CCP Logibro wrote:We're of half a mind to hold back a little bit on the Dropship HP buff, but there will be at least some extra HP for the Caldari dropships to help close the gap in EHP between them and the Gallente dropships.
If swarm vs dropship combat looks better after this change, we can look into things like increasing swarm speed and reducing swarm maneuverability. Just don't want to change too many moving parts at once. Things like an EM swarm launcher (same damage, flipped damage profile) and the anti-dropship (faster missiles) would also be on the table if these changes improve things.
Weapons for dropships are a bit of a different topic, though we are making changes to the small blaster. Details for that will come in another topic, so I would ask you put your discussion there or in a new thread.
(And again, I'm not CCP Rattati!
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Swarms are already *insanely fast*
rattati. Half the reason that people complain about dropships is because swarms are so fast that most pilots feel the only consistently viable option to get away from swarms or forges is an afterburner, it makes the need for an afterburner a completely ubiquitous thing - you must have one to either accelerate out of swarm range or break your relatively linear momentum vs forges or you will be throwing your isk investment away.
There are a few changes that need to be made here (and I imagine I'm going to get some flames for this) but swarms need to be slowed down slightly: Yes I know this sounds completely crazy, but I pose the question "How many MLT / STD dropships have you seen escape from swarms without an afterburner? It's not easy to do without an afterburner even on an assault dropship", this first change makes the 'need' for an afterburner less ubiquitous, to compensate maybe swarms can have higher lock ranges or travel distances.
The second change is that afterburner cooldown times need to be increased to about 40 seconds for basic, 35 for advanced and 30 seconds at proto, this means that while using your afterburner to break linear travel vs forges or accelerate from swarms is still a valid choice it becomes an actual
choice you can engage this module to get away, but it will be on cooldown for a while - you can fit one with less cooldown but it will take more fitting space.
The third thing is some serious changes need to be made to ground vehicle propulsion modules, in far too many cases I see tanks hit that button and just drive back and forth as fast as possible to dodge tons of fire, or simply drive away as fast as possible, these things shouldn't affect momentum so much.
tl;dr Swarms need to be slowed down so that fitting an afterburner isn't a complete necessity, afterburners need increased cooldowns.