CCP Fozzie chose probably the worst day to release a high profile dev blog regarding drone changes, April 1st. In fact, many here at EN24 thought it was an very subtle April’s fool joke, but after careful revision we noticed it was indeed the real thing.
Today CCP Fozzie went into the official EVE-O forums and confirmed that the changes are happening:
Good morning everyone.
Since it’s April 2nd I want to go ahead and confirm once and for all that our balance posts and blog yesterday were 100% legit. We had a little fun subverting expectations and making honest announcements on April 1st. Big smile
To answer a couple of questions and issues raised so far:
I love you too Dinsdale, never change.
We’ll be increasing the base mining yield of all mining drones by 33% to compensate for the change to Drone Interfacing. This means that at max skills mining drones will have identical yield to pre-patch and at lower skills they will be improved. Thanks to CSM member Mike Azariah for reminding me.
There’s currently a display bug that makes the Drone Navigation Computer say that it adds newtons of force. It actually increases drone MWD top speed by a percentage, +30% for T2.
Grath if you think this change nerfs the speed at which supercarriers reinforce sov structures, you’re doing it wrong.
I’m seeing a fair bit of confusion about the details of the Sentry changes. I left the nitty gritty details out of the text section of the blog since they don’t lend themselves to easy summaries and the actual numbers were in the spreadsheet, but I’ll go over the end results of the changes to T1 and T2 sentries here so people can see the whole picture. These numbers assume max skills:
Curator I – +15% tracking, -50% falloff, +18.15% damage
Warden I – +40% falloff, +12% damage
Garde I – +50% falloff, +2% damage
Bouncer I – +60% tracking, -12.5% optimal, +14.3% falloff, +2.86% damageCurator 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% damageWe understand the frustrations expressed by some about how these changes do not address the Drone UI, AI and/or Ewar Drones. These are important issues, but they require a different set of resources to solve and we are not going to hold back meaningful positive changes to wait until we can fix everything at once.
We are hearing the feedback from those of you who argue that this change doesn’t go far enough to make the Caldari and Amarr drones competitive. It is too soon to announce anything else yet but we’re taking this feedback to heart.
You can read the rest of the forum discussion at the EVE-O forums.
– R
