I personally like Drone Assist as a unique feature of the weapon system. Drones having some disadvantages too (travel time, can be destroyed, cannot be overheated)… they can have some advantages as well.
However, since Drone Assist simply scales too well, there have to be restrictions that prevent excessive use especially in massmultiboxing.
First:
- Drone Link Augmentors should give 35% more Drone Range, but made stacking penalized.
– Ship with 5x DLA II currently: 60km + 5x24km = 180km Drone Control Range
– Ship with 5x DLA II then: 60km * 1.35 * 1.30415 * 1.19985 * 1.09905 * 1.0371 = 144.57km Drone Control Range (~160km on an Ishtar with Skill V and all 4 Highslots full of DLAs)
→ This would cut off some of the extreme Drone Assist Fittings, projecting Sentryfire to 160km (Eos) or even 180km (Dominix), while not hurting short-range setups.
Second:
- Drone Assist should always check the Drone Control Range of BOTH ships, the assisting and the bunny - limiting the drone aggro to the lower value. So BOTH ships have to fit for a large drone control range if all the drones should be able to fight at this range.
→ this would mean that drone-bunnies would also need to use HighSlots and lots of CPU to fit Drone Link Augmentors if they want to use the assisted Drones over extreme ranges, limiting their Damage and Tank by not being able to fit guns and or cpu-intensive membranes/hardeners, while not hurting short-range assisting.
Third:
- Drone Bunnies can only accept Drones from 1 other ship per Level of Drone Interfacing, limiting the total amount of assisted drones to 25.
→ this would cut off the extreme scaling for massmultiboxers, but still allow smaller fleets to use some drone assistance or multiple bunnies each controlled by an active player. It would also require a player to actually have good drone skills if he wants to work as drone bunny.
Changes like these would leave the basic gameplay of drone assist intact and useful for certain situations, but cuts off the extreme scaling of massmultiboxed Sentryfleets.
