Hi!
I recently got into Ishtar / Gila ratting to have an alternate income. I ‘ve noticed that auto focus for drones does not work at all. Neither auto targeting modules, they dont target anything. Drones are getting killed over my ship. Like all of them. Whats happening with the game? Why things dont work the way they should? Is it intentional from ccp to ruin the game because of people did a lot of ratting with Ishtars and Gilas?
Focus fire does work, sometimes drones will get conflicting inputs though so you may have to reissue orders (mostly when they do take fire). NPCs now target based on threat levels (and have for a long time now with only missions having the old dumber AI). As a drone boat, you should be monitoring your drone’s health and cycling drones as needed. If you don’t want to constantly repair drones, use Caldari variants and not Gallente ones. Caldari Drones have the best shields, while the Gallente ones do marginally more damage, most of their HP is in hull. CCP’s purpose was to fight against afk gameplay. Play the game!
i am playing the game, we are in very dangerous space and i just trained my alts with plex to have a different type of activity, but nothing seems to work properly. play the game you say,
i have a half hour long session today when the auto targeting modules on those 4 ship targeted absolutely nothing.
drones do no engage on auto attack.
drones do not focus fire
and they are getting focused by every ship and nuked down in seconds,
they spread on 2 ship and not even orbiting, just standing still in space and shooting at things way out of range
there is no afk in my gaming, but also since the moduls do not work, functions do not work, constantly micro managing 4 drone boat to cycloe drones like you said, helps nothing and also does not explain why the game does not work the way it should, but thank you for your concerns about how i play the game.
Auto-targeting modules do nothing for your drones, and the ships you’re trying to auto-target must be within range of the module, for the Tech 1 that’s 50km. If it’s outside that range, it will not auto-target.
Control them manually and don’t rely on the AFK mechanic to do your fighting while you watch, the “F” button tells your drones to focus on the target you have selected.
thats what i was trying to do and changing between ships i always had the same issue, the game seems to be designed NOT TO WORK with any of the functions they are represeinting. i thougth auto targeting will help me lock up the targets and find the ones i need to kill fast - auto targeting does not work even within 10 km. its just not working. the ships dont target anything. so i have to tagert things manually. ccp can just remove auto targeting because its a lie. auto attack would have been helpful i guess but it doesnt work. i have to start attacking ships manually, so why is there a function named auto attack? a fake thing again. drones should stay on one target and orbit properly to do damage, they dont. they do totally random things. so the focus fire is a lie as well. i dont know why the first reaction was is that im afk, i dont think i could be, i would just die to a gank very fast. i just asked around and people said “spin ishtars” and a lot of people do so i thought its a good idea. but its so far a very bad experience because im losing drones and the ships dont do anything properly, and its too much to micro manage if im trying to multibox like when im mining. i feel kinda let down by having all these things in the game not going as they should, so i assume this is intentional, because none of you actually said its not.
if i know drone boats are so bad to multibox i could have spent all these weeks and skill points to train into raven navy, the ammo would cost much less than the drones i lose, its also way more easy to micromanage, and i dont have to worry about having a stupid fragile cruiser in close range for everything to get tackled by rats and die to gankers. this is what bothers me, that ccp seems to have destroyed something on purpose making it unplayable for anyone and you wont discover that untill you actually try.
Auto-targeting activates only when you’re attacked. If an NPC targets your drones first, it won’t work. Same goes for auto-targeting missiles. I believe drones have a similar issue — they only target NPCs that are already attacking your ship.
The days when a drone boat could just orbit sentries and clear everything without any micromanagement are long gone.
Jesus christ it isn’t THAT hard.
While the drones do their job killing stuff, move your ship towards the next group of enemies, so you never have to send them like 30+ km away in a site full of enemies. If you know the NPCs will all spawn pretty far away, use Sentries instead. They might have lesser raw dps, but their ability to shoot without needing to travel compensates more than enough for that.
Or… if all that is way too complex and inconvenient for you, yeah, just buy a Navy Raven and spam missiles.
Auto-targeting modules target ships back that target you.
When NPCs are targrting your drones instead of you this module will clearly not ‘target back’, because your ship is not getting targeted.
This means you will have to pay a bit of attention while you play and not go fully AFK while your drones kill enemies.
went to a 6/10 escalation i had from a site, second pocket ate 9 navy drones in 5 minute with no time to recall them :=( its a huge waste of money compare to any other ship
thanks, i didnt know its only targeting ships that agress me, this is clear now, i think this entire drone boat thing is just bad as it is, i wish i could reverse the training and get that time back lol
There is no thing like “no time to recall them”. Drones from a Gila or an Ishtar have multiple thousand eHP, they don’t just “vanish”. You obviously had too much distance to your drones. You need to learn to pay attention to them.
As I said before: Move your ship towards the enemies and make sure your drones don’t have to fly far away. So you can almost insta-scoop them if they come under fire, pull the aggro back to your ship and then launch them again.
As for Drone’s, read the section on Default behavior settings:
In Esc menu, ‘Gameplay’ section, at the very top under ‘Inflight’ is an ‘Auto Target Back’ option to select how many targets to lock back that initially target you… The selectable amount is 0 to 12…
Thing to remember - the amount is also dependent on ship stats and character skill training.. Meaning you won’t be able to ‘Auto Target Back’ 12 target locks if piloting a Frigate, even with max training on targeting skills…