How to use drones - the guide.

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Drones are good. They're like little henchmen that are cheap and replaceable. You can have fighter drones to attack your enemies or provide cover while you're mining, you can have miner drones to pull in some ore while you're ratting, you can have electronic warfare drones, and you can have repair drones to help heal your comrades or even your drones!

The basic skill needed for drones is 'Drones', pretty straightforward. For every level you have in 'Drones', you can control one additional drone to a max of 5. Here's where some planning takes place. Look at the drone bay on the ship you want to use drones in. If it only has a 5 m3 drone bay, you'll only be able to fit a 5 m3 size drone, which is a light drone. So training to level 3 drones would be pointless, as you'd never be able to fit three in the drone bay anyway.

That, however, is just the beginning. When you open up the drones list of skills in market, you'll see that there are quite a few to choose from. Some of the ones I suggest are scout drone, which increases the range they can be away from your ship before you 'lose control' of them. Don't worry, they just become docile and sit still in space if you have to warp away before retrieving them, they won't attack you as rogue drones upon your return. Enemies will attack them if you have to leave suddenly, but they are cheaper to replace than any ship by far.

Another good drone skill to have is drone interfacing. It does wonders for the drones to the tune of 20% bonus to damage, possibly their armor, and mining effectiveness. So 5 levels of interfacing would double your drones effectiveness.

Drone durability is nice, but there is a trick that keeps your drones from ever being attacked in the first place. Tanking! If you keep your drones in your bay until the enemy targets you, they'll never attack the drones as long as you're around. So your drones will never be attacked, let alone hit for any damage. However, there are missions where enemies show up after you have your drones deployed, so if it's not practical to retrieve and redeploy your drones, it's nice for them to be able to take a couple hits before they disintegrate.

There are fittings that you can add to your drones to have extra range, speed, and tracking capability. The range module is a high, and the tracking and speed are both mediums. Don't spend too many slots though, you'll decrease your ability to tank. Omnidirectional tracking is good for sentry drones, whereas a speed boost to T2 medium drones is just evil with the resulting speed. (Drones navigation skill helps with that too)


But the benefits are many! It all depends on how you use them. While mining in low security (not 0.0), time is of the essence, so i fit as many mining lasers as I can, and even use mining drones to help carve more asteroid. When rats arrive, I put away the mining drones, wait for the rats to target me, and then deploy my scout (fighter) drones to deal with them. Since the rats keep attacking my ship, and I was able to outfit it for tanking without having to use any slots for my drones, I'm able to mine away while my drones chip away at the rats until they're gone. Then my scout drones hop back in the hold, and the 5 miner drones come back to work. You can't change fittings like that on the fly, but you can change drones.

You can even organize your drones into groups. My first grouping was simply 'Injured' If I had drones with damage, I'd put them into this group to keep them from getting launched by mistake. Then I branched out to 'fighters', 'miners' and 'repper'. Now when I have drones in my injured category, I just launch them and the repper drone, target the injured ones, and right click the repper drone and have it 'engage' the targeted injured drone. Pretty soon it's armor is all fixed, then I just right click the 'drones in local space' tab, and either 'scoop drones to bay' which is the command to retrieve them if they're within 1500m, or 'return to drone bay' which instructs them to return to the ship and then the drone bay. You can choose to scoop a drone to your cargo hold as well, and if you're comrade has left drones in space, (they'll just float quietly until retrieved or destroyed by enemies) you can scoop their drones to either your hold or drone bay as well, you just have to get withing 1500 m, as if you were looting a can.

There's endless tactics for use with drones, and lots of types of drones that I haven't even looked at using yet.

Let me share one of my favorite stories about drones though:

While flying about one day I came upon a level 3 DS. I was flying my Vexor with a fit for ratting, and a drone bay full of medium drones. I've got drone interfacing 4, so 5 of these mediums hitting something at once is as scary as heavy missiles, so I thought I'd try to fly a DS by myself. Most of the regular tactics applied, don't aggro everyone at once, let your cap recharge before you aggro the next group, but what I did different was letting my drones do all the damage. I'd fly up to a group until all of them had targetted me, then I'd turn tail, fire my AB up, and release the drones. (You can right click on a groups header bar to launch all of them at once) Once all the drones were out, I'd fire a singe shot at whatever was targeted, and then just fly. Since the enemies were following me, they stayed within drone control range, but out of range of their weapons, (most of the time) and once they were depleted some, I'd start picking up loot, and only targetting them if my drones didn't all pick the same target. With the help of a tractor beam, i was done picking up loot about the time the drones had returned to the ship to orbit, and my cap was still well-charged.

Enough for now, hopefully this will give you some ideas of how to use the little guys. But if you just HAVE to have that webber, and don't have the slots or energy to fit it, think about a drone for the job. Drones don't use any energy from your ship, they don't take a slot (unless you want them to be more uber than skills alone allow), and they're cheaper than a ship every time.

-Drone-lord Dres

Soon to come, bandwidth changes, (as soon as I learn about it! )

[bomberesque]

well done Dres

I know I said I'd start this, but you beat me to it!

One of the issues with drones afaik is that their uses have been expanded considerably with RMR, with several specialist drones being added. Thus many of us haven't yet trained for them and so can't really advise on use (except fro Dres, who can clearly use armour rep drones), the info included here is only from looking at info sheets. To expand on Dres's post, there are 3 sizes of drone;

1. Small drone; 5m3 each
2. Medium drone; 10m3 each
3. Large (or Heavy) drone; 25 m3 each

I only use combat drones atm, so I'll only talk about them. Mining drones you'll have to ask someone else .

as far as the basic attack drones are concerned;

Each of the 3 size flavors are available in 4 damage flavors. Drones, afaik, only do one type of damage so it's worth considering drone choice to tailor your damage output. Small drones (or Light Scout Drones) are a bit meh, ok as a supplement but not a primary weapon (kinda like longer range rockets...) DPS output is not great. 5 Meds (Medium Scout Drones) can kill an NPC BC in <60 seconds, which is serving me well ratting at the POS. /click approach BS, Drones kill the BCs before I make orbit round the BS, then switch to the BS to break it's tank. Large drones (Heavy Attack Drones) I haven't played with yet, but I'm reliably informed that they pwn against NPC BSs. Not sure of reliability for PvP.

The new specialist combat drones are;

Combat utility
Neutraliser drone (sm, med and lrg, lrg takes 20cap/6sec)
Webber drone (Large only, 30% web)

Electronic warfare all avail in sm, med and lrg
Tracking disrupter
Target painter
ECM
Sensor dampner

Logistic drones all avail in sm, med and lrg
Shield maintenance
Armour maintenance

Sentry drones lrg size only, apparantly deal v good damage for 40km, but static like a gate gun

Drone upgrades
Dres got me all excited this morning with talk of a mod that would allow you to use >5 drones. We looked at it together and discovered that it was a touch of wishful thinking. The Mod in question uses 75000 MW and looks designed for a capital ship (I assume carrier) so unless there's a cruiser/BS out there with 99.9 reduction in power needs for drone upgrade mods, I think we're out of luck. That said, I see that the factional "guardian" vexor takes an extra drone per cruiser skill level. Sadly the drone bay stays at 75m3, restricting you to 10 smalls or 7 meds and a small...

The upgrades that are available are;

Drone link Augmenter (hi slot), +20km to drone control range
Drone navi comp (mid slot), increases drone speed
Omnidirectional tracking link (mid slot), increases drone range and tracking (note, range increase is drone to target, not control range)

Note that these appear to have no stacking penalties, so 2x link aug and a sensor booster, and you're controlling drones out to 80km on a vexor

looking through that, my head is spinning with ideas for a vexor tackler. You could feasibly 90% web beyond 100km... sadly no warp disruptor drone as yet.

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And to expand on my post.. those drones webbing at that range are much more expendable tacklers than ships. So having a couple vexors as tacklers, with drones webbing and NOS'ing at 100km makes me all shivery with possibilities..

Of course, a Dominix fitted as such could put the hurt on some BIG ships...

/me thinks we need to get all the Gallente's together in Vex's to see what we can do in a group...

[Lee]

I've actually been flying the vexor a lot more than the thorax for pvp lately, in a thorax if you get webbed you lose half your damage because you cant get in close enough for your blasters, in a vexor your drones are still doing the majority of your damage and rails become more viable than on a thorax.

Also, just thought i'd mention because its not very obvious, the electronic warfare drones skill increases your drone control range by a further 3000m per level so that will take you up to 60km range with scout drones 5 and EW drones 5 :D

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As you can see, we've learned alot about drones. But something I learned from Aki is sentries.... They are very nice vs. BS's, or any target that's at the right range and doesn't have a high transversal velocity. If you've got an omnidirectional tracking link on, they track better, and hit more, all while staying stationary. This can be used as a great advantage though. Since they hit at range, you don't have to wait for them to fly to their target. So you can do damage with them sooner. Also, since they don't move, you can sit next to them, and the instant they take any damage, you can pull them in. They do seem to be more effective against larger targets, (BS's and BC's) but for frigs that are flying directly toward you, they PWN!! You'll just see the frigs disappear and turn into wrecks before your eyes. Tis a beautiful thing, but requires you to have skills to have more than a few targets, as you'll eat them faster than you can target them. (I've trained up for 6 targets, works pretty well!)

T2 medium drones are very nice as well, but do take a bit of training. Not as much as T2 heavies, but more than just regular medium drones. But the damage and speed increases are significant, to say the least!

Right now I'm training for T2 heavies, as Domi's are my ship of choice until I can fly a Gallente Dread, which has simply EVIL drone bonuses, as well as a huge drone bay. Which leads me to my next point, using the bonuses of your ship. Both the Vexor and the Dominix have bonuses for drones, which make the little guys even nicer. But the flexibility to add remote repping/mining/EW/damage/webbing to any ship with a drone bay makes drones a nice addition to your armory. (or in my case, the central portion of my armory. I've got more sp in drones than some people have total sp for all skills, and I'm not done yet!)

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On drones... I believe hull repper drones have been added, although I've not been on lately to check. Any other additions?

[Hehulk]

If they were, I can't find them

Also, T2 logistics drones, T2 sentries and hybrid drones from the rogue drone regions that do multiple damage types (Same DPS as their T1/2 equivelants, but you'd be doing say 16 thermal and 8 kinetic instead of 24 thermal for example. Useful for PVP)

[Anhamgrimmar]

regarding the guardian vexor, i belive it was a limited issue ship (Like the 'tribal' issue tempest, the imperial apoc/geddon, and the opux yachts etc) so theyre that rare, that most will never see combat. And if you search eve-o for 'guardian vexor' the last one sold by auction went for over 6.5bn isk. 6.5 BILLION ISK!



fake edit: 10bn isk! for a sodding cruiser!

[bomberesque]

regarding the guardian vexor, i belive it was a limited issue ship (Like the 'tribal' issue tempest, the imperial apoc/geddon, and the opux yachts etc) so theyre that rare, that most will never see combat. And if you search eve-o for 'guardian vexor' the last one sold by auction went for over 6.5bn isk. 6.5 BILLION ISK!



fake edit: 10bn isk! for a sodding cruiser!

yeah, I believe there are 3 in game or somesuch nonsense

Apparently the drone bonus works as advertised though so you can field 10 drones .. although bandwidth issues may have changed that.

Friz, you am all of teh rich ... buy it for me so I can go lose it ratting in catch

[Hehulk]

50 actually