leave the FG alone! only heavies can use it, it get's expensive, hard to fit at times, low amount of ammo, and no nano hives to insta replenish like other people can.

the FG is not the problem, it's the lack of powerful tanks and counters.

we already have a limited range, compared to rail tanks that can hit anywhere on a map. leave it alone!

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

CCP, we're still here

And we're all very *$(%ed
and very broke.

First wave of respecs is landing on Monday, I already have my build all mapped out and waiting to go ^_^

**** dropships

CCP, we're still here

And we're all very *$(%ed
and very broke.

I saw this thread before. Another guy complains that it's unfair that his shiny toy can be wiped out in 4-5 hits from a single hit weapon with a long refire delay, demand to lead a highly mobile target, having limited ammo, small clip, having to give up a primary anti-infantry weapon and all of that is against a highly mobile target that can make it to the other side of the map in the time it takes the FG to fire 2-3 times back to back. It's not fair and unbalanced? REALLY?

I would agree that dropships currently lack a role. No one takes them seriously as a personnel transport vehicle cuz they are not just that good at it. Their fire capacity is garbage too and if it were any better they would be OP against infantry. I do believe that dropship mechanics need to be redesigned and they have to have some interesting objectives given to them. I disagree that we need to Nerf FG to make DS pilots feel safe and cozy and thus encourage their lazyness.

I saw this thread before. Another guy complains that it's unfair that his shiny toy can be wiped out in 4-5 hits from a single hit weapon with a long refire delay, demand to lead a highly mobile target, having limited ammo, small clip, having to give up a primary anti-infantry weapon and all of that is against a highly mobile target that can make it to the other side of the map in the time it takes the FG to fire 2-3 times back to back. It's not fair and unbalanced? REALLY?

I would agree that dropships currently lack a role. No one takes them seriously as a personnel transport vehicle cuz they are not just that good at it. Their fire capacity is garbage too and if it were any better they would be OP against infantry. I do believe that dropship mechanics need to be redesigned and they have to have some interesting objectives given to them. I disagree that we need to Nerf FG to make DS pilots feel safe and cozy and thus encourage their lazyness.

I saw this thread before. Another guy complains that it's unfair that his shiny toy can be wiped out in 4-5 hits from a single hit weapon with a long refire delay, demand to lead a highly mobile target, having limited ammo, small clip, having to give up a primary anti-infantry weapon and all of that is against a highly mobile target that can make it to the other side of the map in the time it takes the FG to fire 2-3 times back to back. It's not fair and unbalanced? REALLY?

I would agree that dropships currently lack a role. No one takes them seriously as a personnel transport vehicle cuz they are not just that good at it. Their fire capacity is garbage too and if it were any better they would be OP against infantry. I do believe that dropship mechanics need to be redesigned and they have to have some interesting objectives given to them. I disagree that we need to Nerf FG to make DS pilots feel safe and cozy and thus encourage their lazyness.

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.

I saw this thread before. Another guy complains that it's unfair that his shiny toy can be wiped out in 4-5 hits from a single hit weapon with a long refire delay, demand to lead a highly mobile target, having limited ammo, small clip, having to give up a primary anti-infantry weapon and all of that is against a highly mobile target that can make it to the other side of the map in the time it takes the FG to fire 2-3 times back to back. It's not fair and unbalanced? REALLY?

I would agree that dropships currently lack a role. No one takes them seriously as a personnel transport vehicle cuz they are not just that good at it. Their fire capacity is garbage too and if it were any better they would be OP against infantry. I do believe that dropship mechanics need to be redesigned and they have to have some interesting objectives given to them. I disagree that we need to Nerf FG to make DS pilots feel safe and cozy and thus encourage their lazyness.

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.

Here's some numbers, everyone likes numbers, helps back up a point.

Light clarity ward shield booster
Heals 127hp per pulse
Has 5 pulses
Pulses have a 1 second interval.

In other words it heals 635hp over 5 seconds, or about a quarter of the health of what a average shield dropship should have.

Having timed it it takes about 2 seconds after being selected to activate.

Now then, to the enemy.

Lets go with an standard and an assault forge gun

First the standard(adv variant to keep things fair)
It does 1452 damage per shot
Has a charge up time of 3.5 seconds
Has a clip size of four

Straightaway you'll see that 1 shot of a forge gun will take away over half the health of our bare average shield tank dropship, and had done just under 3 times the damage that a shield repper can repair. With its clip size and charge up time it can deal a total of 5808 damage in 14 seconds.

In other words 2 shots will be enough to kill our average tanked dropship.

Now for the assault forge gun (which starts at the advanced variant)
It has a direct damage of 1524.6hp
Has a charge up time of 2.5 seconds
And has a clip size of four

Notice how this thing has both a higher base damage and charge up time? Absolutely wonderful don't you think?
In 5 seconds it has done 3049.2 damage
In ten seconds it had done 6098.4 damage

So the assault forge gun can in the same time span that the best light shield repper on the market can run do over 6 times the damage it can heal. Not to mention that by the time the module actually activates the second shot will be less than half a second away from hitting you.

Now admittedly these numbers don't take resistance into account but I'm not 100% sure on how they work, so we'll do without.

It also doesn't take into account forge gun skills or damage mods. Forge gun skills can reduce the charge up time by 25% and can increase the damage per shot by 15%.

Things are massively in favor of the forge gunner.

Cant we have a threat indicator? a red box which will go around railgun installations, people armed with AV weapons and tanks so we can better know where to move to be out of the way.

leave the FG alone! only heavies can use it, it get's expensive, hard to fit at times, low amount of ammo, and no nano hives to insta replenish like other people can.

the FG is not the problem, it's the lack of powerful tanks and counters.

we already have a limited range, compared to rail tanks that can hit anywhere on a map. leave it alone!

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.

I saw a bunch of ppl accusing me of not knowing what I am talking about because I don't fly DS. True, I don't fly DS. But I did used to play a little with FG in chromosome. What I was used to seeing is a DS circling around the map over my head OVER and OVER and OVER again after having already been hit by a couple of bolts from my FG without any attempt to run for cover and let shields rep up, so basically until eventually the DS shot down, which was inevitable because of the dumb tactics DS pilots typically use of flying in circles and hoping that the bad FGunner would not hit them again like he did last time the DS flew over.

From where I sit it seems that what all of you guys want is a penalty free game style where you can continue thoughlessly flying in circles around the map without any countermeasure by the infantry.

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.

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.

Any advice for a would-be pilot gentlemen?