I think we're going about this the wrong way. Instead of asking "How can we make it possible to kill a dropship while it's doing the only thing that could be considered 'evasive actions' allowed by its flight physics?" we should be asking "How can we make it so 'swarm dodging flight' and 'warfighting flight' aren't the same thing?" In other words, let's make it so that flying around at top speed isn't the way for dropships to earn warpoints.

1) Range penalties on the turrets. The turrets need to be there, because that's how a dropship provides support and cover to troops it drops off, but it should lose effectiveness past 15m or so. Reduced damage, reduced accuracy, something.

2) Transport assist points. CCP has mentioned before that they're planning this, or something similar. For those of you not familiar with the idea, they'll have pilots get a portion of warpoints earned by anyone they recently dropped off.

3) Remove the swarm starter suit. As it is now every time a dropship or HAV appears on the field every d-bag grabs his swarm starter suit and goes to town. This is why you rarely see HAVs anymore and dropships are forced to behave the way they do.

What does this change?
You still won't be able to kill a dropship that is moving at max speed around the map. Not with swarms, anyway. But that pilot won't be able to make any money that way anymore. Instead, he or she will be taking position over cap points and supporting troops with rapid transport and acting as a mobile spawn point that shoots missiles. Maybe even fitting a remote rep, who knows? The point is that its role is being changed from "doofy looking AC-130" to "ground support aircraft" like it's supposed to be.
And while it's doing that ground support it's not flying at max speed, and a vigilant AV troop has an opportunity to do damage. Thus avoiding swarms becomes about situational awareness and reflexes, not holding the joystick forward and slightly to the left.

I believe that these three things (one of which CCP has all but stated is coming) are the best way to get the gameplay to where we want.

Just increase swarm speed, and introduce a chaff or equivalent anti-swarm dropship tool. "Chaff" should have one use, and a marginal "recharge" time. This would make it effective against a lone swarm user, but would mean dropship is vulnerable to multiple AV/swarm users trying to take it down.

As it stands now, a competent dropship pilot is invincible. Unless of course there is at least one good Forge gun user.

Having just played the same game against a good dropship pilot, I agree with this.

Faster direct line swarms so the pilot can dodge around buildings to destroy the swarms, and as a module that needs recharging to distract the swarms that aren't avoidable.

Watch your swarm buffs- dropships may be a problem, but LAVs need to stand a chance.

Watch your swarm buffs- dropships may be a problem, but LAVs need to stand a chance.

I just want to ask has anyone who is commenting on this ever flown a drop ship. It is nowhere near easy to do and it takes a lot of practice to be good enough to dodge swarms. Right now we are probably dealing with good pilots which makes them almost invincible. But if you compare this to real life in a sense. Not to try and start something Because yes I know this is a video game. If you take in to consideration that a militia swarm is like the equivalent of a basic RPG or a Gustav. With this understanding it is understandable why capable pilots are able to get away from them. I think that a good balance to this problem would be to increase the speed as well as the damage of the swarms as you either level the skill or make it into the upper tier swarms.

Basically making it that if you want to take down a good pilot or at least one of good measure then you are going to need something a little bit more reliable just like the pilots are a little bit more reliable at keeping himself and his ship alive.

I am not hating on the ships or the swarms but, I think this would be a good balance.

Watch your swarm buffs- dropships may be a problem, but LAVs need to stand a chance.

Btw: a question to any current dropship pilots-

Are you using the new modules that increase the flight speed?

The problem isn't just the swarms, it's the entire design of the dropship.

We're trying to have our cake and eat it too with the current design of the dropship. There are four primary factors which contribute to the dropship's balance current balance:

(1) How survivable is it (decreases risk)
(2) How much damage can it do? (increases reward)
(3) How much does it cost (increases risk)
(4) How much other utility does it have (increases reward)

There is no way to balance the dropship so that it is both survivable and it has good damage capabilities. Why is that?

In order to keep risk/reward within acceptable parameters, if you make the Dropship more tanky, you must make it cost more ISK. No matter what, a Dropship will always have the utility of troop transport. If it is tanky, and passably maneuverable, then it must cost more. Otherwise, everyone would always have a dropship: there would be no reason not to have one. It's the same kind of logic that goes into the LAV "spam" produced by free LAV BPO's. The less it costs, the more "why not" mentality.

Meanwhile, the more weapons capacity you give a dropship, the more potential reward. Some risk or another must offset this, so either you have to decrease health or increase price in order to achieve some sort of balance.



Right now, we have a bit of a problem. Swarm Launchers being unable to hit dropships effectively boosts the HP of dropships for the time being. Yes, they are forced to fly in a circular pattern, but it seems that the weapons are still effective while flying in this pattern, at least on smaller maps. This situation is actually great, because it shows exactly what's wrong with the current dropship design.


Dropships have good weapons, good tank, and are at a price which is profitable granted those two factors.


The problem with dropships is that their current balance insists on them doing all the air things at once. http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/28487752.jpg

Dropships right now are troop transports and weapons platforms at the same time. Meanwhile they're priced like they're troop transports without weapons capabilities.

If the swarm launcher is fixed in any way, the dropship becomes obsolete. Why? Because suddenly it just costs too damn much for how risky it is to fly one of the things onto the map. The weapons on a dropship aren't good enough to justify a 100k+ ISK cost that you're almost guaranteed to lose to any idiot and his swarm launcher.

If the EHP is left as is on the dropshiop, the dropship is overpowered. Why? Because it has the potential to do a lot of weapons damage for very small risk, since killing the things is so damn hard.


The core of the issue is that CCP hasn't made a decision. Is the dropship a troop transport, or is it a weapons platform?

If it is a weapons platform, it needs to be cheap, be relatively easy to kill (though not TOO easy, mind), and it needs to be able to do quite a bit of damage during the time that it's alive. Being cheap and fragile is essential. This way the risk isn't much, the reward is potentially high, but it requires a skilled pilot in order to maximize the reward you can get out of the dropship since it can be killed easily.

If it is an actual troop transport, it needs to be tanky, about the same price point that it is now, and it needs to have limited weapons capability.


CCP keeps on trying to combine weapons and tank in the same place. You'll never be able to balance that, especially IN THE AIR, which is worse than on the ground. The weapons make the reward too high compared to the risk, which is relatively low. This was the previous problem with tanks- they had great weapons and were really quite hard to kill. It didn't matter what the price point was, because they simply never died.