Insanely high cost goes hand and hand with being insanely overpowered.

A freshly bought unmodified assault dropship costs about as much as a decently fitted tank (certainly more than a very effective 70k tank). There is no reason why it should be so costly.

Basic dropship 45k
Assault dropship 323k (costs much more when fully well fitted)

I believe that specializations for vehicles and dropsuits should be more expensive than their basic counterparts, but it should be like a 20% increase. Right now an assault dropship has over a 7x increase in price compared to a basic dropship.

An assault dropship with only a small turret for the pilot should not be cheaper or cost more than a tank with substantially more HP and firepower capable of ruing the lives of infantry. It is no way ok that being an assault dropship pilot should mean living in poverty.

Assault dropship prices need to be severely cut.

Agreed, it should be more (it's a tech 2 hull after all), but it shouldn't be THAT much more.

Sadly, once Caps get ahold of manufacturing, it'll be a lot more

Fair enough guys you have convinced me, make them cheaper, but there has to be a counter besides a rail tank. If AV is not buffed then things are going to be in a terrible state.

I have knocked off a few with my forge gun but it's hardly reliable against a good pilot with a 2.5- 3 sec charge time. These kills are mostly guys that don't move after the first hit, who knows why not.

I just got my back up a bit because the sentiments you guys were putting across were very similar to pre 1.7 tank threads and look what happened.

Any way thanks for the discussion. i'm out.

Many dropship pilots agree with you, myself included. Light av should be buffed a bit, though it should take at least two swarms to bring down a proto fit dropship or else dropships would just be really expensive suits. I wouldn't mind giving the forge gun less of a charge up time but I have seen some talented forge gunners fight off dropships in 1.7.
I have great respect for forge gunners because they need as much skill as a dropship pilot to do their job. Unlike rail tanks.

I can understand your concerns for assault dropships going the way of the tank. Let me reassure you, good assault dropship pilots have spent way to much time getting good at flying to make it into an op FOTM. Dropships are challenging and that's fun, without a challenge it would be stale.
It takes far too much sp to be a FOTM anyway because you need at least 5mil skill points to be effective as an assault dropship pilot, something every ace pilot is proud of.

Assault dropship spam won't happen, and would be hilarious to watch if rookies tried. To become proficient at flying you have to spend a couple months flying and getting shot down. I have flown in dropship squadrons and it is chaos, dropships crash into each other all the time, redline rails make short work of them and av makes collisions happen all the time. The squadrons I flew with contained some of the best pilots I know on dust and it was very hard to keep everything coordinated. If you want to fly in a squadron you need 6 months minimum of flight time plus a few weeks of flying with another dropship before you even consider becoming a squadron pilot. ADS spam is only for very experienced pilots and even then its very easily countered, trust me I know.

Anyway glad you can see where we are coming from, have a good night, come fly with us sometime and see what we are talking about.

(Also I'm starting to realize how backwards the dropship world is compared to the rest of dust)

What do you mean backward?

I mean opposite of the normal ideology of dust. Pythons fit proto to survive rather than slay, spam is actually worse than just 3 ADS and is only effective with skilled pilots as opposed to tank spam or cal logies back in the day, dropships fly, they cost a lot in both sp and isk for something that is very fragile. Pretty backwards from your average grunts perspective I dunno maybe I'm just tired....

Have you ever tried flying an ADS? It's not nearly as easy as some people make it look.
Edit: He may have been doing absolutely everything right, only to get surprised by swarms, which really knock a dropship as light as the Python around. Bumping into a wall will drop the vast majority of your shields and make it even harder to maintain control, at which point tapping another wall will probably destroy the dropship. If that doesn't get you, the followup swarm volleys probably will, unless you're skilled enough to maintain control and get out of there extremely quickly, which is very, very hard.

It's not the dropship, the point of my discussion is when rail tanks are nerfed there will be nothing left to take them out. so why do they deserve a price reduction?

So what happens if there are no buildings to crash into?

Look, I don't take my ADS because of rail tanks. That is literally it. The only deterrent is a rail tank.

If they buff the ADS or drop the price while nerfing rails or tanks in general, then we run the risk of having another 1.7 super tank spam fest.

Everybody called tanks becoming spam-able and OP in 1.7 and if something like this happened then it will be the same for ADS.

when they first came out it was 1.2 mil isk for a proto assault dropship.. so stop your whinning

when they first came out it was 1.2 mil isk for a proto assault dropship.. so stop your whinning

Do you know that the gallente Government is corrupt
Go ahead look it up, i find it kinda funny

Obvious red line rail tanker is obvious.
The funniest part about your post is that it is the ultimate argument as to why the rail tanks are so out of balance.
"I don't take my ADS because of rail tanks. That is literally it."
So an entire vehicle should be denied in the game because of another one?
*facepalm* so dumb.

considering that without concentrated AV players or a railtank, assault derpships can completely dominate a map I'd say the cost is justified.

the railgun and it's interaction with damage mods is what's overpowered.

Yeah the whole set up with tanks in general, but i still don't know how else to reliable suppress an assault dropship without one.

[quote=RemingtonBeaver][quote=Cody Sietz]

I'm not arguing that redline tanking is good, in fact, it's broken and OP...yet it is the ONLY thing that can counter the incubus ADS.


Thank you for proving my point.

Even just losing the hull without modules (completely weak and exposed against AV) can cost you more than you'll make in a battle. Why is that ok?

EDIT: read post #37 by Awry Barux.

What's that saying in EVE? Don't use what you can't afford to lose??

Whenever I see an ads in a pub ambush they usually have 1 extra turret at most and seem to be almost perma hardened - any ADS I've ever taken down with a proto forge has been by bad luck of the pilot - usually I just hear them laugh as they fly over my head and missile me to death.

put 6 ADS's in the air and there is no more OP thing in the game...


I don't know how they could limit the use more then what they did...

I do believe ADS's where on the chopping block with Logistic DS's.. but for some reason they got lobbied to stay.. The cost probably never fully got adjusted with everything else as it was never fully planned to be kept.

A freshly bought unmodified assault dropship costs about as much as a decently fitted tank (certainly more than a very effective 70k tank). There is no reason why it should be so costly.

Basic dropship 45k
Assault dropship 323k (costs much more when fully well fitted)

I believe that specializations for vehicles and dropsuits should be more expensive than their basic counterparts, but it should be like a 20% increase. Right now an assault dropship has over a 7x increase in price compared to a basic dropship.

An assault dropship with only a small turret for the pilot should not be cheaper or cost more than a tank with substantially more HP and firepower capable of ruing the lives of infantry. It is no way ok that being an assault dropship pilot should mean living in poverty.

Assault dropship prices need to be severely cut.