I don’t hate on the Heavy Guard Drone. To me, it is balanced, since it’s spread is high enough and the projectile speed low enough that you can dodge it going full-speed in a ceptor, fighter, or some frigs. I hate on the sentry drone because it is OP. After the buff that reduced its spread, increased its damage, and increased its projectile speed, it has become super OP (also the J10 implant has bugged it to make it deal twice as much damage as it should).
The Heavy Guard Drone is useful, this post is not to say it isn’t. I’m just sick of seeing players use the double-drone, speed tacklers in a completely pointless way. If you actually use it in a non-hit’n’run way (like you stated above: decloaking behind a frigate, dropping both drones, and doing all the damage you can to it), the build can actually get you high scores against Aces and half-decent teams (not against pros). Compared to the drop’n’run tactic, which will only sometimes work against Aces.
To be fair my comment was more to the common “Heavy Guard Drones are useless” comments I have seen in this thread… I agree it’s not as OPed as the Sentry Drone, though, as that thing can 2-4 shot Fed inties pretty easily.
Actually the tactic I mentioned works pretty well against everybody, even if not in Frigates. The key is for a player to be in close proximity to both drones and distracted by someone else… so in a team game, those things will still be effective with team work… maybe too effective, especially since the Sentry has the current issues you mentioned.
I did run into somebody who exclusively used the double-drone, hide, and run tactic the several matches in a row and to be honest it made me flying an inty almost pointless since a few splash shots from a few missiles, coil mortars, etc and 2-3 Sentry Drone shots later I would be melted no matter how “pro” my flying was (not very) or how much HP I restored. Switching to any other ship solved that problem pretty quickly, though. 