weird idea:

maybe make sentries follow the mothership and shoot its target while moving? i.e they always follow the ishtar while shooting its primary

that way the ishtar will always be close to its drones and he will have to care about tracking again

One thing I was really annoyed with: ECM Bursts seems to not effect drones effectively. This should be changed so an ECM burst causes a drone to lose all locks and then aggro based on CCP's wonky drone aggro AI.

indeed .. if a drone needs its parent ship too function then why does it not need a constant connection ??? surely any interruption like ecm or damps should render them idle..

Ishtars will just assign their drones to someone with longer target range.

I agree along with other changes this could help alleviate the ishtar domination

maybe sentries, if regular drones get immobile becouse ewar they'll get instakilled then the ship (now we arent' talking about ishtar anymore) lose its only weapon.
ewar should be temporary, not a permanent weapon denial.

If the tracking on sentries was so bad the counter to Ishtars is to orbit the sentries? That sounds wrong. About as good of an idea as smartbombing them off with 0 m/s battleships.



I am fairly certain someone at CCP took a hard nerfbat to every doctrine that was used before the Ishtar got buffed like crazy. Have not seen any supercaps with normal drones, trackingtitans, canes or drakes lately. Also DDAs weren-¦t a thing. Or ships warping with different speeds. Pretty sure there was no real cruiserdoctrine except zealots for quite a while.

The Ishtar is a broken peace of ****, with more fittingroom than most HACs. You can put whatever you want on it without requiring fittingmods. While not needing any CPU/PG for guns and still having free highslots.
And as many people have pointed out destroyable only counts in largescale and without the ability to carry more than enough of them around and then even being able to reload from the cargohold.

How about we just add some sort of visual overlay or addition to the overview that signifies which ship has the drones assigned to it? That way FCs can disrupt the command and control better.

Just white boarding here.

I like the idea of ewar having an effect on drones. Right now, damps are basically the only thing that does anything if you damp all of the Ishtars, which really isn't reasonable in a large fight.

A few things have popped into my head:

- Target Spectrum Breaker disrupts all locked drones for 20s
- ECM Burst disrupts all affected drones for 20s
- Sensor Damps reduce drone control range in addition to target lock range (with additional drone lock script)

There have already been nerfs to sentries and now to the Ishtar. Still the Ishtar problem if there is one is nothing like the Drake problem of old. Anyway, further nerfage is misguided at this point. Sentry usage does come with not insignificant drawbacks.

The only thing that makes some sense in this discussion is possibly some ewar countering to drone use. But to simply thorw another ability onto ecm jammers and ecm boats would ruin the currently and very welcome damping down of ecm power (after many years "of Falcon").
The devs have stated they wanted to do something with painters (buff) and rework of ecm (change this horrible mechanic).

To throw some drone control counter ability to painters would make some sense now that Amarr use drones heavily. Say somehow the painted ship overloads the drone control communications and reduces tracking or range on the drones, or reduces the drone control range. Whatever, as long as the effect is not totally disabling (as with ecm).

Alternately, further nerf ecm, but give caldari recons a new anti drone control module.

But I really think this should go to Minmatar painters. Ecm can stay as it is, as horrid as it is, because it has been nerfed already to some semblance of tolerability. Painters however are such weak sauce that buffing them with anti-drone effects would give them more reason to be fit, and give the Vigil some reason to be on the battlefield.