The missile DPS is type-locked too. Not only do the drones have an excellent bonus but given that you can choose your damage type in almost all circumstances they will do more DPS than missiles on a Rattlesnake.
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Ooops, sorry. Youāre probably right. I did SKIM the whole way from top to bottom, but yeah I didnāt read every single word. 
Anyway, fair enough. But some people donāt fly their snakes especially with any missiles at all, filling the highslots with nothing but DLAs for drone range, neuts for PVP or reps/cap transfers for spider tanking or just the cap transfers for tinker mode with local reps, etc. etc.
Missiles AND drones is very nice, tho. I still consider them mostly droneboats because I think a max skill pilot gets more DPS from the drones in a snake than from the missiles (3 BCS, 3 DDA), IIRC. But I could be wrong, for the longest time I had t2 sentries, t2 heaviesā¦ but still L4 cruise missiles and torps, no t2 yet, and my opinions on the snake might have been too formed in cement back in those days.
Oh, but heyā¦ good, glad Iām not the only one who thinks that.
Yeah, I was gonna guessā¦ heās warping away to rep his drones, not to rep his Eos.
Yeahā¦ itās a lot of micromanagement. Esp if youāre just single boxingā¦
Unless youāre on room 4 or 5 of an extravaganza L4, itās probably easier to warp off and rep (at a citadel for free, hopefully) and then return to the mish than micromanage all that.
That said, on my drone boats with enough bay space (Domis, Nestors?.. not so much Rattlesnakes and Ishtars), I do often keep some rep bots for repping the dronesā¦ usually after a pocket is cleared or while waiting on a MTU to pull something or whatever.
Lately Iām not flying drone boats at allā¦ after experimenting with triple Leshaks last yearā¦ mostly this spring/summer I triplebox Claymores or dualbox Machariels with 1 Noctis behind. The Claymores all have armor rep bots along with their hobs or acolytes or whatever and salvage drones (75 m3, yay)ā¦ but I really should change 1 of 'em to hull bots.
The Machs I fiddled with more recently, and I put armor bots in one and hull bots in the other, and that way I can take care of any drone damage on field if I want to. Usually just wait till Iām done mishing and only salvaging with the 3rd toon and my two Machs go find a public citadel to park at for a bit and idle.
But yeah, Claymores and Machs are not droneboats, ofc, but just mentioning my methods most recently. Can do all of that with drone boats (more easily in most cases, a domi could hold both hull and armor bots at once if it wantedā¦ less room for lights/heavies/sentries then, tho. mobile depots DO exist, tho!). Twin Nestors many years ago (after Domi ā Rattlesnake ā Ishtar ā 2 Ishtars progression) was fun because of not needing the mobile depots, btw.
Rattlesnakeā¦ notā¦ droneā¦ you uhhā¦ whatā¦?
You could argue that itās 50/50 I suppose, but by that logic a Domi-navy issue isnāt a drone boat eitherā¦
Anyhow, compared to trigs and wormhole rats level 4 mission rats are quite tame when it comes to drones, just about the only drones I ever manage to lose are light drones, and even then itās usually because Iām not paying attention, besides, drones are pretty cheap anyways, unless you go around losing Geckos repeatedly (how?) replacing drones will cost you a fraction of the price that other ships burn in ammo.
Really when you think of it drones are kinda busted from an isk efficiency standpoint, Iāve lost ONE T2 light drone in the last 40-50 hours of mission running, ONE Set of scorch crystals for my Megapulse Nightmare costs way more than that.
WHY would you say that in public? 
Now CCP is going to nerf dronesā¦ 
CCP doesnāt come here.
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But their spys do. You can find Himlar posting in the forums āifā you know where to look.
One does have to wonder? 
He doesnt have a face so good.
Next time quote me so I get a ding-y
I really needed this thread today
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Light drones target Frigates, donāt use anything except sentry or light until frigate and destroyers are killed.
Medium Drones on Cruisers and above. Donāt launch medium drones until frigates killed.
Heavy drones only on battleships, use them only when there are only battleships left.
Sentry drones, snipe at 100km. Target in order Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship.
Pull them in and out as needed (wonāt need often)
Use T1 drones, cost is so much less than t2 just like use T1 ammo over t2 in a PVE level 4.
The issue with that is that light drones are not supposed to take NPC aggro so easily.
Lights are supposedly to only take aggro from frigs/DDs, if you clear those, you should be in the clear, yetā¦ the times all the Sansha cruisers, BCs, and BSes in a mission room start ripping apart my lightsā¦ Iāve lost count.
Similarly, Mediums from C/BC and down, and only heavies/sentries from BS rats.
But as I just said, the NPC rats donāt care about those old rules, theyāll shoot any and all drones now, size be damned.
They care about what is dealing damage in the room - and some NPCs just plain HATE drones as part of their backstory, too.
If the majority of a fitās damage comes from drones, the drones are going to be at risk of drawing aggro. Drone fits should take this into account and include modules that can help pull aggro back to the ship or otherwise protect the drones.
I can literally be doing 3000+ DPS from the superlasers of 3 Leshaks on grid (doing remote cap transfer AND armor RR to each other, which should draw even more aggro than the DPS alone) in a Sansha Blockade and my Acolyte IIs with no DDAs on the ships will take damage, soā¦ itās not entirely from that.
I never said it is entirely from that. I have, in fact, repeatedly said there are a lot of mechanics in play. This includes AI tweaks to be more attentive to drones as targets, but there are also specific ships that will go out of their way to target drones, and specific missions that prioritize drone aggro for certain groups/pockets.
For sure.
But the aggro mechanics have broken and been āfixedā so many times over the yearsā¦ I donāt know if you remember, but there was a time when nullsec VNI ratters reported they had to get out of their ship and back into it to fix massively over-the-top 100% drone aggro, for instanceā¦
I have no faith that current drone aggro mechanics are functioning as intended. And if they do anything to stop bots and people trying to 100% AFK PVE content with drones, they are also frustrating to legions of at the keyboard players.
But so it goes.
Alls I knows isā¦ Iāve been in sleeper sites and incursion sites with less drone aggro than many L4 missions these days. Something about that seemsā¦ not right.
The 100% drone aggro bug is a whole separate issue from intended AI behaviors; CCP has acknowledged it is a bug, but havenāt figured out how to fix it, and it is still a thing to this day.
When it comes to intended drone aggro behaviors, you have a few mechanics to consider:
- Target size: the AI almost always prefers targets of its own size class before larger targets default - thus, frigates and destroyers will usually target light drones in preference to their deploying ship unless that ship is also a āsmallā ship class.
- Target threat assessment : the AI has some weird threat perceptions - EWAR tends to rank higher than pure DPS, for some reason.
- Faction target preference: Sleepers/Drifters HATE drones and will target them to the near-exclusion of everything else.
And that is just a portion of the AI - thereās more considerations in play, including specific mission AI behaviors. Some missions just plain are intended to not be readily done by brawling droneboats.
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Iāve experienced that near 100% drone agro bug, itās as if my ship didnāt even exist and they simply kept going for the dronesā¦Fixed it by docking, and logging in/outā¦even so, drones are a ā ā ā ā ā ā ā hassle to use now.
Wouldnāt the 100% drone aggro be desirable? Fit a couple of remote reppers and lock them on your single light drone, set it to orbit your ship, and you donāt have to worry about any incoming damage.