One suggestion would be to remove or nerf the drone control range bonus forcing people to give up more fitting for an extra drone range thingy to use it as longrange sentry boat.

Make all the cruiser size droneboats have medium drone bonuses. Not heavy nor sentry. Like Gila, but with 5 drones. Having BS sized weapon bonuses to aply BS damage and range to a cruiser just makes no sence whatsoever.

"Battleships are not in a good place, you crazy Rise" - an important distinction here is that I meant battleships are in a relatively good place WITHIN the class. Whether or not they are healthy relative to other classes is more complicated...

Sentry drones have enormous downsides. They can be killed like other drones AND they don't return to your ship. There's a reason they were never used at all until assist + these tracking/optimal bonuses came along.

perhaps add a new type of sentry drone .. called mobile gundrones or something along those lines...

make ishtar damage bonus tied too them instead .. reduce their dps and range a little .. compared too the current sentries..

Crazy thought for sentry drones:

Sentry drones are battleship sized weapons, in a very small hull. So they're taking liberties with shielding and the like, and are unstable.

When destroyed, they explode, damaging anything in a 6km radius, doing at least enough damage to kill any sentry drone (max boosted sentry drone, at that matter)

Oh, and push sentry drone deployment out to a 3km radius of the ship deploying them.

And just to take care of a potential issue, no sentry drone deployment within, say, 20km of a station or star gate.

Why not drop the ishtar's drone bandwidth to 100mbit/sec . Nothing else would need to be changed then :P

Yeah sure... make weapon only working on 5km... then you have to change all guns to shoot to max 5km as well

the insane fitting gap between ACs and arties causes stuff like this, I think. you give a ship fitting for arties and it has 99999999 infinite grid in AC mode, and you give a ship grid for ACs and it cannot artillery.

also optimal bonuses on minmatar are pretty bad.

CCP has experimented in the direction of giving certain ships bonuses to all size-class of weapons (mordus legion).
I would suggest expanding this to all Battleships, giving them the full bonus to all size weapons. This way you could actually field some bs with point-defense weaponry.

Hello

I was out of the office yesterday but I did get caught up here finally. I don't have a lot to add for the moment. We are still leaning towards more gradual changes for this particular pass but I'm going to get folks together once vacations are over and have a larger conversation about sentries and drone balance overall. I definitely agree that being destructible doesn't end up being an actual drawback for sentry drones in almost all situations. We could expose that weakness more by changing things like drone bay or drone HP but the August release is too close for that kind of change so I'll just get the conversation started and we'll see how things look for the following release.

I don't doubt that the Ishtar will still be strong, and we could definitely remove it from the meta by attacking the sentry use more directly, but we want to try and reach some middle ground before going that route.

One small addition - I'm going to even out the cargo capacity on HACs some in this release, the Zealot's very sad 260 cargo was very annoying.

I guess you'd be happy if my stabber can fit a full rack of 1400mm then also?

do you know what 'power creep' is