Will they make marauders obsolete? What new bonuses should marauders take in place of their current salvage friendly ones?

Current salvage friendly bonus!
"100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams"

Should they gain drone salvage chance? should they keep them as is. Will they still be desirable simply for faster looting?

What do you guys think?

How salvage drones will affect Marauders? Not at all. We live in the age of the Noctis. There is simply no situation where staying and salvaging is more profitable than simply moving on and killing more rats/running more missions.

Depends. Can a flight of salvage drones loot and salvage faster than a Marauder's tractors and salvagers? Can Marauders like the Vargur, which doesn't deploy drones that often, also take advantage of salvage drones? (A Vargur could use three tractors and let the salvage drones work on nearby wrecks thus mitigating the drone flight time while making it easier to grab all the loot on the field.)

Given the how low salvage prices have fallen and how the mineral value of the loot is normally significantly greater than the salvage, if salvage drones can't loot, then they won't be adding a lot of value. Plus, adding salvage drones will probably increase the salvage supply thus driving down prices even further.

Newsflash: Marauders already ARE obsolete.

Unless if you are in a Marauder and can get 80% of the BS cans without delaying the mission completon time ...

That's at least one targeting slot wasted on not getting rats out of your way.

Maybe I am just spoiled by the Vargur, but anything you could do on the go, even if you killed and moved much slower, would still be a waste of effort compared to looting and salvaging with a Noctis.

Call me skeptical. At least the way I run missions, you're losing money every time you return to station, leave your combat ship and begin flying around in a Noctis, because that's time you aren't spending doing additional combat missions. I tend to blitz missions with 2 accounts and don't bother salvaging/looting at all, but if I was going to, dual Marauders would be the way to do it. You don't even need to loot/salvage every single wreck in a mission with a Marauder, but you can just aim for the battleship wrecks and do the others as time permits. That way, you don't ever have any downtime where you aren't killing rats/completing missions.

On the other hand, if you leave the mission and pick up your Noctis, you're incurring additional travel time and while you loot/salvage faster, you aren't earning any bounties or mission rewards (LP being the big one) while doing it. If you want to salvage, you're much better off doing it with marauders and just doing what you can on the go.

My argument is that using a BS pilot to loot and salvage is a waste of time. Even two Marauders would be outperformed by a five day old Noctis pilot. And would be much better off just running another mission.

How salvage drones will affect Marauders? Not at all. We live in the age of the Noctis. There is simply no situation where staying and salvaging is more profitable than simply moving on and killing more rats/running more missions.
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My argument is that using a BS pilot to loot and salvage is a waste of time. Even two Marauders would be outperformed by a five day old Noctis pilot. And would be much better off just running another mission.

Newsflash: Marauders already ARE obsolete.

So obsolete they cost 800+ million to buy.

So obsolete they cost 800+ million to buy.

You honestly believe that 2 marauders is going to be outperformed by a faction BS and a noctis. Oh man, look how stupid you are.

-Liang

Hmmm, I would potentially argue this point. I went from rattlesnake/noctis combo to rattlesnake/paladin. The added dps is quite a boon while nothing is outside of range for the Paladins tractors. However, I would imagine a nightmare/noctis combo would perform better though. A rattlesnake/paladin would be a better AFK option however with assigning its drones to the rattlesnake. and perma running its tank while only targeting bs's when needed.

A much larger isk investment in the 2nd ship however as well as an increase in skill point training time.

Why were you using a Rattlesnake with that much gank on the field?

-Liang

That's at least one targeting slot wasted on not getting rats out of your way.

Maybe I am just spoiled by the Vargur, but anything you could do on the go, even if you killed and moved much slower, would still be a waste of effort compared to looting and salvaging with a Noctis.

My argument is that using a BS pilot to loot and salvage is a waste of time. Even two Marauders would be outperformed by a five day old Noctis pilot. And would be much better off just running another mission.

Well it sounds like you're content with your approach. Heavy LP approaches will always value gank over looting and salvaging, which means that you'd be even better with a pair of faction BS (probably Machs for the align time). A pair of Marauders becomes dramatically superior once looting and/or salvaging matters to you (Drones, FW, Sleepers, etc).

Basically, the question you need to ask yourself is whether the Noctis earns more ISK/hr than a second gank BS/Marauder/Tengu in either that mission or running wholly separate missions. When you start looking at dual marauders, the question becomes whether the Noctis coming along and looting 1-2 battleships and a some frigs/cruisers is likely to make more than the extra DPS from the second Marauder.

The answer is almost certainly no.

-Liang