Ships & Modules

It's one of the very few ships able to dual ancil with a strong tank, and an injector, and smartbombs, and good dps, and good range
Bhaal, mach, or vindi can't do that, they are excellent ships in their own right but the nightmare at least can do something now, and do it fairly well at that. Other faction ships lack the utility highs, midslots, or damage output to pull this off successfully

Smartbombs are essential on ancil fits, as ECM drone spam is what kills them

Mobility not such an issue either with pulse

It´s as fun as shooting something unbreakable untill it runs out of buffer.

The way the boosters work now is like an hitpoint reservoir, simmilar to an extender. Unless you are in a gank situation you have to grind through the boost cycles and wait for reload. In a way this is like adding an XL-extender.

Even having multiples will not make you invulnerable against superior numbers, as usually when outnumbered the enemy has spare slots on some ships to bring ewar/neuts/reps. At that point nothing has changed for the outnumbered solo hunter. Either the enemy was unprepared anyway or just takes a few more seconds to kill you.

ASB do not increase ehp. AT X just showed it yesterday : alpha go right through them perfectly. The only thing this module does is being better than a buffer in low scale engagement, but as soon as alpha is in the equation or number rise above 5, you are plain dead. A standard pvp fit is at least 500dps. 3 ships bleed dangerously throught an XL-ASB, and as soon as it run out of cap charge, it's the end because there is no buffer to speak of.

Remember, the whole point of active tanking is to be better than buffer in low scale engagement at the drawback of being pointless when number rise too much. Standard active tank is only used on ship able to sport a similar tank than the ASB does, that mean on bonused hull. The bonus on these hull should not be what make them viable at active tanking, active tanking should be viable for every ship in low scale engagement and bonused ship should be better for it.

Not anyone and their mothers wil use the ASB, because as soon as you have a logi with you, and I speak about ONE logi, you are better with a buffer and that's exactly what it should be !

I think next week of tournament will be interesting in this regard because numbers will double and clearly show how this module, because of being active tanking and it's in its essence, will be almost useless unless the ship using it is able to speed tank.

Because that's another sily thing : speed tanking ships use a buffer whereas active tank is way more suited for them in theory.

BTW, buffing active tank is not power creep ; buffer have been buffed years ago, and active tanking stoped being used since then ; a buff to active tank would only put it in line at the place it deserve.

It's much worse, since increasing tanking values across the board means a ship can no longer break the opponent's tank alone and thus have to bring some backup - that is, a blob.

Also, saying that active tanking is used only on bonused hull is a plain lie. Your PvP experience seems to be very limited to make such statements, more so when that of mine has some awesome cases of using a battleship of 40k EHP with a single rep tanking 200 DPS.

You don't understand why active tanking is not really viable, except active shield tanking which is and was sort of viable (very viable after the introduction of pills, actually).

The reason why DPS and not tank is so necessary is what actual TQ PVP looks like, which means, the sooner you can end the fight the safer you are (or you can choose the other way, which is nanoing it up and fighting out of webrange, giving you some disengagement options). So either you have lots of DPS, or you fight out of webrange, or your ship is not really viable for solo outside EFT / SISI.

It is certainly possible to fight multiple people in a shipclass below or even same (but inferior fits / stupidly done) if you can get the jump on one and burn him before the situation becomes a true X v 1. If you boost tanks to the extent it is easy to tank one high-DPS ship of the same shipclass (or shipclass above), then this becomes much harder, since you can't exploit someone's mistake quickly.

This is why most people with actual experience outside of eft jockeying / SISI / bait and blobbery and station-hugging don't like the idea of boosting tank.



Now with that out of the way:

Let's illustrate what is wrong with active armour tanking on an unbonused hull.

Ignoring BS, where it's actually halfway viable, but few people solo with them, take a BC. I'll compare two Hurricanes, a ship I have plenty of experience with, and compare armour repair and armour buffer fit, and let's see why armour repair is not viable.

A dual-MAR Hurricane tanks somewhere in the region of 330-400 DPS (with heat). While this seems like a low number, it's not actually a problem. Comparing to an armour-buffer Hurricane, with a 3-slot tank (1600mm RT, eanm, DC), it's very easy to determine that a dual-MAR fit is superior in survivability for situations where you receive less than 800 DPS. This is not so bad, and there are situations where you'd really prefer a dual-MAR fit; and situations where you'd prefer a plate fit. Reasonably balanced in that regard.

Here lies the problem:
A 3-slot plated Hurricane with my skills and implants does 900-1000 DPS overheated, 800-900 non-overheated (and in more extreme gank fits, can be pushed even more).

A dual-MAR fit? 680-750 DPS overheated, circa 610-670 DPS non-overheated, with less range, and with greater difficulty in bringing maximum DPS to bear (because you lack a midslot and don't have the buffer of the buffer-tank).

If you could get comparable DPS with active tank and buffer tank, then even with the current tanking values, active tanking might make some more sense. That's why I suggest a "two in one" module with less fitting requirements then current 2 MARs (and lowering the fitting on a single rep a lot), but with restriction so you can't put that and extra reps.

From there you can easily understand why eg. Cyclones and stuff were actively tanked occasionally even before; they can fit DPS while doing so. A LSB Cyclone does not suffer from the "low damage" malaise and consequently makes sense.

On the other hand, even a triple-rep myrmidon which can in EFT kill any single battlecruiser, even HG slaved implanted Hurricanes and such, is for general PVP not such a great ship, since it's slow, so more vulnerable to kiting, and takes so long to actually kill anything you're very likely

He isn't trolling. That's the baseline EHP when you don't have plates/LSE or buffer rigs.