CCP Rise wrote:We feel that in general it's an interesting and positive part of drone design that they aren't fixed to ship sizes nearly as strictly as other weapon types. We just need to find ways to have balanced ships as well.
Great, but it's still not well balanced, even accounting for the downsides to sentry drones.
As an aside to everyone making hay over the tracking, please don't forget that sig resolution is also a factor in tracking. If you extract sig resolution and tracking speed from the gun damage formula and calculate sig res/tracking speed, you get something we'll just call the "Tracking Factor" that does a more thorough job of expressing how well a gun actually applies damage.
So with that in mind, Tracking Factors for some common setups. Generally a larger Tracking Factor would be worse, although we're ignoring the range element entirely. The (transversal/range) factor would apply to each number identically, however.
Pulse Zealot (Scorch, range scripted TC): 1641 (39+6.5 range, 406 DPS w/ 2x Heat Sink)
Beam Zealot (Multifreq, range scripted TC): 3367 (36+13 range, 557 DPS w/ 2x Heat Sink)
Rail Tengu (250mm Rails w/ AM: 4817 (36+15 range, 482 DPS w/ 3x Magstab)
Current Ishtar w/ Gardes, no tracking mods: 8080 (41+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
Current Ishtar w/ Gardes, 3x Tracking scripted Omni: 4209 (41+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
Current Ishtar w/ Gardes, 1x Tracking Scripted Omni: 6216 (41+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
New Ishtar w/ Gardes, no tracking mods: 8889 (37.5+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
New Ishtar w/ Gardes, 3x Tracking scripted Omni: 4630 (37.5+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
New Ishtar w/ Gardes, 1x Tracking Scripted Omni: 6838 (41+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
Gardes on an Armageddon, no tracking mods: 11111 (30+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
Gardes on an Armageddon, 3x Tracking scripted Omni: 5788 (30+18 range, 421-702 DPS depending on DDA count)
Baltec Megathron (tracking scripted, Antimatter): 18570 (36+30 range, 528 DPS)
Baltec Apocalypse (tracking scripted, Multifreq): 11692 (41+20 range, 433 DPS)
And just for good measure...
Baltec Megathron with 3x tracking scripted TC: 11997
Baltec Apocalypse with 3x tracking scripted TC: 7917
Navy Apoc with 3x tracking scripted TC and Megapulses with Scorch: 4789 (74+10 with 520 DPS, incidentally; that's two heat sinks and a Locus rig)
These numbers are deceptive, however. The gunships must account for their own motion; drones do not. That's obviously an upside and a downside.
Anyway, to break off from the lesson about tracking & damage application and cut to the chase I think the problem with the Ishtar is more in that the battleship sized weapons give it a decidedly outsized capacity to deal damage, and the slot layout enables applying that damage as "fit a bunch of Omnilinks" isn't really forcing much of a tradeoff. I propose:
- The tracking change you already posted; leave speed as-is.
- Split the damage bonus and give it 5%/level to Sentries and 10%/level to everything else. That'd give Gardes a damage range of 351-585 DPS with 0-3 Omnis (as opposed to 421-702 now). This leaves the potential for a healthy damage edge over other HACs without being absurd, though it does grow at longer ranges (it's 310-516 DPS at 72km with Bouncers, compared to 278 for a Beam Zealot or 322 for a Tengu). Could also bake the drone control range bonus into the hull and make 5% sentry damage in its place.
- Note that the damage bonus creates a differentiation between heavies and sentries for damage which honestly is badly needed in general, and frankly an alternative to changing the Ishtar's damage bonus would just be to take 20% off the top end of Sentries themselves.
- Maybe do -1 mid, +1 low. That reduces the midslot flexibility just a little as well as doing more to encourage armor over shields (which trades off more between damage, tank and speed)