Currently among Electronic Warfare and Combat Utility drones, the only ones that really get use are the ECM drones. All the rest are highly under powered, and provide very little advantage in combat compared these ECM or damage drones.
I suggest three means towards helping these guys find a place upon the battle field:
Make drone damage bonuses able to modify the ability of them. This means that drone damage amplifies, or some similar module should be able to boost their ability
Up-size their ability. Imagine a small 5m3 drone that uses 10 Mbit bandwidth, or a 10m3 drone that uses 5 Mbit bandwidth, and these drones would project the ability of the medium powered drones. The Medium and Heavy drone counterparts would then operate in the same way.
Give ships that have bonuses to these warfare types, also have bonuses to their corresponding drone, or … all warfare drones.
Of course, fixing and balancing ECM in some way, or making it so that it has depreciating returns is likely also needed.
I dont think modifing their ability by the Damage Bonus is a solution, then you have drone ships be EW ships and overlaping with EW Focus Ships, even if they need to choice for Damage or EW. Also, ships wich combine both; like Curse, Pilgrim and Armageddon; could be extremely powerfull with both bonuses, much more with your 3º idea.
And I’m confuse with your 2º, did you mean Small EW Drones with Stats of Medium EW Drones?
Also, @Lugh_Crow-Slave making them bigger … Maybe like Squads as Fighters are now. Is middle ground, they are as big as now but as they are a Squad they have a combine power.
Also the EW Skill could be modify to increase the power of them.
And I’m confuse with your 2º, did you mean Small EW Drones with Stats of Medium EW Drones?
I mean that the small drones will have the medium application stats, but will either use up 10m3, of drone bay space with 5 mbit of bandwidth, or use up 10 mbit of bandwidth with 5m3 of drone bay space (I’m not sure which would work out best)
They would almost be like a gecko, but still retain 1 stat from the standard size category.
They do need a bit of a buff. (Other than ecm drones) But I do use webbing drones in fleets, as they allow for easy tackling of interceptors, though they die when sneezed at, they tackle long enough to allow a proper tackle ship to catch the little buggers. Never used any other ewar drone other than webs and ecm though, the rest are a waste of drone bay space.
Why would we be talking about damage and extra bandwidth for utility drones? If you want to buff them, turning them into geckos is not a push the right direction for drones. Maybe make a flight of 5 be roughly equivalent to a meta 4 module of the same type rather than meta 1.
Agreed about their size. Make them 25m^3 each, increase their power level. Frigates can only field one, Cruisers can field a few more. Hell, make them 40m^3 if you’re concerned about say VNI balance.
Well CCP deliberately made them that way to keep from having such drones utterly replace tackle ships, since 5 medium webbing drones reduces a ships speed by almost half, which makes it easy to get a tackle onto even the most absurdly high speed inty. Of course this only works if the inty doesn’t fire back at the drones, as the drones can be 1 or 2 shot by even an interceptor due to having around 200-250 ehp and the signature radius of a freaking cruiser almost.
Because of this, ewar dones other than ecm only work in small to moderately sized fleets, useless solo, and useless in massive fleets. As you need enough drones flying around so that the ecm are not killed in a matter of nanoseconds, and not enemies flying around witha bunch of smartbombs in massive fleets, which instantly kill all ewar drones, even large ones with just a single large smart bomb pulse.
The problem with EWAR-drones is that the line between good and overpowered is hair-thin. You’ve seen how difficult it has been to balance the Vexor and it’s variations due to them using drones as their main weapon.