It’s also a huge headache to anyone participating in group PVE activities such as Sansha Incursioning, Trig/Pochven content, FOB bashing, and just fleeting up to do L4 or L5 missions and such for fun more than profit usually.
CCP, please just figure out some way for drone bunnies to still work. If you kill off drone bunnying… you’re really doing a disservice to the group PVE community, which has already been somewhat falling apart. The single key press to launch drones made getting drones out and assigned to the bunny a bit easier (though an easier way to keep reassigning to the same bunny would have been nice either as an FC option to set a default assist target or on the individual player’s side to say “reassign to last target”)… but this? this is 2 steps back after that 1 step forward.
I saw a reddit thread in the past couple of days in which a dude who triple boxes Ishtars (hey! I resemble that! ;D) and has 2 of them slaved to the 1 master (who has a TP and the other 2 have their drones assisted to him)… was called an AFKer because he was only actively playing on 1 of his 3 toons constantly. Dude replying to him literally said “your other 2 toons are AFK”… um… last time I checked players are either AFK or at the keyboard. Toons… don’t have keyboards. O_o Also: nevermind that he has to rep and move around and warp and drones out and assign and etc etc with the other 2 ishtars.
Personally I go with 3 lovetars (4 armor RR in the highs on all 3), no TPs, so I manually do the drones on all 3 when I fly those… but I use a similar setup with my triple Rattlesnakes, which I’ve barely used for years but did want to bring out again as I trained all 3 toons to tech 2 Cruise/Torps in the past couple years… hmmm… TP/direct fire missiles (furies now!) on the master. assigned geckos/heavies/sentries and FOF cruise missiles on the slaves. Rip that thought for the time being!
That’s about the long and short of it, except that assist didn’t just work with damage-based attacks but also webs, target painters, ewar of various types…
but yes, if they’re basically saying assist is now guard… what’s the point of having a separate assist and guard submenu selection.
No offense to the PVPers who will continue to enjoy aggressive drones, but I think it might have overall been better if CCP had just removed the aggressive option and made all drones passive. If that wouldn’t have broken assisting, that is.
Little history lesson for those who don’t know: Drone assisting used to be able to be done for all 255 peops in fleet. Thanks to giant fleets of archons (back when they were the best logi/drone carrier combo) and maybe also fairly large ishtar swarms in PVP as well back in the day… it’s been limited to just 10 (50 drones) per drone bunny for years now. That was enough for CCP for a long while… too bad it apparently still isn’t.