and supercapitals. The gist is there is counterplay to slowcats and wreckingball. Which is the definition of balanced gameplay in a sandbox.
Now drones are entities much like missiles once were. The same missiles AAA & Stainwagon used with wild abandon despite the fact that using a missile based concept caused massive lag. They didn't use missile base ships to intentionally cause lag they used them because it was the best tool they had at their disposal. Do drones need to be reworked so they don't create excessive server load? Maybe so maybe not only CCP can answer that. As CCP stated in regards to the last few node crashes they had nothing to do with server load and everything to do with a error in the code.
I think the discussion CCP is having about drone assign is the correct approach. Its not a question of is this or that overpowered . Instead they are looking at it from the pov of : How much control should of your ship should you give over to another person. So things like fleet warps are part of that question. I personally think bombers are way overpowered. In heavy TIDI there is near 0 counterplay to stopping bombers. Since bombers can warp cloaked together you have 0 warning till they decloak and launch bombs and tidi removes the problem of having fast reactions. So bombers are already prepared to drop their bombs and warp off.
It's funny that OP has nothing to do with either drone assist or carrier OP-ness, but while you're at this dumb preventive damage control, lets have a chat on subj.
Lets start with the objective well-balanced game conception, which CCP has been feeding us for years: every ship has its combat role and niche. But with carrier blobs what we really get is all sub-caps (xept suicide dictors) are totally useless once carriers are deployed, because any subcapital ship within 200k range from carriers gets instapoped, including ceptors orbiting carrier blob at 40k. There was once an ultimate anti-subcap weapon for titans, maybe even twice with tracking version and sub-cap dd, remember what happened to it?
I don't think there really should be an ultimate cap ship which cuts down all sub-cap classes. And even sieged dreads melt under carrier focused fire like matches, one by one. Speaking of dreads btw, they do have own niche of anti-battleship capitals, which is ok and relatively balanced. But not carriers. I'm pretty sure even 100 dreads will lose to 100 carriers. Is it intended game mechanic as well?
I personally know a few ways to counter carrier blobs with capitals, but the problem is still the lag: dreadnaught guns cycle for 3-5 min, sc fb's get smartbombed (which you have plenty of time to fit in TD) after gettign a few carrier kills and even titan doomsdays are not the solution, because they have about 2 hour cooldown. So you end up with having 20-30 kills for the whole night of fighting, not even mentioning the node survival chance
And this exactly is the matter of my concern.
Also I agree that bombers are currently OP.