Drone Types and Damage Explained

One thing I never took advantage of in EVE was the overall power of drones. It's easy to continue leveling your guns, and simply ignore the drones due to long training times, but as you progress you find yourself needing them more and more. In this article I'll go over the different types of drones, their damage types, and their strengths and weaknesses.

NOTE: Since Kronos, the base damage has been raised, but the stats are mostly the same.
Types of Drones

Starting out it is good to know what each drone's role is, and knowing how to utilize the power they offer.

Light Scout Drones are your "bread n' butter" offering easy long-ranged damage, while being able to track even the fastest of ships. These are absolutely great for just about everything, but provide the smallest amount of DPS out of all the drones.

Medium Scout Drones are the cruisers of drones, offering more DPS with slower travel times, and a mid-ranged tank. These are great when used with drone-based ships and fighting against cruisers and combined gun/drone DPS against battleships. When ratting, these are some of the best for almost any NPC aside from frigates.

Heavy Combat Drones are used against slow ships offering large amounts of DPS. These drones are probably the most underused drones, but some of the most powerful drones with a lot of HP. In hindsight they are also the slowest drones, taking a lot of time to reach targets far away. These are the ones you want to use if they don't have to leave anytime soon.

Sentry Drones are the most addictive drones; as soon as you can use T2 sentries, you will never want to use anything else as they offer volley damage comparative to turret volleys. While these drones are not exactly "tanky", and they don't move at all, they can be deadly when used by a seasoned pilot. These are great for absolutely everything, and extremely beneficial when running missions.

Combat Utility Drones consist of Stasis Webifier drones (SW), and Energy Vampire (EV) drones. While the EV drones are not "Vampires" and actually neutralizing drones, they still prove to be useful. The SW drones are great drones to have in a drone-based cruiser or battleship, as they can slow down anything to make it much easier to hit. Each size of these drones is given in the name of the drone. 300 is "small/light size", 600 is "medium/cruiser size", and 900 "large/heavy size". Each size does a bit more of it's role as the size goes up as you'll see later on.

Electronic Warfare Drones are the drones offering the other great utilities you would want in a drone. These include Track Disruption (TD), Target Painter (TP), Sensor Dampener (SD), and ECM (EC). Out of all of these, the EC is probably the most used especially in logistic ships. Unfortunately the ECM is not a combined use, each drone basically "rolls" to see if the ECM works individually. While more drones allow more rolls, the actual chance is not increased without using a larger drone.

Logistic Drones are a great way to offer logistics without an actual logistics ship, or offer even more reps when using a logi. Since Rubicon 1.3 you can now get drones for all types of HP, shield, armor, hull. Like all other drones, they offer more power as the size goes up, and the speed goes down respectively.

Mining Drones offer you the ability to mine without having to have an actual mining ship. While they are not very useful with non-mining ships, they do allow mining ships to fill their hold quicker, increasing the ISK/hour rate. While mining barges have small drone bays only allowing a few small drones, these are usually not recommended unless you have dedicated DPS to take care of rats.

Salvage Drones give you the ability to salvage wrecks without the use of a salvager taking up a high slot. Not only can they salvage, they can salvage as far as your drone control range. Paired with a mobile tractor unit, clearing a mission site is extremely easy when running solo.

Drone Numbers

Well, now that we have their use out of the way, it's time to finally put those numbers in front of you. Now you can see exactly how each combat and combat utility drone differs from types, and sizes.

Keep in mind that navy offers higher tracking, hp, and speed, while augmented offers higher DPS. Integrated and Augmented also offer multiple damage type DPS. As you can see there is a obvious damage bonus for T2, but is also on the high-end for tracking, optimal range, and falloff. Integrated is a decent replacement if you cannot use T2. You may wonder why I didn't recommend 'augmented', and if you look at the price, you will understand.

While the augmented do offer higher DPS, they do tend to cost quite a bit more, around 10m-25m each. Generally T2 is what to aim for, integrated while you train for T2, and faction and/or augmented for things like missions or mining where your chance of losing them is quite low. Aside from that, you can now see the subtle differences between each drone, and what may be your best drone for the job you will have for it later. Enjoy, and fly safe. o/