"can I bring my Drake?"

What is this phrase means? And why people use this in almost every circumstances? Is the Drake OP in game?

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You should ask the people who use it in game really.

But if you must know… it’s about the love for a very forgiving ship. One can love a ship too much and this is what happened to the Drake. So the answer is:

“No, you cannot bring your Drake.”

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Nowadays it’s mostly used as a running joke, or meme, whatever you prefer.

Some might consider the Drake as a very “care-beary” ship. Easy to fit, fly and pretty cheap. Effective at pve, but not necessarily good at pvp.

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Said often in fleet comms if its an armour roam from up lol.

Or hac roams.

And normally with exclamation marks.

Armor Hacs! Armor Hacs!! ARMOR HACS!!!

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Player A: We are going roaming at 1300 hours so get your ships ready.

Player N: Can I bring my Drake?

Players A-M: No dipwit!!!

It became a meme because of so many people asking to bring their Drake.

Well, nobody talked about the history of this ship, or put the phrase into a historical context. Millennial whippersnappers…

There was a time in the ancient past when the Drake was OP. So everybody flew Drakes, and entire fleets were composed of Drakes. Nullsec fleet doctrines were composed around Drakes.

Eventually, the ship was nerfed, and faded away into oblivion, only to be remembered by the meme “can I bring my Drake?”

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I’m feeling old…

There was time when Drake was a real answer to all the questions (like 42). It had good tank (4% to all resistances by skill level, 8 missile launchers, good mobility and such).
There was fleet doctrines based on drakes and doctrines called “Firewall” used against these.

Since then the questions “Can i bring my Draek?” exists. (and yes, Draek and not Drake)

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7 missile launchers and 5% resists per level is how I remember it.

Can I bring my Gila? :smiley:

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Yea, 5% resistances it was.

Not sure about number of launchers. At some point Drake lost one and new Caldari Navy Drake was made from original one. So i would look at number of launchers of faction one.

Yeah, for a time the Drake literally could do everything. With 5% resists (at the time), extremely generous fittings allowing a very impressive passive shield tank and a near battleship level of dps with Kinetic missiles, the Drake was so forgiving you could do about anything in PvE in your sleep with the ship.
So in fleet fights, where sub cap ships tend to get vaporized in a blink of an eye, a lot of new players thought they could tank fleets with a Drake like they could your typically rats. It didn’t work out too well, not to mention that missile flight time made the Drake pretty mediocre in gunnery fleet fights.

It wasn’t so much that the drake was OP… it was that it had an incredible tank and was super easy to skill into. Really, it had the highest HP regen in the game, probably on par with most capitals at the time. That tank also included a huge buffer. As a bonus, it was invulnerable to cap drain. And those nice features loaded onto a good agility battlecruiser hull. And again emphasis on how easy it was to skill. It dominated the blob meta.

Even when it was at its peak, it had a reputation as a ship people trained because they couldn’t bother learning how the play the game. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety in loadouts. It was the kind of ship an alliance would ask their miners to go ahead and train so they’d at least have something useful to fly.

I started hearing that meme the most when incursions came out, since it was the only combat ship a certain type of person had trained.

(It had 7 launchers and 1 utility high.)

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The drake a logn time ago used to be the best tool for most things until CCP nerfed it and it’s main weapon system the heavy missiles to make sure it’ll never rise up again.

The Drake is still good for clearing rat hubs/havens etc. as the tank and shield recharge rate is still good for pve…but that’s about it and that’s what I use mine for. If you can get 500-600 dps, a target painter, heavy missiles with tier 2 ammo on it with a good 100-120 shield recharge a sec on it plus an afterburner for speed tank too, then it can run most rat sites. Though, doubt I can stretch it much further than that.

7 launchers and 1 utility that went unused in pve.

To be fair…Caldari pilots were screwed here and had no choice. The other BC option was lolrox. If its gotten better in past few years I don’t know (been away). Back then though…drake was all caldari pilots had sadly for a BC.

Drake got ruined when most of the server started to spam the crap out of it. Its OP ness came from running in legions of them Put that drake in a well run armor fleet…yeah it was clear why not liked really. Really saw the difference when I cross trained out of them.

Sort of. Except everyone was crosstraining into it. The meta at the time for BC’s was drake, somewhere below it the cane, and everything else ranging from meh to suck. Caldari pilots were only screwed if you assume only Caldari shouldn’t have to want to crosstrain.

True. Among my first stops on crosstrain was…dual neut o cane. Fun times that. It was not a question of why did cane get nerfed but more of a question how the hell did they let it last so long on the server lol.

Yes, the Drake is the best ship in the game. It’s like a ■■■■■■■ cheat.

… at least it was … :wink:

After my carebare phase when I went to w-space I naturally took my Drake with me. We where living in a Pulsar system and it was seriously creepy how op that ship was.

It had like an insane passive tank that worked without cap since back then invuls gave a passive bonus when offline.

It had crappy dps when fitted with HMS, but an insane range and you could use those FOF so you could even shoot stuff (including sometimes your friends) while jammed (but yes they actually worked and saved my ass more than once).

And a full fleet of ECM scout drones because they suck (for the enemy)

You would basically win every 1vs1 just because no one was able to break the tank and you could just slowly kill them.

So much for my Drake experience :rofl: what a newb I was