I don’t entirely get the drama that is behind this.
Reducing spaceball to 7,5 fair enough, I get the point. But overall it is still not trash now.
About the rest: Previously we had damage, armor, Cooldown and speed or range in max value with 3 drones. We didn’t even look at other drone attributes simply because why would you even think about swapping cooldown for 10% critchance? Or hit chance. That simply is no option. Same goes for most combodrones: spaceball2k20, or spaceball pirate. Why would you use these? These effects were just not good enough.
And drones like crit, damage and armor having the same value as their spaceball counterpart also made no sense at all.
Same as taunt and aggrobeacon having no purpose at all. From an objective pov it is an imbalance. And the change is not surprising at all. Just as it will be no surprise when at one point items will get a new balancing.
Or did everyone miss that all the ships mentioned above (presumably being nerfed to the ground now because of these drone changes) have either Orbital strike or Sniperblaster.
Some complain about rocket and aim PC being absolutely OP now.
I may ask: more OP than Orbitalstrike or Sniperblaster? More OP than Scope shifter? More OP than allycover in combination with Corr. Cloud?
I think some here are forgetting what kind of OPness they have been using all time for the past years because nothing happened regarding balancing items or drones.
And the number of ships none looks at because their items do not consist of SB, OS prot, Speed, Inverter or Cloud.
We always use what is good or OP if you wanna call it that. I just think that now there is room for more ships to join the circle of „good or OP“ ships. Rocket has been painfully nerfed a few years ago. But even then it was not considered OP, it was just AS GOOD AS Orbitalstrike. Now it may come back to the same level.
And I still did not understand what the issue is if someone uses crit and hitchance drone.
You do realize that this person has only one more slot for damage, armor, cooldown, speed or range right? No matter what he uses he lacks a bunch of important other attributes. If he uses damage, he has no armor, no CD, no speed and range… if he uses armor he lacks 15% damage and the other above mentioned. You can’t tell me that you can’t use your own drones to play against this.
I had a OTB on Vega yesterday where crit drone comes into play more than anywhere else. Wasn’t so bad at all. There is no 100% critrate. You can’t oneshot ppl. Switching 6 drones is more challenging than the fight itself. And the winner is still the team with better coordination.
Nothing changed except my right mousebutton filed a complaint.
Btw: if you do the math then crit drone is just doing the same as damage drone only with an RNG factor behind it.
So to sum this up:
I believe that all drones can be used now, there is no „best setup“ anymore that always consists of the same 4/10 drones.
It is an indirect Buff to Rockets, and an indirect nerf to scramblers. Lava Pitchstone and Quartz are the ones who benefit or suffer most from this.
Probably all other ships benefit from it no matter what they do.
It increases the overall option of useable ships and tactics which can’t be bad.
And imo it is a first step into the right direction when it comes to balancing BUT others have to follow.
As others mentioned scramblers need some love again, but so do many other items. BTW: anyone remembering the old scramblers. When it was 95% mysts being used in PVP. Was fun right.. so much fun… so much variety…
One thing I dislike is that switching drones is still a pain and won’t get easier with more drones. That could have been adjusted when more drones are viable now. Maybe that can get changed in the future.
And one last thing: we saw on Public PTR 3 years ago that full gneiss is disgusting in CQs and cannot be countered with normal ships. Go on YouTube watch the vids. That has nothing to do with drones.
