Ships & Modules

OP has to be a troll right?

Armor tanks are still good, links a video nearly as old as my abaddon.

Buaaaah! I'm not CCP favorites anymore!!!!!!!!! Buaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!, Fix it!!!!!!!!

I see very few of those ships in SOLO PVP period (which is what you specified in your OP). And many of the above are simply poor PVP ships regardless. Much of the solo/small gang PVP has been dominated by shield BC's down for quite some time.

Again, I don't dislike the ASB. But to try and say armor has had some advantage in SOLO and small gang PVP is just flat out wrong.



I fail to see the relevance when the OP specified SOLO PVP. Unless you are soloing Titans regularily?

Mainly because Drake can't fit it due to fitting issues, Hurricane can't fit it because 4 midslots (it was not, I think, designed to actively shieldtank), Maelstrom is a battleship without spare slots for heavy neuts so niche usage, and what else gets flown with any regularity (from BC-sized hulls)?

Cruiser hulls just can't fit / power it because of inferior slots and fitting, putting it on Amarr ships would be a bad joke (and can't fit, anyway), putting it on Myrmidon would be funny but can't fit with any weapons worth a damn.

So that leaves Tengu, Cyclone and Sleipnir (which is just too expensive for what it does) which can make workable active tank fits. It's a problem of not being able to fit it to ships together with damage mods, high-tier weapons, neuts, MWD and everything else you realistically expect to fit on a PVP ship but can only do so if and only if you buffer fit.

You got it entirely backwards. LARs are largely fine except for huge fitting costs (you free up 3+K grid by going with two plate 5-slot tank instead of active 5-slot tank though), the 650-800 DPS tank of a 5 lowslot slot dual-LAR tank is both sufficient and enables you to have 2 damage mods on a 7-lowslot ship. Sad fact is that it's useless because either you will fly in gangs, where you want buffer anyway and will always want buffer (and RRs) above a certain (and not very large) size, or you can't fit largest guns rendering the BS pointless next to a plated variant.

It is how it scales to smaller ships what is actually problematic. A LAR is 100% stronger then a MAR, but a large turret is 33-34% more DPS then a medium turret. If scaling was the same as it is for turrets (which I am not saying it should), then a MAR would need to repair 67% more HP, and a SAR 133% more HP. Suggesting that BS reps should get an increase bigger then the medium or small reps because scaling is somehow wrong is silly.

Again, the real issue is fitting costs and number of slots taken. Shields don't have the slot problem so much (because of XL-SB), so they are occasionally seen, but active armour fits have no "two in one" option, and the repair rigs also reduce speed. So even ships with 6 lows and 4 mids which in theory could make armour active tanks can go only shield buffer or plate.

Out of which the shield buffer is actually more popular and better in gangs.

Active armour tanking on BS hulls doesn't need a huge overhaul. Resolving fitting issues (bringing it, one way or another, inline with buffer tanks which can be fit sensibly), maybe some cap use... it's sub-BS active armour tanks which are worthless crap.

Since you gave some numbers, here are some for you. IF A 2-LAR MEGA COULD FIT NEUTRONS, a 5-lowslot LAR tank is superior to a 5-lowslot buffer tank while receiving less than 1150 DPS, or less than 1400 DPS with heat which lasts a long long time. This is not counting implants (where there are repping implants too), drugs (which are cheap and only active tank ones exist), etc. Now the numbers aren't stellar without adding extra stuff, but they are not that bad, either.

The math is trivial. An active armour tank outlives a buffer tank up to X=(-108337)Y / (48084-108337) where X is amount of DPS received, 48084 is armour+hull EHP of rep tank and 108337 is armour+hull EHP of buffer tank, and Y is amount tanked.


tldr version of what active armour tanking needs to be remotely viable: make a "two in one" armour rep with same cap use, same repping power as dual rep of appropriate size, same PG requirement as 80% of a current single rep, and restriction that this module cannot be used with other repairers simultaneously (to prevent overtanking crap), and slash current rep fitting in half and cap use by 70%-ish so it can be used in buffer+(single rep) fits without necessarily using a cap booster. Naturally, removing the speed reduction from rep amount and speed rigs.

Would fix active armour tanking all around.

While I'm on the side of the ASBs being TOO overpowered and need some tweaking (not saying get rid of or even a huge nerf, just minor tweak), I have to say the OP is a bit laughable and I'm surprised honestly you haven't been trolled into oblivion by this post already. I fail to see why the BATTLESHIPS you mentioned shouldn't be able to solo kill a BATTLECRUISER.

While I've seen some decent arguments against leaving ASBs alone, this is not one of them.

The 'shield nano' tempest is slower than my gran, even with my snakes in. It dies to any cruiser with an MWD and even a small nos to keeps its tackle running. Huge fleets of them are just that: Huge fleets. At which point the type of ship becomes less important. May i also note these are semi-effective active tanked only because of the ASB... this has nothing to do with active tanking armor.

Brick tanked geddons and baddons are popular due to excellent range and high HP. megathron are popular cause they can tear people in half with 1k DPS while fitting an MWD, neut, full tackle and 130k EHP. Rokh's and maelstroms can do similar to this if they have tacklers. Hell, even an ASB torp raven rips battleships in 2 these days.

People look at the tempest and go 'meh, ill get a tornado instead'.

That's digressing.

Point being that in REAL situations, the only time active tanking is better is when you are nowhere near a gate/station and have to permatank a tiny amount of DPS til something dies or your friends arrive. EHP tanks just DE-aggress and jump if the DPS is that low and they can't land a kill.

I had no problems using it to kill anything short of other battleships (which are all probably playing EFT anyway), including hac/bc (or CS, amarr recon, whatever) duos and crap. I think my first and also current (I've never lost one in lowsec, while I lost a number of plated or such fits because of blobbing, since with all the nice numbers a HG slaved BS can have with max skills, once **** hits the fan you are either running away or dead) nanopest scored about ~150ish kills and probably around 800ish mil in loot, more then half the amount of kills your character even has, total.

But fine, Tempest is useless and I get my info watching PVP videos.

It's actually the same thing with flying 720mm II solo arty Hurricane, which can hypothetically on paper die to a solo EFT frig, yet every one of them ends up making money and killing all sorts of things, BCs, HACs, etc, while the HG slaved plate fit which can in EFT kill everything dies to blob after maybe ten kills.

"But it doesn't work because what if a frigate lands on top and you are afk and he scrambles you and has nos and you die."



In real situations, active tanking is useless not because active tanking is useless, but because you can't fit ships properly for DPS and/or range (or tackle & utility highs if we talk about eg. Maelstrom) while fitting an active tank, rendering the ships useless as a result. If that was fixed, some of us would actually fit it on some ships, while the remaining people on forums which only solo or small gang in EFT would still whine, I guess.

Highsec station baiting is not "real" situations either.

Tanking 5-10 people in an active tanked ship is just not going to happen, ever, and if it did, it would be imbalanced to hell. However, a niche exists for active tanks if they weren't so debilitating to fit.

And yours, unless of course your talking to yourself