depends on level.

a couple more things
rank, energy, attack and rate you plan to rank up.

basically what you are doing with drannik is reducing the energy needed to kill a NPC, if you can kill it in the min shot w/o drannik it is useless, if you can autorank without drannik, you can put more energy into missions/base donations instead of NPCs but as far as NPCs it is useless.

should have been clearer. meant the attack at which drannik is useless depends on your level as the attack required to kill in min hits its somewhat dependant on that.
somewhere around 40x rank i think and you should be able to min hit

Being Drannik myself I can say that it all depends on your own ship. Once you can reach 40x rank in buffed npc attack either as Konqul or any other race then you should change race. Your energy needs to be atleast 11x your rank as a minimum though.

Personally I think Im in for the long haul with drannik. Currently Im rank 316 at the rate Im ranking its much easier to be drannik than not.

At 1099 I can say that Drannik is unneeded - I have 30k attack unbuffed and one-shot chargers and dark runners. Honestly I'd say that when you hit cap on flamehawks you're close to not getting help from Drannik. If you can do 1000 per shot or close to it, you'll be taking out most other npc's pretty quick. Usually you can get a 4:1 ratio on xp if you're hitting NPC's with a neuro on, provided you're close to the damage caps.

Caps on Chargers and Dark Runners is determined by level, you won't be able to one-shot them 'til about 1000.

I was super excited to become drannik and when I finally became that race I stayed for 1 day. Found out that my attack/def wasn't where it needed to be to do tons of npcing as I was burning tms to repair and I didn't have the artifact score to keep up with nanos, and shield restorers.

I switched back to inergon? perhaps until I finished talth and have been there ever since. Now that my ship is stronger/arti more "abundant" I can autolevel whenever I want without a neural.

I'd skip going that route and stick with konqul which is a total attack bonus, not just drannik's npc bonus or inergon/human for taltherian mission completion.

Drannik is nice if you want to just be NPC'ing, but I find the konqul+fixer route to be a lot better for if you want a better rounded combat ship, but that's just cause I find doing one thing boring Not to mention you'll need to be halced all the time because a lot of people in our range want Drannik kills