nerf drakes?

M

Mogs

Veteran XX
:psyduck:

There's a topic about this on just about every other eve forum so I figured i'd start one here. Basically, people are complaining about the drake's effectiveness in blob warfare. Its cheap, has a low skill requirement, good tank and has good ranged damage making it one of the best fleet setups at the moment. It also takes a very minimal amount of skill to use it too. Align/orbit -> target -> shoot -> boom. So pretty much any bunch of newbs can form a gigantic ball of drake death. This angers the higher sp people with their armor hacs and rr bs and snipe hacs, ect... They require more pilot skill to fly, cost a lot more and you need more skill points. All these pvp setups can all be wiped out by some shitty t1 battlecruiser.

From my personal experience, I think drakes suck balls and shouldn't be nerfed but that's probably because i've only used them for small or medium sized gangs or PVE (when i first started). If you bring a drake on a roam, you always end up being the token slow fuck that holds everyone back and get tackled because you're slow as shit and you really don't do that much dps so you're never on top dmg of a killmail. If they were to nerf a drake in any way, I would reduce its cap or something so it can't perma mwd everywhere.

Anyways, here is a cool vid that the initiative put out showing their theorycrafting "firewall" smartbomb battleships. What they do is tank their ships for kinetic (the most used dmg type for drakes because it gets a bonus to it) and use smartbombs to kill some of the incoming missiles to reduce the incoming dmg (missiles are objects in space and have an HP, so if you spam an AOE type weapon like smartbombs, technically you could destroy missiles before they hit you). Even if the strat isn't completely perfect, its still an awesome video. It makes me wish i could play eve with effects without my computer exploding.

YouTube - Eve Online - The Initiative. Firewall
 
I think it's less a problem with drakes and more a problem with HML/HAM balance; the drake is just where it manifests the most. Increase the grid or cpu requirement on HML a bit, look at the other missile cruiser and BC ships, and see if they might need fitting adjustemnt. It would add some variety if they used this as an excuse to add tiering to launchers. Then, they could keep the fittings on HMLs as they are, decrease the RoF and the clip size, and add an accelerated HML with increased fitting but otherwise the same as the current launcher.
 
Or they could just fix the damn defender missiles no one uses because they don't work.

1) A dedicated "defence missile module" instead of being a missile launcher. Then anything can mount one.

2) Make it more fire and forget so you just launch one and it automatically intercepts any hostile missile (aka make it more user friendly). Generally just be able to turn the thing on and ignore it though if this makes it too easy then just keep it only for the specific target, but NOT for if the missiles are targeting you. It's pretty much impossible to defend other ships from missiles with defenders (so a fleet with a couple dedicated missile defender ships becomes a reasonable idea).

3) Fix the skill that gives a speed bonus to defender missiles that usually makes them worse because they overshoot their target. So either change it to a different bonus (say damage) or fix the damn thing.

There, no more problems with drakes or any missile boat for that matter but the balance won't swing so far in the other direction to make missile boats useless.
 
i don't think defender missiles will ever work in this situation...

300 drakes x 7 missile slots = 2100 missiles per volley

u would need a lotta defenders
 
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