Not constructive in any way and useless^^^^^^^^^^

Anyways

The cost of the DS were supposed to have been cut in half, still not enough of a difference to make a profit.

CCP address this before the extinction of the DS. Just lower the price of DS and or mods.

While I definitely feel for my fellow pilots, this increase in range thing is going to be a massive blessing to us, and the game as a whole.

So long as forge guns have their optimal range tweaked back just a little, so falloff kicks in a little sooner, we can actually use distance more effectively against them, without completely nulifying their usefulness. I feel like that will create a better dynamic between AV on the ground and pilots in the sky, and will encourage forge gunners to try and get the jump on lower flying ships, instead of just taking a shot no matter where they are.

There's a concept called "Window of vulnerability." This is how long you allow yourself to be exposed to effective enemy fire. You don't have to stay away the ENTIRE match, but you do want to minimize the amount of time the enemy can try to kill you. A good dropship pilot will only be exposed for seconds at a time, meaning only a GOOD AV player will have time to spot, aim, then fire on them.

This is a skillset that you won't find on your skill tree. Master it an you'll find that dropships are actually pretty tough to shoot down if they are in the hands of a good pilot. This is also the reason why you occasionally hear about dropships being TOO hard to kill.

Serimos, while I agree that they cost too much I (and other dropship pilots I know) have found a few fits that allow them to put out quite a bit of damage. Right now I'm testing out a build using an Incubus, three prototype damage mods and an afterburner. It may be light on defense but it packs a punch. The only problem I have with it is that the Gallente dropships crosshairs are crazy hard to hold on target so my accuracy is terrible using anything but a blaster. If you want to talk shop some send me a mail in game and I'll gladly chat. I'm always happy to talk to another pilot.

im paying 1.4mill isk for 1 assault dropship and 950k isk for 1 logi dropship. so price cut in half is a load of ****

^ DAU/2 Assault Forge Gun, clip size 4 shots, with FG Operation skill level 5 it charges shots in under 2 seconds, and with a complex damage modifier and level 3-4 proficiency you're looking at something like 1600 damage per shot. That's 6400 damage in less than 8 seconds, less if you miss one of those shots, but if you run FG full time you have to learn how to lead shots in order to hit infantry and Dropships are a much bigger target than infantry, meaning practice in leading shots nets you all 4 hits.

This is why I argue that Dropships need a buff.

Dropship threads are almost always the most civil and constructive threads on these forums

If the Assault FG took down HAVs as quickly and easily as they did Dropships, I'd have to agree on the RoF thing. But when you go up against a skilled tanker in a well-fitted HAV and decent infantry support, the RoF on the AFG only helps provide area denial and it's reasonably difficult to take them down, not to mention doing it alone. It's usually the prototype AV grenades + Nanohives, or general AV squads including AFG that are the bane of tankers. Considering the costs versus (lack of) rewards of skilling into and piloting dropships, I think they should have similar survivability to HAVs. In terms of what amount of raw damage they can eat.

Just curious, but would DS pilots object to paying more ISK on Dropships if they were as tough as tanks?

Learn to fly better.

actually forge is for both shield and armor.

And is way too effective overall. High damage to both shields and armour, absolutely zero warning to the target, minuscule travel time compared to other forms of AV, and a huge range, oh and it can be used as an anti infantry weapon too.

Dude..... its a dropship. It drops people off. Use it to do what it was meant to. Just because you cant go all crazy and get scores like 20 and 0 in it doesn't mean its broken, it means that theres another vehicle for another time that will fulfill that role. Heavy assault ships will be a thing eventually, but until then you'll have to get used to your flying LAV dying.

Kind of a cavalier response from someone who desired to be and was delegated to be a player's representative.

Couldnt you just donate to the pilot's corp and they pay him? Or he can put an alt in you corp and you pay the alt, that a little more work though.

Very skilled and experienced pilot here:

In my opinion the biggest problem is that a completely decked out dropship(assualt logistics or standard) with all the modules and skills seems to be balanced ONLY when flown against militia/standard AV. Against AV at this level you will be denied your effectiveness around them yet still have an opportunity to do your job(troop transport, gunship, scout) for a few seconds before having to retreat. However, against proto AV you immediately have to retreat or your ship quickly becomes a burning wreck. Dropships NEED a big buff to shields/armor.

This is because the skills investment and modules effectiveness scales up far better than vehicles.

Compare militia AV to militia ships (lol av one shots anything)

From there on up the disparity only gets WORSE. AV need 10x less SP and 100x less ISK to effectively counter any vehicle that cost 10x more sp and 1000x more isk. So, wtf?

Hi guys, let me provide you guys with provide some feedback on this topic.

1. We are looking at doing re-balancing of our AV weapons. One of the topics, which also seems to be showing through on this thread is to keep a decently long enough range on the forge gun, but also look at the damage decay variable over time on it, optimal ranges, etc. Because agreed, that it is a very potent anti-vehicle weapon and it's not exactly something that is easily countered with countermeasures (see next point). We also don't want the forge gun to be nerfed to the point of feeling ineffective, so a direct reduction of damage output across the board is not going to be the simple answer there.

2. We are also want to get countermeasures in soon, as well as a lock-on warning system for players piloting vehicles that have been locked on to. The lock-on indication will be a graduated indicator so that you will have a decent idea of how imminent your time to impact is and can choose to act accordingly. Furthermore, we're also working on porting lock-on to a certain subset of turrets. This will come in helpful for dropship pilots who are engaged in dogfights, or supporting assaults against ground units.

3. As one of our immediate tasks, we want to look at how we can provide dropship pilots with more chances to earn WP. We have lots of ideas in mind, however we need to tread carefully on this one so that we're not opening up too many opportunities for exploit. Some of the ideas that are bouncing around are providing WP for players spawned into your craft, WP for use of active scanners (possibly more specialized ones), and finding a way to re-introduce WP for remote repairs without exploit.

4. We will be reducing the ISK cost of dropships so that players can get into them more easily, while also looking at the overall skill cost of this class of vehicle.

5. Lastly, we're aware of turret issues that have come up. Many of the improvements needed will require code support to fix lingering bugs as well as further flesh out existing systems. We are currently working on this as our next set of code fixes.

Thank you for the response CCP Blam, it's very relieving to know you've seen our feedback and are seriously considering at least some of it.

To the rest of you, please keep up the constructive discussion, this is a good thread for us pilots, lets keep it going in that direction ^_^

So, we can expect this to be added in 2015, right?

If you make the main focus of AV weapons the destruction of vehicles you will never get the balance right. Instead the focus needs to be on suppressing the function of the vehicle and area of denial. In the case of tanks or LAV's this of course means destruction because they currently serve an offensive role.

The dropship however does not serve an offensive role so the destruction of the dropship is of less importance than denying them the ability to deposit additional forces in a certain area. To this end here are some ideas I've had. This is just brainstorming though, I'm not saying whether these are good or bad.

1. Substantial increase to the DS's ability to resistance damage. This could be accomplished by either increasing the base resistance or introducing resistance modules exclusive to aerial vehicles that offer a substantial increase in effectiveness over modules for ground vehicles or possibly a much, much shorter cool down period, etc.... The second option is probably the best since it requires skill and sound judgement on the part of the pilot to be effective instead of simply making them tougher across the board.

2. Remove all turrets from the DS and replace them with some sort of exclusive weapon that is only effective against other vehicles, possibly one similar to a swarm launcher but with a more limited ability to home in on the target and reduced damage or something along those lines. Honestly the DS has no need for anti-infantry weapons. It's too hard to hit anything with rails unless you are hovering over a tank in which case an exclusive AV weapon would also work. Blasters have too limited of a range and there's no way to make missile turrets work without breaking them again.

3. Bring back the old AB.

4. Maybe give DS an exclusive module that projects a shield around the ship that blocks almost all incoming damage but prevents anyone from jumping out giving the ship time to return to safety while preventing it from actually doing anything which as long as the DS has limited offensive capabilities

OP said that his DS has 4260 hp shield, not sure about how much extra armor that thing has, probably 800 at least or so. Looks like it will take assault FG about 10 seconds of continuous fire on the drop ship to bring it down. I am not gonna comment here whether assault FG is OP relative to the base version - this belongs in the FG thread. What you guys seem to agree is that AFG poses more threat to you than any other weapon. If we run you calculation and apply it to the ship OP has described, we will see about 10 sec of continued fire are required to bring the ship down. So that's 10 sec of perfectly aimed lead and placed shots in an FPS game on a very mobile target. I don't fly DS but in my mind this is not OP at all.

WAAAAAAAAAA I am the BEST pilot in dust. I can crash and burn any ship just by playing bumper cars. The ships fly perfect now. Just have to use air brakes. They do need to add landing gear.

yo the booster works over 20 seconds not over 5 seconds. shield booster every 4 seconds while armor reps 3times over 3 seconds(one per second) with one second breaks between cycles/pulse so armor gets 3x posted repair per pulse while shields get 1.

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE FORGE GUN! If anything I say give dropship pilots an HP BUFF and maybe some resistances to DMG, along with a number of other survivability features (i.e. lock-on warning for all weapons not just swarms). BUT PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT TURN THE DROPSHIP INTO THE NEXT LOGI LAV, next thing you know people will just be crushing players with dropships and we will have nothing to counter it because AV has been NERFED across the board. If you're going to "re-balance" the dropship then do so according to the current AV, do not buff one thing and nerf everything else.

Please CCP, from a Veteran Forge Gunner.....................don't touch my baby Its all we heavies have left since you show us no love anywhere else in this game.

- Wee Baby

While I'm annoyed that the only response to buffing dropships CCP has given us is "soon" but that's another issue.

I think dropships would be close to, if not just right, with a countermeasures system for BOTH the SL and FG. R1 and R2 are unbound to anything on dropships, so that would be a perfect place to bind them. R1 shoots a flare out that draws off swarms, with perhaps a 6-10 sec cooldown, and R2 does... something to stop FG. Perhaps a field that last 5 sec with a 15-25 sec cooldown that nullifies a FG hit. The idea is not to give the dropship permanent invulnerability to AV, but to give us a chance to escape before were shot down.

An hp buff and/or a pg buff would also do wonders for us, but my experience has been being hit from I don't know where from, and being unable to do anything about AV, save fly at the flight ceiling and wait the match out. Tanks don't have countermeasures, but they aren't as exposed as dropships are, and even if they were, at least they can take the hits.

imo the active fuel injector needs some buff, not to what it used to be way overpowered, but some more than what it is, the first cycle should give that old boost back just not for as long, just for 1/2 a second so we can dodge the next FG hit

i cant decide if active shield hardener or fuel injector on my incubus, lately i've been using shield hardener because an active fuel injector on a gallente DS seems to be trying to polish a turd

Even today, real life aircraft all have countermeasures (flares, etc.) to counter incoming missiles, and while forge guns are a tricky beast with no real logical way to counter them, a dropship shouldn't rely on speed to escape AV, that's more of what fighters do, because they are more maneuverable and able to outfly the missiles. The fighter pilots of today are trained in various maneuvers to evade incoming missiles, using their mobility to "outsmart" the missile. Even then, some fighters do come equipped with actual countermeasures.

As a dropship, we fill the niche akin to the Huey, providing transportation across infantry-unfriendly terrain to deliver them to the target location. The side gunners are there to provide some sort of protection when dropping troops into a hostile LZ. The Huey is equipped with multiple countermeasures to incoming missiles, from jamming the missile lock, to flares, to God knows what else they've come up with. Because they can't rely on their speed and maneuverability to escape AV like the fighter pilots can. Without the countermeasures they have, they'd be shot down as soon as anyone looked at them funny.

To this end, dropships are not, nor should they be, treated like fighters, ESPECIALLY since there is talks of adding actual fighters to the game (whether this actually happens or not is, like I mentioned before, one of the things that irks me about CCP, and a different can of worms.) I'm confident that if we on Earth figured out how to counter incoming AV after having aircraft IN GENERAL for a little over a century (Flight of the Wright Brothers 1903 - 2013) then surely in the 12 THOUSAND years since the Eve Wormhole collapsed the four empires would have rediscovered technology.

Edited for omitted words.

The only problem with the Forge Gun / DS relationship is that the DS is way to big and the Forge gun has no sway.

Add sway to FG, and increase it's blast radius, while making the DS a reasonable size. If it were a helicopter, at the moment it would be a twin prop, painted orange, made of paper mache and carrying an elephant on its back.

Make a tanking dropship with loads of HP and resistance that moves slow, while making Assault ships that are fast, handle WAY better - even differently, and are small, carrying only 3 people.

All I want is CCP Blam! to say SOMETHING about vehicles, or even post an unconstructive post to tell us he is still alive, and working on what he should be doing

Any changes to vehicles will be good after this. I'm glad Blam is gone. He created Missile Tanks 2. One day we'll look back on thisand llaugh, telling noobs about the olds days when tanks were lavs and lava were unkillable.

All the people you named are not associated with dropships. You should look for the post associated with dropships and also CCP Wang has this as a topic in another forum post. Dropship Feedback

I understand that, and Yes it was created by a CPM but if you look a bit in the forums in one of the threads, that CCP Wang post, CCP will be discussing on ways to make Dust more enjoyable. I am all for a better dropship gaming experience for Dust, but so many are making a huge fuss about things with a lack of information on the work process. From what I understand is on another recent post, before you had posted earlier, there was talk of a dev blog and a few other things concerning vehicles in general. So just have patience. So far I think they have done a good job as Forge Gunners cant 1 shot you from their red zone etc. with the fall of range of the weapons etc. that is a huge improvement if you ask me, so just be patient., despite us dropship pilots who have been here since chromosome, when we use to fly egg shells.

No matter what CCP does this game will never be balanced. Just make it an all vehicle game. Foot soldiers are not needed turn into a mini EVE.

Bumping in the hopes that dropships will get love in 1.5.

Amen brother, prometheus handles like a turd and gets blown up like its a piece of paper. Just BOOM down I go.

Someone was talking about "window of opertunity" or something like that and I call BS, I tried AV to see how hard it really was to blow up dropships. Honestly it was the easiest thing ever did, I wrecked dozens and feel bad abut it because I know what it's like.

So tell me, how big is a 5 second window to an AV soldier?