Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think this change is diluting diversity amongst the defense types.

If anything consider shield passive tanks get a shield bloom while armor passive tanks get a speed nerf and reverse it for active tanking to emphasize diversity.

Other than that don't like it because it makes everything the same.

For active-tank and resist rigs, sure. But from the ubiquitous shield Cane and Drake spam, almost all of which are extender-rigged, then a penalty more meaningful than sig is needed. Mobile ships are supposed to be flimsy, and the ability to sidestep this via EHP rigs was a bad idea that resulted in very few drawbacks for shield AC boats. The proposed trade-off between EHP and speed makes a lot more sense, and should lead to a greater diversity of ships and fits.

That said, the OP's ideas do little to make active tanking more viable. The average 0.0 blobmonkey will never active tank, but there is scope for it in WHs and other small fights. Increasing the boost bonus from 7.5% to 10% would be a good start.

Guys, let's change the mechanics of active tanking. Instead of repairing hit-points, change the system to grant a window of complete invincibility (100% resistance). A window which will obviously be stacking-penalised. This brings active tanking into the fray of blobs - wherever they be blob-blobs or just one side that outnumbers the other. If all the opposing ships fire during the seconds-lasting invincible window of "lol-try-again", nothing happens to the ship. If the ship does take damage, it traditionally takes away a chunck of hitpoints. What the blob will have to do is split and co-ordinate their fire at timed segments (should be easier now that the lag issues have been improved), ensuring some of their hits make it through - this maintains the advantage of numbers while bringing in "entertaining" micro for the defenders (panic/excitement sets in as theres no way to know if that alpha will be aimed at you, and if so, when)  and rewarding group co-ordination, amongst over things. Of course, co-ordinated ultra-blobs will still annihilate this defence set-up, just like they will a buffer tank of the same caliber -in terms of shielding, larger shield modules will offer higher ratios of invincibility-to-vulnerability.

Yes, it's a big change. But it is important to change - to adapt - and with the recent flurry of similarly-shocking (in terms of uniqueness) changes, such as Captain's Quarters, upcoming ship-role redesigns etc. there's no better time to implement either the changes outlined by myself and/or other's similarly jarring ideas. The past few months have been revolutionary and proved that change is not only possible, but inevitable. So why not jump in now?

Edit: Redesigned & Condensed.

When I initially caught wind of the idea whilst on lunch at work..... I thought "that sounds like it could be fun"
But since getting home I've read the first 10 pages of the thread - by then I'd pretty much made my mind up agreeing with a lot of comments in here.

I'd love active tanking to be more viable, there is a lot of ships I'd love to put to more use but just can't due to how they work at the moment. But this isn't the way to do it, there are other ship balance changes and rig changes that would work better. The fact this proposed change would pigeonhole races into particular positions isn't a great thing.

Personally I'd like to see penalties on all active tank and resist rigs removed. This would work both from a gameplay perspective and a *realism* perspective imo. This will make them far more useful instantly. Trimarks/Extenders would remain unaffected by this - keeping the same penalty. Having more armour hp = more mass, makes sense to be slower. Having more shield hp = more sig, makes sense again.

Why would more efficient nano repair bots mean you're slower? Someone proposed having rigs like this have a grid usage penalty for armour repairers, makes sense to me. Same sort of thing with the shield rigs.

I don't post on EVE-O often, and I've posted this before on the old boards the last time rigs were on the chopping block (rig sizes), but here we are again and so I'll repeat myself again:


@ CCP:

It's time to remove rig penalties completely. This half-hearted attempt to balance shield and armor rig penalties just underscores the complete imbalance present in the system of penalties to begin with. Any rational pilot (and to be sure that's the minority of the playerbase) is going to fit rigs according to one simple guideline:

1) Maximize what my ship is good a
2) Mitigate any resulting penalty into areas that don't matter

Armor rigs are a great example of this. Armor-nano isn't a thing because armor rigs slow your ship down (and to a lesser extent, plates do as well), therefore you fail to maximze what your ship is good at (running away) and fail to mitigate the penalty. Hilariously, astronautic rigs are the mirror for armor-nano - they increase what your ship is good at (running away), at the cost of what your ship is also good at (armor tanking).

On the other side of the token, you have ships like an Abaddon with multiple 1600mm plates. Any form of armor rig is amazing here, because they massively increase what the ship is good at (armor tanking) and the penalty (-speed) is immaterial as we are already so fat and slow that we aren't going anywhere fast to begin with.


This lopsided nature of rig penalty imbalance is rampant throughout rigs. Some ships, due to the nature of their fittings, can use weapon rigs without any meaningful penalty. Some can't use them at all. Some ships can use electronic superiority rigs without any form of penalty, others cripple their tank. Some rigs have no penalty at all past opportunity cost (sup ACRs), others practically cripple ANY ship with just ONE rig (-% CPU drone rigs, el oh el).


In all of these situations, rig penalties don't provide any compelling gameplay choices. There is no way armor-nano can ever be a thing with penalties (as just one of many examples), as all the relevant rigs are at cross odds. No enterprising player can make an unorthodox fit that actually works, because the game just says "nope!". So you fit the obvious rig with the meaningless penalty, and that's all that anyone can or will do.


SO HERE IS HOW YOU FIX RIGS:

1)Remove rig penalties. They have completely failed at their purpose (providing tangible tradeoffs in ship performance), and are nothing more than meaningless legacy game-design impacting today's EVE.

2) Change rig skills to behave like Spaceship Command Skills. In other words, you can have "Armor rigging 4", but what armor rigging 4 gives you depends on the rig itself.

2.A) Change rigs to scale off their related rigging skill. Trimarks, instead of a flat +15% armor bonus, would become "+3% armor HP per level of Armor Rigging".

This does several things for EVE

First, you remove all the stupid, arbitrarily punitive rig penalties. Weird fits are suddenly much more viable, because, hey, you CAN fit a zealot with trimarks and polycarbons and get a bit more speed AND a bit more armor! You can fit electronic superiority rigs to your Rook or Scorpion and not totally screw up its tank. You can actually use drone rigs! A whole new world of unusual ship rigging options open up without penalties.

Second, rigs become much easier to balance. Are trimarks overpowered? Well **** son, just change them to 2% or 2.5% armor HP per level, and ta-da, you just changed the rig's power without changing 20 other friggen modules at the same time. There are a whole lot of really bad rigs out there, and between removing their penalties and bumping up their effectiveness, you'll see them actually get used.

Third, this shifts the balancing focus to opportunity cost and calibration points. Rigs need to have more diverse calibration points required to fit them. Trimarks and CDFEs, indisputably the two "best" rigs in the game, have the lowest calibration costs to actually fit them. This is absurd. Once rigs are decoupled from penalties, a much more aggressive rig calibration cost balancing approach can be taken. This shifts the choice of rigs, much like medslots, into "what do I really, really want". Each rig not only consumes a rigging slot, but might be consuming enough calibration that you can't easily just slap in that other rig you really want. With no penalties to arbitrarily force you into one type of rig or another, this provides a competitive balancing mechanism soley through opportunity cost.

Finally, it provides a reason to actually train rigging skills. For many pilots, rigging 1 is all you need. Shield rig penalties are meaningless, so why bother train up the rigging skill past 1 if you aren't going to use T2 rigs? Even on weapon rigging skills, with a tangible, measurable penalty to fitting, rigging SKILL V is very seldom worth the train. Those few extra cpu or grid can be saved elsewhere, or a better fit without that rig is possible anyways. By changing rigs to scale off the actual rigging skill (just like spaceship command), there becomes a very real reason to have Armor Rigging V, and those who want to employ armor rigs would be wise to train it. Of course, most of the benefit from rigs can be found in the III-IV skill range (you would only gain 2.67% additional armor going from IV to V), so this does not significantly penalize players who don't want to train these skills to V either.


TLDR

Rigging penalties are dumb and should be removed. Rig bonuses should scale off their related rigging skill, and calibration costs should be much more aggressively employed to provide for a challenging opportunity-cost based ship fitting decision.

Rig penalties are good : it's about specializing your ship, removing them, that would be turing the game more wow-ish ; but speed penalty on active armor tank is going against it's own specialization -- an active tank ship need speed to speed tank the damages it cannot repair -- and giving buffer tank rig and active tank rig the same drawback give an advantage to buffer.

For resistance rig, the thing is that they are as useful for buffer than for active tank, though not nerfing them the same way than CDFE would just make people use resist rig instead and hence would be pointless.

More like active tank = good for nothing.

Yes, I agree, a change that will wreck nano ships while indirectly buffing battlecruisers is exactly what the game needs to freshen it up, because DrakesDrakesDrakesDrakesDrakesDrakesDrakesDrakesDrakes finally being used will be a real change of pace for small gang warfare.



Sorry we're mean :3

That's extremely dissapointing.

Still, you do realize the disparity between armour and shield rigs penalties, right? You still need to address that.

By the way - most of the playerbase do use passive tank rigs. Did you really expect them to approve these changes? Really? That's like seeking approval of Titan fix among Titan (ab)users.

You guys do realize the underlying problem with keeping speed as the difference between the shield and armor tanks with concerns to small gang warfare right?

The problem is that in small gang warfare, speed is life.

The ships that have it are used and the ships that dont are modified until they do with very few exceptions

That's not about favoring any kind of player category - that's about being sure of what we are doing before committing to it .

In this case, we weren't certain about the concept at all, thus we asked for feedback, which quite shows it is not ready yet. Don't get us wrong, active versus passive tanking needs to be looked at and there will be changes when we come to it, we just don't want to rush the process when better solutions may exist.