Buffs are pretty easy kills. It feels like I shoot them down at a rate of 20:1. Even the venerable 999 falls to my guns more often than not. I see no need to perk Lancs in general. I do, however, see the validity in charging a perk for drones for the reasons mentioned previously. They should have SOME value to the pilot. Perhaps, if drones are perked, there would be a provision for more drones beyond the standard two but on a sliding scale.
Example: 1st drone = one perk, 2nd drone = two perks, 3rd drone = three and so on.
I don't think it would be a travesty to give the bomber guys up to four drones provided there is a cost.
A competent gunner with 5 bombers worth of guns at his disposal would be pretty terrifying, even if they were Lancs. I would not want 999 to have this, ever.
Drones costing perks, the problem I see is fine-tuning the cost of them. Too low, who cares? Too high, people stop using them and buff drivers get discouraged, which from what I've seen on the forums and ingame is an omnipresent concern.
I am suggesting that bombers have been given any number of unrealistic advantages such, F3, multiple planes for a single player, slaving of all defensive guns together. I am suggesting that when it can be demonstrated that such advantages allow the formation to have k/ds in the neighborhood of 1:1 while carrying tens of thousands of bombs then it has gone too far, and something has gotta give. If there were any fighter-bombers that could carry a bomb load into the tens of thousands of pounds while simultaneously maintaining a k/d around 1, the cries to perk that plane would be deafening. This is exactly what heavy buff formations are capable of, as the statistics for every single tour demonstrate. But for some reason there is a great deal of cognitive dissonance from players regarding bombers and their effectiveness in this game.
Because in spite of all of those advantages, that K/D, and everything you mentioned there, bombers are not an unstoppable force that unreasonably affects gameplay.
As far as that K/D, fighters are used vastly differently than bombers. Fighters are upped into the vulch, fighters are thrown into the horde by people who don't care about dying. The vast majority of the time, bombers fly around on their own, at alt, pretty much relying on people to be too low to come after them. When they are attacked, it's generally in a situation where they're at their best possible capability defensively. That skews their numbers.
I'm just not seeing anywhere other than on paper, looking at their capabilities mathematically, that bombers are being used so much and so effectively that they're bad for gameplay.
Wiley.
