Eve Online: Drone Boats

Lately I've been focusing on my drone skills more than anything else. With the updates in Odyssey both the Dominix and Navy Issue Vexor have become forces not to be taken lightly. The Dominix got rid of it's turret damage bonuses and added drone optimal range and tracking bonuses. The Navy issue Vexor can now field a full flight of heavy drones or sentry drones in space.

I've been using the Dominix to do site running and belt ratting for now, I'm not willing to take it into PvP until I can afford to lose it, so instead I've been using the standard Vexor and the Algos for my PvP ships. I brought the Vexor and Algos blueprints out with me and have 5 of each currently waiting for the next one to be blown up. At this point I'm at about 400 DPS with just my drones in my Dominix, 250 DPS with just my drones in my Vexor, and about 150 DPS with my drones in my Algos. Add in an extra hundred or two with my turrets and I'm at 600, 450, and 300 DPS respectively. Not amazing DPS but enough to be able to add value to a fight.

I figure that once my drone skills are where I want them they'll add value to all my ships that I fly. If you're thinking about becoming a drone pilot there is no reason to not immediately train drones to 5 and drone interfacing to 4. There are a dozen other skills you need too to boost as well to 4 or 5 but these two skills are crucial if you want to get your money and damage worth out of your drones. The price difference from Tech 1 Drones to Tech 2 Drones is huge. You'll go from 20-30k for tech 1 drones to 500,000 ISK to 2 million ISK per drone for the Tech 2 version depending on where you are shopping. Leaving your drones behind when you're running sites or having them blown up hurts your wallet much more.

Someday I'd like to own and fly a carrier so my drone skills will come in handy then, but that's many many months away. I'm not even going to worry about flying capital ships until I've got a steady income and can afford to lose one if it gets blown up. I typically have between 400-800 million ISK in my wallet and I'd prefer to have billions of ISK readily available before I try to fly capital ships.

Right now I like my drone boats and my covert ops ships. I've been debating on training to fly the Force Recon Cruiser next. I've got time until I need to make that decision though since I still have about 15 days left till I have cruisers five trained. Once cruisers is trained to five I plan to fully evaluate and weigh the pros and cons of all the tech 2 cruisers. I'll separate this topic into another thread though.