Hello again .
So quick and easy , drones should use consumable ammo and have to reload.
I do think drones should have quite a high capacity . like double what the caparison would be on a normal weapon system .
I believe this may be one of the ways to make vni’s less op for ratting as it will require more input when doing sites .
-1
Drones have the disadvantage over most other weapon systems of flight time and they can be killed.
Those disadvantages shouldn’t be underestimated, so suggesting this change just to impact 1 ship, will flow into all uses of drones, for all ships. No thanks.
I like it for fighters, but not drones.
So, more tedious button-pressing and annoyance with the interface, in exchange for negligible strategic impact. No thanks.
If you want to nerf VNIs for PvE without touching PvP balance (which is far more important than PvE balance) just make the NPC AI aggressively target drones. AFK farmers will quickly lose all of their drones and become useless.
When Drones are no longer able to simply be shot out of space, we can talk.
As it is, Drones can be shot out of space, and the AI does shoot them with regularity. I’m not sure how anyone is afk ratting in a drone ship because it won’t be long before you simply don’t have drones anymore. They have to at least be paying enough attention that they are putting out new drones once in a while, and unless you are humping a sentry there is no realistic version of calling them in and putting them out again that works reliably.
Some newer rats shoot drones. The old ones in anoms, belts and missions rarely shoot drones.
Afk vni’s and ishtars are very much a thing.
Edit- make drone squadrons pls.
If by Rarely you mean losing several each and every mission… sure.
You must be doing something very different to me.
Get aggro with weapons/e-war first. Rats don’t switch targets much.
Some pvp drone ship’s combined drone ehp is higher than the ship ehp, so often shooting them makes no sense.
Let’s Look at the gila:
10x Caldari Navy Vespa
6200 Shield with avg of 27.5% resi so 7905 ehp per drone in only shield nvm armor and hull x 10 is 80k ehp, that’s more than the gila…Nvm that you can pull the drone back into the ship while it regen’s shields and you pull out a fresh drone will full shield.
Maybe the solution is to increase drone signature and lower drone ehp so that shooting drones is always more efficient than shooting the ship. I find that even with 500 tracking on small guns small drones often only get glancing blow’s becuase of their small signiture and high orbit speed’s.
That is the specific one trick pony of the Gurista line. The ask was to nerf the VNI.
These things are unrelated.
The claim was an afk ship using them to rat.
If you are using weapons and ewar to maintain agro, that’s not happening.
Even then, it’s not reliable, I often still lose several per mission.
Ok so afk drone boats aren’t used so much in missions but that’s more because of pockets than drone aggro.
In null afk vni’s and ishtars are used quite frequently. Just google it. There are guides everywhere. One such case:
Getting Rich
Your drones will finish the site with no further input from you. If you deployed your drones before the hostile ships targeted you, then they will ignore your drones. If the hostiles do not ignore your drones, warp to a safe spot, eject from your ship, and board the ship again. This will force a session change and reset your threat scores with the NPC ships.You can use this method to make ISK while watching Netflix, doing work, or any other activity. Remember to check in once every 30-40 minutes to switch anomalies. This method also scales well with multiple accounts. Running several accounts across multiple systems will increase your ISK/hour, but require more activity to switch sites.
If you’re looking for a fix to AFK drone ratting the solution is rather simple. Make rats treat drones the same way they do fighters by prioritizing them. Then drone ships would need some amount of micro management rather than let them sit in space between targets where they can easily be blapped (just like fighters)
Yeah. Tried it. Does not work as advertised.
It did, years ago before the agro changes, but hasn’t worked like that reliably in quite a while.
This would only be worthwhile if by using ammo you could modify the existing behavior of the drones. Such as modify their attack ranges, tracking, dps.
This is a interesting idea. So treat drones like actual ships with fittings and different ammo types
What are you trying to say here and what does make the Vexor Navy Issue original poster at ratting?
Are sooper doopers making gajillions per second not op?
Drones are the comsumables.
Then they should die quicker lol
They die quickly if the right thing shoots at them.
lol it wont just impact 1 ship but everything with a drone bay, every person that uses drones.
question is do they use already existing ammo or do they get their own ammo? ie hobgoblins would use small hybrid charges or do they require some kind of special drone charge.