Advanced Drones - noel-wolfisheim/notes GitHub Wiki

Advanced Drone Skills

If you are Gallente you'll want to start thinking about advancing your drones skills right after getting into cruisers. You'll want at least:

  • Drones IV
    
  • Scout Drone Operation III
    
  • Combat Drone Operation III
    
  • Drone Durability II
    
  • Drone Navigation III 
    

Drones 5 takes awhile to train and you may want to train learning skills and other fitting skills before reaching it. You will need to train it before getting into battle cruisers or battleships and I would recommend it for cruiser pilots.

Once you get Drones 5 completed you'll want to get the following skills if you are Gallente:

  • Drone Durability III
    
  • Drone Interfacing III
    
  • Drone Navigation IV
    
  • Drone Sharpshooting IV
    
  • Heavy Drone Operation III
    
  • Repair Drone Operation III
    
  • Scout Drone Operation IV
    
  • Combat Drone Operation IV 
    

After reaching this you'll be able to control 5 pretty mean medium drones or 2 heavy drones in a Thorax cruiser.

Other races besides Gallente may choose to approach this a little differently as drones are more of a supplement and training time can be better spent elsewhere (you'll need to fly battlecruisers or battleships to have decent drone bays). However, if you chose to utilize drones, you must get Drones V ASAP. That is because of the Drone Interfacing skill, which has Drones V as a prereq and raises drone damage by 20% per level. Here's some handy math:

4 drones (Drones IV) x 100% damage = 400%; 5 drones (Drones V) x 160% damage (DI III) = 800%

Drones V and DI III take about a week to train combined from Drones IV, which means you can double your drone DPS in 7 days. Once you get past the really vital fitting and weapon skills that you train just to get out of the newbie frigates, this is the most bang for the buck skill combination in the game.

Scout Drone Operation increases drone range by 5 km/level, so training that to IV (1.5 days or so) effectively doubles it. In addition, the Electronics Warfare Drone Interfacing skill also raises drone range by 3 km/level. It has Drones V and Electronics Warfare IV as a prerequisite, but if you've been going on fleet actions as a newbie tackler you should already have EW IV anyway. If you do, another 12 hours of training to get the skill to III gives you another 9 km.

After this I would say train the skills as you see fit for your play style. A Dominix using the above skills can easy kill most NPC battleships with drones alone. There are specialization skills that can be trained to use Tech 2 drones, but you should know what the hell you are doing before approaching those.