Thursday 3 April 2014

Recent dev posts on Contracts and Drones

There are a couple of dev posts that I wish to shout out.

CCP wants feedback on the contract system.  As someone who tried producing mid level BPC's for sale, and gave up due to the limits of the contract system, I can only endorse a desire to improve this. If you have ever tried contracts, now is the time to offer the wisdom of your opinions.



It is no real secret that the only boats I can currently fly are the Epithal and Dominix. (This is an oversimplification - but not by much.) 


Drones are being rebalanced.  T2 Gardes are being nerfed 7% raw DPS (9% if you only have Gallente Drone IV), but picking up a bit of tracking.  Other races drones are being buffed, but ... nothing will replace that lost DPS for sentry drones (maybe the new faction Drone Damage Amp?) 

Heavy drones will be slightly less painful to use on large targets if you want to get up close and personal.  I will also see what might happen if we change our C4 sleeper tactics from ranged warpins to dropping on top of them with heavy drones.  The concept of moving while we fight might be interesting.

TLDR; The gap between best and worst are being shrunk by buffing the new drone pilot and nerfing the Gallente Sentry T2 user. 

I wont pretend to understand the intricacies of carrier ship changes yet, I was reading that there were calls for 2 Damage Control Units, when the calls instead were for something to do with Drone Control Units; both being DCU.

Yes Van, you called it.  The goons should be pleased that their campaign against drones has paid dividends (as Van said it would).  Reducing drone assist earlier was not enough, so now we just nerf the T2 sentry drones. 

I will probably stop whining when I train t2 large guns and AWU 5.  Maybe.

4 comments:

  1. How do you figure Gallente T2 Sentries are being nerfed?

    I see nothing in the dev blog about a 7% damage nerf to Gardes.

    The increase over T1 damage is going down for all T2 sentry drones and will require racial specialization skill (+2% damage per level) but the base damage of T1 (which that 2%/lvl increase is based upon) is also going up to compensate.

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  2. I first saw it on serpentine logic.

    Confirmed by CCP at https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4426759#post4426759
    Assuming max skills including racial drones:
    Curator II - +15% tracking, -50% falloff, +8.31% damage
    Warden II - +40% falloff, +2.67% damage
    Garde II - +50% falloff, -6.5% damage
    Bouncer II - +60% tracking, -12.5% optimal, +14.3% falloff, -5.71% damage

    Essentially T2 gardes and bouncers are not being fully buffed to counter the drone interfacing nerf. The other T2 sentries get a larger buff, but still will be less DPS than Gardes. Light, medium and heavies will be tweaked so that t2's will remain unaffected.

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  3. In any rebalance, there will always be some items that get buffed and some that get nerfed. As long as the overall goal - namely to make previously useless items useful (or at least more useful) - is achieved, well done. I use gardes and if this upcoming rebalance means we see more amarr and caldari drones being used, that's got to be good for the game.

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  4. Heretic, while I agree that this is buff the weaker drones, and especially t1 pilots, it remains an overall nerf of sentry drones in generall for my current uses.

    I will have a look to see if I want to use more t2 heavies or move to another weapon system all together.

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