Basically give drone boats and E-WAR ships a bonus to them and give Minmatar and Caldari E-WAR ships appropriate sized drone bays and reduce turret/launcher DPS accordingly
Okay, but if you even think about proposing any kind of bonus to EC-300ā¦
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I was thinking of having those annoyances nerfed so that they perform a bit less than they do now with maxed skills
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Good man.
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Yes, giving ships that have electronic attack bonuses (or a module) a bonus to E-War and/or Combat Utility drones would work great for their usability and niche.
Another thing that I would like to see that I think would greatly help these drones would be to decrease their drone bay size. If the small drone varieties were 2 m3, mediums 5 m3 and Large 10 m3 (using the same bandwidth as normal) then I think they could be loaded for situational application without gimping the rest of the ships output potential. (could also have a gecko version that is still 25 m3)
Another thought would be to introduce new drone behaviors and allow some of these drone to have a large application range. With these new behaviors you could have drones orbit their targets tight, far, or keep close to your ship while they are engaging an enemy. This would mean that the option to have these drones kite an enemy would be available, or to quickly swap them out. And obviously the larger the drone, the greater the potential application range.
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But this E-WAR ships already have good abilities in jamming/webbing so if they get addition bonuses for addition devices (drones) it would be kinda moving the balance.
I think that staright boosting of drones itself is a good decision:
- their stats are low;
- thereās never free space in drone bay, so their usage will be always through planning (not so easy and free).
Considering that OP is proposing a nerf to offense to accompany a bonus to e-war drone performance, what are you envisioning when you speak āmoving the balanceā?
But you inspire a point of discussion. @Slayer_Liberator, were you envisioning these bonuses for just the T1 e-war cruisers? Or for T1, T2, and certain T3C subsystems?
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Moving the balance can be because of making jamming machines more powerfull with jam (as well as web machines).
Offense is not so matter in this ships so nerfing it will not make real difference.
ā¦but what do you mean by āmoving the balanceā, and why is that a bad thing in this specific case?
Well I think that if you need the base module performance a bit and add the drone bonus then it could be added to T2 and T3C hulls though I do think that the natural drawbacks of using drones should be looked at when balancing these bonuses.
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To be fair you would be able to remove the jam and web drones with little difficulty if you are in the right ship or have the right ship in fleet smartbombs for BSes and turrets/launchers for smaller stuff(caps tend to be too slow for webs to matter anyways and are immune to ECM)
You should take another look at ewar drones. They usually have an optimal range that is far outside of any smartbomb, yes even the purple ones.
Why shouldnāt a rapier have 4 additional 60% web drones or the Falcon 5 additional rainbow drones?
What could go wrong if a Curse would do zero damage but have 5 additional weapon disruption drones?
Would 5 additional sensor damping drones on a Lachesis make any difference in small gangs?
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The base stats of the E-WAR ships would be reduced and the stats of the drones would be like 20/35/50% for Max skills on the web drone and the Rapier would only be able to use 2 heavy drones and all you need to kill those is a web or two and a frigate/destroyer in fleet.and the others would be similarly balanced so the heavy only preformed as well as a t1 unbonused module and the slot layouts and/or bonuses could be adjusted.
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It looks like players forced to use drones. Even gallentian ships (except very few amount of droneboats) intend to have drones as an option, so on other ships.
The better decision is make drones to be like a fully functional modules (jam/web/damp/etc) so for example 5 e-war drones will be like 2 jamming modules of falcon. And remove dronebays from e-war ships (or make bandwith of e-war drones big).
Now we do can fit jammers in medium slots of any ships in order to have additional defence (for example ecm burst or multispectrum or racial - if we expect attack of specific ship). Why there canāt be full equivalent of modules in drones.
I would not like to see ships with bonuses to ewar drones - thatās too niche for me.
They basically just need to be less shit. Even EC-300s arenāt good, just annoying occasionally. But others are atrocious.
The SW-300 for example. Even without stacking penalties you would need over 30 of them to match just 2 webifier IIs (compare the damage from 32 warrior II drones), and with stacking they are just pointless, and thatās without pointing out that they arenāt all that fast, or tough, and have a sig radius larger than a bloody Stabber (and how is a 5m3 drone bigger than a cruiser, and how is it the same size as an SW-900?).
Frankly they need a total rebalance, and so do the ridiculous drone rigs while at it.
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E-war boats already get bigger drone bays by design. And the bellicose is an e-war/combat hybrid. Nerfing itās fighting power would kinda suck. Not against bonuses to e war drones for respective races. But i donāt think every race should have bonuses to every e-war drone.
Buffing e-war drones would best come in two ways:
- Drone squads (just sayin).
- Geckoāising e-war drones.
Either of these would stop the stacking penalty and be FAR easier to balance.
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Squads all the way! as all drones should eventually be, so that its more practical to use e-war on drones as well, since trying to ecm/tracking disrupt 5 drones is a nightmare.
So your argument is āmake drones into squads so itās easier to kill themā?
Since you can already ecm the drone boat itself and destroy itās dps Iād say hell no.
If we are only talking about the T1 E-war support cruisers, personally I think the bonus to e-war drones should be (more or less) opposite to the bonus they already receive, with their faction taken into account. Take the Bellicose for example, since it already receives an E-war target painting bonus, it can attain itās own factions Combat utility drone (webs) and itās allies factionās E-War drone (Damps)
The breakdown would be like this for drone bonuses:
Bellicose: Web, Damps
Celestis: Web, Paints
Blackbird: Neut, TD
Arbitrator: Neut, ECM
The main issue with this however is that the Arbitrator has such a large drone bay, while the blackbird has almost none, so the nature of the bonuses would need to be different to ensure they are not unbalanced.
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Thats not a very elegant solution.
The asymmetry in the drone bays and how gallenteās second e-war is warp disruption not webs and how caldari donāt have a secondary e-war. Youāre having to shoe horn things in and propose different magnitudes of bonusesā¦
Leave it as just primary e-war.
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