Drone aggro from a lvl 4 mission runner perspective, light and medium drones are now useless being attacked as soon as you drop them. so lvl 4 missions where you need small fast attack drones to stop your battleship from being webbed and scrammed in the mission sites by smaller vessels. is no longer an option even if you pull them back immediately is just not workable. Sentry drone last a little longer but still have to be pulled back in one by one. You’ve finally broken lvl 4 missions congrats CCP sub cancelled i’ll play as an alpha until you guys get your ■■■■ together.
Do you pay for subscription or just plexing?
I pay sub with rl cash
ok. payers of real cash has the right to say their protest 
CCP might as well take drones out of the game for the pve playstyle they have just killed it. Some missions i won’t be able to do now after nearly decade of getting the skills maxed so i can blitz any lvl 4 mission all that time skilling up drones just for CCP to ■■■■ all over it makes me want to take my money elsewhere. Missions like smash the supplier with the resist nerf and now the drone nerf im gonna lose my battleship because my set up dictates I use drone for fast attack ships that web and scram. Now going to have change everything around look at my set up without factoring in drones at all.
In my opinion. CCP should just make omega time be bought by cash by cheaper price and it can’t be bought by plex. Much better than making this rapid changes. players can afk as long as they want. It may also reduce boters.
This is a bad change.
Please make it so that npc’s don’t attack drones anymore, but player has to lock the npc first and then click drones to attack, but npc’s shouldn’t attack any drones as those are not auto agressing anymore.
I always directed my drones I never just let them clear the field. That play style is now mute, another screw up by CCP. They’re making a lot of those these days.
Did you misread the change?
This has no impact on your play style if you’ve always directed your drones.
As soon as i launch and direct they come under fire and explode even if i try and get them back into drone bay its touch and go a matter of seconds then boom frigates immediately de-agress and go for the drones webbing and scramming them in some cases. A second later i recall and it seriously is a race to save them. I am thinking of using that tactic to get out of the missions plex if my ship comes under a savage attack, if webbing asnd scramming frigs de-agress and attack drones, maybe using tech 1’s as a throw away option.Hmmm will give that a try.
This change has no impact on the scenario you are describing.
Well something has changed, I know npc’s in mission plexes attack drones , but not with this current verocity. The fact that I have unsubbed means I really do see a prob. Even if if one does not present it’self with the current changes. tha last mission i was in had 6 frigs webbing and scramming my battleship, launched drones and everyone of the frigs de-agressed and attacked my drones within a couple seconds drones recalled and 3 of the 5 got back to the ship. Something is amiss.
I mean, this change isn’t even live yet, so I don’t know what to say.
Again, this change isn’t even live, so whatever “problems” you are seeing are in your head. They are completely unrelated to the topic of this thread.
1 Like
So it would seem. Then I guess were truly Fkd.
I don’t like how this will change my active gameplay.
How often drones get agro and how fragile they are is already annoying. After this change there is no drones attacking while your targeting is slow or broken by npc ewar, it makes target management much more annoying as you often want drones to go after smaller, longer to target ships and is all around a clumsy half-arsed design change change that hurts active gameplay and downgrades skills invested into drones. From what I read most botters/afk-ers have F in their macros and auto-targeter use etc anyway.
In design terms it feels like instead of shutting your window when your room is cold in winter, you instead decide to set your curtains on fire.
An ill thought out change that doesn’t achieve it’s stated aims, while causing new problems.
Got some citations for this?
>no drones attacking while targeting is slow
good, now they’re on par with basically the rest of the weapon platforms except aoe.
>broken by npc ewar
drones, once engaging a target, will continue to engage the target, even if your ship’s lock is broken, so this is a non issue.
What new problems is it causing?
You could attack blinding ewar etc mobs before by using drones, even if they totally shut down your targeting, now you will not be able to.
Drones have travel time, making you target first then manually engage drones massively increases drone time delay to start damaging, changing drones effectiveness vs. other weapons platforms.
Small ships you often want to use drones on, (webbers scramblers etc) tend to have very long target times. This changes how content will play in a number of scenarios. Clearing small ships becomes substantially slower. This will make some content have quite different difficulty. This will make substantial impacts on drone boats and drone skills investment.
It hurts active players, and does very little to botters. So, it’s a failure.
You can, you just need to lock them now.
Turns out weapon platforms have pros and cons to them.
So you’re mad about this change because you’re slightly inconvenienced by having to lock a few more ships?
It doesn’t impact active players, is what you meant to say.
It’s not intended to do anything to botters, so I don’t know where you’re getting that nonsense from.
Would adding a 10 to 20 second delay before lasers start operating make them more or less effective? Would that change their balance relative to other weapons systems, moving them out of balance if they currently were balanced. Think hard.
NPCs that prevent you from targeting anything at all, can currently be fought with drones because they don’t require targeting, irrespective of if you are driving a drone focused boat. Do you see how “lock them” interacts with no locking possible?
Botting is by definition, no attention gameplay.
As far as Im aware, auto drones dont auto-aggro on ECM, do they?
As in, they are attacking a frigate that is not ECM, when it blows they dont automatically move to one using ECM on you over priority of one doing damage, do they?