I think that Polarized Combat and Sentry Drones should be the next improvement for drones. Just like the ship based polarized weapon system that deals a lot of damage the Polarized Drone would cause 2x the normal damage of a TII drone. The Polarized Drone would also not have any resistances and would be limited to a short control range of 25km.
Cost for a Polarized Light Combat Drone: 10 million ISK.
Interesting idea.
Hard to balance not to be overpowered. I donât think control range is the way to go. You can pull them back to quick then.
No resitances plus less HP maybe. On a Guristas ship this would still be a lot. I imagine a Worm that already can get like 130dps from 2 light drones. Now they would deal 260dps. Thatâs nearly as much as a lot of cruisers would do. I guess that would be enough to kill a firgate or destroyer before theyâre able to lock and kill the drones.
A 20 man Gila fleet, each dealing ~800 dps just with drones. That might oneshot battleships. 
If such drones were announced I would stockpile Gallente & Guristas ships.
A little rework would need to be done.
One draw back would be is that you wouldnât be able to use the Polarized Drones with ships such as the Gila.
Polarized Drones could only be used with T1 ships to help beef up the offenses of T1 ships against their T2 variants.
Their optimal range would be very low as well being around 1,000m allowing ships fit Smart Bombs to defend against them.
I feel like this would be too broken. Because weâre talking about a variation on an existing thing, the key issues are balance.
A high cost would push it out of viability for small gangs, but make it a no-brainer for blobs. Do we really need blobs doubling their DPS?
So many ships in EVE can use drones. Drone DPS is part of the equation of balance on each one of those ships. This would screw up the balance on all those ships.
DPS is the longest lever of balance for drones. Or, applied DPS, I guess. And like a lever, a small movement on one side can lead to a huge movement on the other.
So basically, the only real way to balance them would be to make them completely useless.
A drone like this feels wrong - I think they would be way too strong.
With a lot of other drawbacks maybe (and still a very big maybe). Drawbacks like only heavy drones, slow, really bad tracking and lock-on times, etc.
Something to prevent them from killing small ships too quickly.
Polarized Drones would not have any resistances at all so destroying them with ship to drone or drone to drone combat should be fairly easy to achieve.
Or a smartbombâŚ
The balance will be seen when Triglavian ships start appearing in K and W space.
That just pushes to use them with blobs, so you can kill your target before they can kill any of the drones (which is not a fun meta), while simultaneously making them useless for smaller gangs.
Exactly what problem are you trying to solve here? Because throwing an anvil on a lever of balance just for the hell of it isnât going to have any kind of desirable outcome.
Dominance is the issue. Throwing an anvil on anything seems to pretty much solve the problem.
Polarized weapons are all short-range, which would preclude sentry drones. I donât have a problem with âAugmentedâ sentry drones that deal hybrid damage, though. To work, polarized drones would have to have zero resistances as well as negate all ship resistances if loaded into a drone bay. I think this would end up being too problematic to implement, and I canât really see a scenario other than structure-bashing where you would want to utilize them.
My vote would thus be ânoâ and instead overhaul how polarized weapons work (-25% velocity hit and +25% signature bloom instead of the resistance penalty).
Polarized drones would be horribly brokenâŚ
The reason⌠Drones already have pretty low resists.
Ship resistances can be easily buffed into the 60âs to 70âs, higher for T2/T3 ships. Drones get just base resists meaning their resists arenât very important already.
As proposed will never happen.
Arenât drones fragile enough already?
Maybe 100m ish for a polarized light drone and also negates the resistances on the parent ship? Augmented light drones are like 20-30m each and they just do slightly more than t2 drones
Itâs a dryson suggestion. The day I see a suggestion from him that makes any reasonable sense is the day I hit the winning numbers for the lottery AND be selected by PCH for their 10k a week for life shtick.
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