Re-Balencing drones

[james1122]

This was an idea that was originally posted in evo assembly hall which I think quite frankly is too good to be allowed to just drift away and die out there.
The original idea itself was quite simply to swap the Em and explosive drone damage around as it makes no sense that explosive drones are so much better in almost every respect to Em drones. However someone else posted this in the thread :-

I propose going a bit further:

EM drones are made equal to EXPLOSIVE drones in everything except damage type.
KINETIC drones are made equal to THERMAL drones in everything except damage type.

Reasons being:
Warrior II's don't need nerfing, it's the kinetic and em drones that need buffing.
Kinetic drones currently have the intended dps but are underused. As long as em and kinetic drones do inferior dps, they will be underused.

I honestly believe this is a very promising idea that should be pushed further and strongly considered.

Original thread

[prometheus]

Swap EM/Explosive drone damage modifiers (not including sentries). Problem solved.

There's nothing actually WRONG with Kinetic drones, people just don't use them, even though Kinetic drones are often the better choice.
EM drones on the other hand are woefully underpowered. EM is arguably the easiest damage type to defend against, yet the drone is by far the weakest.
Explosive drones by comparison are primarily used for their speed and tracking, not necessarily their damage type.

If this were to happen you're guaranteed that people are still going to be using Explosive drones solely because of their speed.

[Rudolf Miller]

Swap EM/Explosive drone damage modifiers (not including sentries). Problem solved.

There's nothing actually WRONG with Kinetic drones, people just don't use them, even though Kinetic drones are often the better choice.
EM drones on the other hand are woefully underpowered. EM is arguably the easiest damage type to defend against, yet the drone is by far the weakest.
Explosive drones by comparison are primarily used for their speed and tracking, not necessarily their damage type.

If this were to happen you're guaranteed that people are still going to be using Explosive drones solely because of their speed.

But you do agree that some tweaking is in good order, especially for amarrian drones right?

[Vortex]

Yet another topic where I have a large and already fleshed out response to this somewhere. Maybe it was back on the SHC boards, who knows. None of this applies to sentries, which are fine as is.

EM drone damage output is too low, it doesn't fucking matter if they had the tracking and speed of minmatar drones, they would still be horribly useless. To illustrate just how bad they are, a Spec V TII Amarr drone does less damage than a T1 Gallente drone. So no, just making the minmatar drones "fast and low damage" is not going to fix a damn thing - you'll just make a new, useless drone type. Minmatar drones as-is are on the low threshold for useability, and are only viable due to their massive speed advantage over other drones. The Amarrian drones could do 20,000m/s with perfect tracking and you still wouldn't be able to use them - the damage is just too shit to ever matter.


The TLDR of my proposed fixes:

Kin/Thr drones become the high damage drone types. These are the most common damage types with the most common T2 resist profile, making them the easiest damage types to prepare for.
EM/Exp drones become the utility drone damage types. They don't do as much damage as their pure-attack counterparts, but they have something to make up for it.


Gallente drones stay as they are, barring any global tweaks to drone performance
Caldari drones do slightly more DPS than of Gallente drones, but instead fire fighter-bomber pseudo missiles instead of a gun attack, with the worst tracking of all drones. They have high alpha, low rate of fire, and are slightly more fragile and slightly faster than Gallente drones

Minmatar drones stay as they are, barring any global tweaks to drone performance.
Amarrian drones get the same DPS of Minmatar drones, but with higher rate of fire, lower alpha, and slightly improved tracking. Amarrian drones become the slowest drones in the drone fleet, but have (pending balance testing) 50-100% more EHP than the other drone types.


So you wind up with the following breakdowns:

• Gallente - best overall performance, highly desirable damage type, but a bit fat and slow
• Caldari - Miniature fighter-bombers - best dps and high alpha, but unlikely to deliver their full dps to most targets in their comparative weight class. Terrible at drone v drone combat.
• Minmatar - Best drone handling in the game, perfect for getting rid of targets your guns can't hit. Highly desirable damage type is mitigated by their lower DPS numbers
• Amarr - Slowest drones, but with an immense tank that makes them hard to get rid of. Their high rate of fire, improved tracking, and raw tank makes them the best drones to have in a drone vs drone conflict.

Bam, all fixed. Now you have two tiers of drones based on damage, and each drone in the category does something a bit different than the other. You now have a reason to chose a drone for damage type, DPS output, and utility. Compared to now, this essentially doubles your number of practical options (yea yea caldari drones get a bad rap, but they essentially split the difference between the two best drones as is, and so you either usually want maximum damage or maximum speed, not half of each). This is a marked improvement to the game, and would take all of one Sisi testing weekend to get the balance right on.

[OrangeAfroMan]

Agree with Vortex.

[LordsServant]

Came expecting drone region thread, left dissapointed.

Also, confirming as an '05 player I have t2 heavy minmatar and gallente, along with caldari drone spec 3, but haven't even trained amarr drone spec to 1 yet.(At least I don't remember doing it). I don't think I've ever seen anyone except some nubbin ratter I killed ever use any amarr t2 drones(he had infiltrator IIs, literally didn't know what they were for a few seconds).

Drones do need a boost/balanacing as atm its gallente/minmatar or gtfo.

[notbitterenough]

Drones do need a boost/balanacing as atm its ECM drones or gtfo.

FYP?

[Sponk]

Drones do need a boost/balanacing as atm its ECM drones or gtfo.

FYP?

Nope.. Ecm drones are suboptimal if you have drone damage bonuses.


Blah blah blah tapatalk

[Vortex]

Drones do need a boost/balanacing as atm its ECM drones or gtfo.

FYP?

Username relevant

[Sponk]

Drones do need a boost/balanacing as atm its ECM drones or gtfo.

FYP?

Username relevant

upvote for you, sir

[BOOLER]

Agree with Vortex 100%, if you could couple that with wiping ewar drones from the game completely I think we would have a winner.

[Mfume]

Agree with Vortex 100%, if you could couple that with wiping ewar drones from the game completely I think we would have a winner.

damn those damp drones, so op!

[pr0lurker]

Make kinetic drones more or less the same as thermal and give EM drones a nice optimal so they are out of smartbomb range... oh and kill Ewar drones

[BOOLER]

Agree with Vortex 100%, if you could couple that with wiping ewar drones from the game completely I think we would have a winner.

damn those damp drones, so op!

Haha, yeah. Personally I dont have a problem with ecm drones or any other ewar drones for that matter. My opinion is that they are just far too easy to train for and take away the need to actually train for and use the ships that are designed for those roles.

[Qwert]

Did a spreadsheet with damage drone and smartbomb stats a while back. Link.

TBH, I may have fucked up the tracking formula for drones, but then again, never seen anyone else try to account for tracking on them either.

Some things I have noticed:

• Medium EM drones are only 14% better dps than Thermal Light drones. (T1 EM's are actually worse than T2 Thermal).
• The DPS of mediums compared to smalls is ~140%; large to medium is ~200%; large to small is ~320%
• Adjusted for bandwidth, those numbers are ~70%, ~80%, and ~64% respectively.
• Each stage doubles the EHP of the previous, at the cost of a 2x and 2.5x increase in size.
• This means that for optimal drone ehp per m3, you want to fill your bay with mediums or smalls.
• The dps of smart-bombs also doubles with each size increase
• However, SHIP ehp increases by over 5 times (from frig>cruiser>BS), giving different times for the smarties to do their work
• A signature radius of ~130 is the tiping point between small and medium drones
• Interestingly the tipping point between mediums and heavies is at 80
• This makes medium drones completely worthless if m3 is no issue.

[Sponk]

You're not taking into account flight time.

Also, there's actual data about real-world application of speed vs orbit speed.

[Qwert]

You're not taking into account flight time.

Also, there's actual data about real-world application of speed vs orbit speed.

I know it has its flaws, but I originally did this in 2009 at the latest. (would give the actual date, but Google docs is giving me 25% packet loss atm.

[notbitterenough]

Agree with Vortex 100%, if you could couple that with wiping ewar drones from the game completely I think we would have a winner.

damn those damp drones, so op!

Haha, yeah. Personally I dont have a problem with ecm drones or any other ewar drones for that matter. My opinion is that they are just far too easy to train for and take away the need to actually train for and use the ships that are designed for those roles.

Top 3 produced EW drones were small, medium and heavy ECM. Web drones came in an extreme distant 4th iirc according to that guy posting stats on twitter.