They're useless for that even. You cant land to pick people up at all.

I disagree with them not being a problem in the previous build, but the root cause of the problem WASN'T a need for the Dropships to be nerfed, and with the fixed spawning and other improvements that made squishing players more difficult, the nerf is unwelcome - and this is coming from a career AV guy, NOT a Dropship pilot.

I'm loving the fact that because something takes practise and time to get good, everyone's moaning. No you cannot train a skill to become good. No IMHO you shouldn't get points for a CRU. Yes, Dropships are a TEAM asset. Dropships shouldn't be an easy meal ticket for the terrible shot. It should however reward players who have taken the time to get good. Logistic ships DO reward you.
The previous drop ship let me just arse about constantly. New one IMHO is working as intended.

I disagree with them not being a problem in the previous build, but the root cause of the problem WASN'T a need for the Dropships to be nerfed, and with the fixed spawning and other improvements that made squishing players more difficult, the nerf is unwelcome - and this is coming from a career AV guy, NOT a Dropship pilot.

Hey there Iron Wolf Saber, you crazy pilot legend from the last beta build. Could you please explain in further detail as to what you mean by not being able to "land". Does the dropship magically explode or disappear if it touches the ground? Or is it impossible for it to touch the ground & therefore continously forced to remain in the air for the remaining duration of the round or until its destruction? Are pilots even allowed to exit the vehicle. I've yet to fly an aircraft in this beta build & am quite curious to know what actualy happens when a pilot puts their acraftt on the ground. One of my tactics for dealing with signifcant damage on my shield heavey & armor repair deficient aircraft would be to land in a safe zone, get out & repair my aircraft with my repair tool. Also I sometime prefered my acraft without a CRU as it irritated me having people spawn in my aircraft as a non-gunner passenger refusing to exit the vehicle. If dropships are truly not able to pick up other players then I might have to rethink going without a CRU as its possible for gunners to get shot out of the gunner seat and a dropship is basically useless without a gunner, aside from being a very expensive decoy, lol. However I imagine thats the cost for nerfing the dropships against bad pilots bouncing their dropships off the ground to kill people in the last beta build.

*Sidenote - I wonder what Chuck Norris flying a dropship could accomplish... Chuck Norris piloting an aircraft, exiting it in mid-flight, getting an aircraft kill, reentering the aircraft, & then safely landing it, Like A BOSS.

i know you dont like me too much but i actually must say you nailed it in this post

dropship are useless to a useless 1 day old pilot.. the things actually take skill to fly now, the role is not for everyone

i'm a pretty useless pilot atm but it won't last forever.. I will fly the dam thing good again soon enuff

I'm loving the fact that because something takes practise and time to get good, everyone's moaning. No you cannot train a skill to become good. No IMHO you shouldn't get points for a CRU. Yes, Dropships are a TEAM asset. Dropships shouldn't be an easy meal ticket for the terrible shot. It should however reward players who have taken the time to get good. Logistic ships DO reward you.
The previous drop ship let me just arse about constantly. New one IMHO is working as intended.

And Rhadiem, I saw Tony's Dropship in the last build, he was GOOD. Calling him out like that isn't productive, and won't get you anywhere. Even his enemies respect him as a good pilot.

Well the price tag alone fixes spamming.

AV grenades combined with price increases fixes crushing of attentive players (most of my crushes have been unattentive snipers and I have had no gunners, unless you count dropship jousting crushing then I have far more kills wresteling hostile dropships into the ground)

I'm not at all against needing to have "RL" skill to fly the dropship. Heck, you can go back to my old posts and see many posts talking about it flying like the Desert Combat mod Apaches, which were super difficult to fly. You can't imagine the moaning people whould do about that. But once mastered, they were VERY effective. They rewarded skill invested.

The issue here is "are dropship pilots rewarded for doing their job well in SKILL POINTS" and they are barely done this, and not at the level in comparison to the skill points and ISK needed to do the job well.

As an example in his post I diagree with, SP for an in-ship CRU should be done, just like they are done for INFANTRY.

I believe a player should be able to start out with 2-3 million skill points and make a difference on the battlefield as a Dropship pilot, and earn similar SP to Logistics, Tank drivers and combat infantry. I don't see this being the case.

Yeah, I did Dropships in Replication. They were squish mobiles then, and anyone could use them. I had a badly fitted Logi ship (I didnt spend much time on it) and used loads of naked 25k Caldari tier 1 Dropshops as taxi/squash. Trouble is, that was a while ago. I'm actually spending like 1 mil learning to fly right..... NOW!
Oh server full :D

ok bro my reading comprehension is trash right now. . dont mind me having a bit of alchohol withdrawl combined with the infinate loading screen

lol, friends don't let friends post and drink. ;)

I need to stop posting also, I'm having post Dropship nerf withdrawal and miss having 30 Eryx sitting around ready to fly.

lol the problem is i'm not drunk yet

I agree they should be spendy and flying them should take skill currently the main thing is noone has good skills to put the better gear so they won't fly. I built one once I had the 200k to buy the basic equipment for a gorgon to fly support. cru missiles dam red and a repper. I won't even pull it out of the hangar unless I got at least 4teammates with voice and in a skirmish no way I'm taking it out in an ambush.

That said, any CRU you willfully use should be rewarded.

Nothing personal, but this is completely stupid. The only reason some pilots went around squishing players or tower "sniping" was they have NO FREAKING WAY to get a legitimate amount of skill points any other way.

In 90% of the games you play, you're really there just to grind SP and ISK. The win is a bonus. In these games, Pilots need a way to earn.

Tanks can roll around firing at anything they want, and people who want to gun will run up and jump in.

Pilots have to beg people who have ZERO training in gunning to gun for them so they can earn their SP to improve their trade.

Dust isn't a charity. Pilots aren't here to serve you like slaves, we expect to get SP like the rest, and deserve proper compensation IN GAME for doing their job.

CCP Devs have failed to do this, so that's why you get all this cheesy stuff.

If they actually put a gun on a ship, or even made other forms of combat airships available, you wouldn't see this crap.

And with this patch, not only have they failed to compensate air pilots, they made it harder to do their charity work, more expensive, and much harder to stay alive while doing it.

This is exactly how it should be, there shouldnt be ships flying everywhere landing on people just for a single kill!

Most of the time when attempting to land the dropship would voilently bounce up and down then blow up becuase of 'collision' damage to the ground, this seems to happen alot more the slower you try to 'float' a landing. Where it is almost favorable to crash your dropship into the groun to get a good 'landing' and eat the damage a bit that way you can avoid the bouncing. Also the wind blows over your dropship once it lands.

So far the only time I've successfully landed was with the armor repper up and full hp. and once on the ground the engines dont cut out I have to constantly tell the engines to shift downpower.