Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There's a whole host of issues you need to look at if you want to make active tanking viable on cruiser / frigate hulls

- Active tanking takes up too many slots
- Active tanking devours way too much cap
- Reps / boosters take up too much CPU/PG
- Because you have to trade resist mods and HP mods in order to fit the reps, you end up with zero buffer, which means that an active tank needs to rep an absurd amount of HP/s to be effectively better than a buffer tank.

Just because I was curious, I did a quick mathematical comparison of a very tanky (shield rigs, damage controllled) dual-LSE Vaga vs a "very tanky" (shield repping rigs, damage controlled) MSB Vaga, and here's how it works out:

(DISCLAIMER: The boosting Vaga reps 104 dps, the LSE Vaga regens 72 DPS. In EVE, however, the LSE Vaga will only regen ~72 DPS while its shields are at peak regen-- above and below peak it will rep less. I don't know how to model this, so I've just assumed a constant 72 DPS rep effect. This will make the LSE Vaga look a little better than it should towards the right of the graph and a LOT better on the left, but you get the idea. The main point is how awful the active tank setup is. The left-most data point for the active tanked setup is technically infinite (since the fit tanks more than 100 DPS), but I set it at 2000 seconds so as to render the rest of the graph readable.

http://i.imgur.com/f7kbV.jpg

Notice that the boosting setup's buffer lasts ~15 seconds when subjected to 500 DPS. This isn't totally accurate (since damage and rep aren't averages in a real fight-- they both come in bursts), but it gets the general idea across. As soon as incoming DPS exceeds your (awfully low) ability to rep, your ship quickly falls apart, whereas a buffer fit at least gives you some time to react.

e: for some reason, the "insert draft" thing (when I used it after the forum ate my post) removed the last character from each line of this post. Go figure. I've restored them.

You can not balance the prevalence of active vs passive tanking. Many have stated that active tanking "has its place in small gang and pve." What they have not explained is why.

The problem fundamentally lies in the nature of active tanking. On an active tank the more DPS is applied (aka the more ships involved) the less net damage is required. On a passive tank the same net damage is required no matter how many ships are involved. A simple mathematical model of how long it takes an eve ship to die might look like this:

timeToDie = EHP / (NumberShips * DPSPerShip - TankedDPS)

If we take to ships, one with 100k EHP, and no active tank and one with 50k EHP and 1200 dps tanked against ships averaging 600dps we obtain the following equations:

timeToDie = 70,000 / (NumberShips * 600)
timeToDie = 50,000 / (NumberShips * 600 - 1200)

This means after six ships, the _beastly_ 1200DPS active tank is less effective than the somewhat mediocre 70k EHP passive tank. If you happen to like Big O notation (asymptotic arguments), assuming that we fix average DPS:

O( E / N ) > O ( 1 / (N - T)) for E > T


The problem is if you boost active tanking so that the crossover point becomes high, it now becomes impossible for ships to kill each other 1 on 1. Active tanking is more or less unfixable, beyond perhaps taking some time to insure that "active tankers" are more effective against 1 ship than an EHP buffer.

Active tanking is used quite often in PvP, it is simply not used in large scale engagements. The reasons for which I explained above. Also remote repping is used in PvP and arguably is active tanking.

The issue I have with tanking isn't passive vs active tanking, but the fact that increasing shield size results in an increase in effective regen.

Honestly, I think the first step is to put a stacking penalty on everything that increases the base amount of HP, that includes:

Trimark Armor Pumps
Core Defense Field Extenders

The way it stands, if you have 10,000 armor HP and you put one trimark on you get 11,500 which is fine, 15% more, but if you put two of them on you end up with 13,225 or 32.25% more than you started with, and a third one pushes you to 15,208.75 or 52% more armor than you began with. This is like getting compound interest at the bank, it gets crazy fast because the later ones add a percentage to the already increased percentage of armor by the previous one.

At the very least they should stack nerf against eachother so each subsequent trimark has less effect, also IMHO they should combine their effect so if you have one fitted it gives you a 15% increase, two fitted give you a 28.05% increase (because of the stacking penalty) and three fitted give you a 36.6% increase.

Also, why are they 50 calibration? they are, by an order of magnitude, the most effective and desirable rigs, why is their calibration cost super low? shouldnt the better rigs cost more calibration?

Currently shield extenders give both buffer and regen, which is one of the things that makes passive shield tanking powerful. Armor tanks obviously don't have anything similar. What if Plates and Extenders both gave a bonus to Armor Repair/Shield boost amount (local only not remote)? I don't know exactly what the percentages would need to be, but my basic goal would be that active tanks would use a plate or extender in place of one (or more) of the resistance modules they currently use.

Good points.

I'm fine with leaving sig radius penalty for CDFEs as it is, but increasing calibration cost to 200 for a tech1 rigs and 300 for tech2.

And stacking penalty should be there anyway.

Active Tanking vs Buffer Tanking and Ship Bonuses

Active vs Buffer tanking has came up time and time again on the forums. I know this is off topic being about rigs and everything but a lot of the problems with active tanking have been stated on here (CAP intensive, Slot intensive, poor vs larger than small gangs and only really good when using off grid T3 boosts - drugs and billions in implants).

However, one of the problems with active tanking ships are the ship bonuses themselves. The resist bonus and the repair amount bonus don't compare. This becomes blatently obvious in remote repair situations because a resist bonus carries from active tanking to buffer tanking to remote tanking. The repair amount bonus only effects active tanking and also is only marginally better at active tanking than a similar resist bonused ship.

If the repair amount bonus also effected repair amount received many ships that were previously poor in fleet combat using remote repair would become viable ships.

Next look at increasing the bonus from 7.5% to 9% repair amount received. What you end up with is ships with resist bonuses get better buffers but lower active and remote tanking ability and ships with a repair bonus get lower buffers with better active and remote tanking abilities.

Rigs

The issues with rigs have been stated in this thread a few times and I would like to echo what has been said;

One of the best suggestions in here has been to remove the flat bonus a rig gives and give it a % per level bonus. This would gave the skills far more meaning and as they stated balancing the rigs becomes very easy. Tweaking the rig per level bonus up or down depending on how well it appears to be scaling and making the utterly useless rigs appealing.

Almost everyone agrees that calibration points needs to be reviewed. CCC's and extender/trimarks are far too cheap where as other rigs are far too expensive.

Stacking penalties! These need to be considered and carefully balanced.

Why not ? Because angel pilots would have to learn to manage their cap ?

I heard a long time ago when I was learning EVE that "cap is life". Of course it's easier when your cap is only used for your prop, but that's a bit against this statement I think. Minmatar, angel and most caldari ships don't have any hard pressure on their cap, so why crying when a suggestion suggest to use it ?

These armor/shield rigs help the other races much more than Gallente because Gallente baseline HP is in hull structure (there are no equivalent structure HP rigs) and therefore they don't get as large of a tanking boost. Nerf these rigs and Gallente ships get BETTER overall in comparison to other hulls.