Looking to setup a new 6box, thoughts/suggestions?

The Drake wasn't targetted directly by the 4th December patch but was affected by the HM nerf to flight time/range, damage and explosion radius...

http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp

Patch notes for EVE Online: Retribution 1.0
Released on Tuesday, December 4, 2012

<snip>

Heavy missile changes:

Base flight time reduced by 35% (to 6.5 seconds) for tech1 variants
Base velocity increased by 14.6% (to 4300m/s)
Damage has been decreased by 10% (rounded to closest digit)
Explosion radius increased by 12%

Back in early 2012, they were talking about removing some of the tanking ability of the Drake but I believe those plans were dropped and just the HM nerf applied.
You never know, they may revisit the Drake when they split the BC skill into the 4 racial BC skills, but I can't see any talk of it, yet.

That's what I was thinking about then. I think they're also planning to "expand" the battle-cruiser branch into more ships, or adding to them. Otherwise there is no point to beaking it up like that into racial pieces. I don't see the point in breaking it up into separate racials otherwise since right now one of the issues for new players is "catching up" to older players in terms of ships that they can fly. Having to wait months to fly anything decently pisses a lot of people off and they quit since EvE doesn't realistically start until 30days of training pretty much.

Some people will say noobs can start from day one doing things but it isn't realistic. I'm curious if they plan to help noobs out at all anymore as they stopped doing stuff like that.

And lo... the Drake took another crit to the head with the nerf bat in yesterday's patch

http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp

The bat hit hard and appears to have knocked one of my missile launchers off - not even Sansha were able to do that!

HM nerf in December, direct nerf in February - if they don't want people to fly the Drake, why not just delete the fucking hull!