Ships & Modules

Get ready to revamp your armour fits: on Sisi the T2 plates now are getting a buffer bonus that'll make them more valuable then the meta 4 Rolled Tungstens. Time to make room on the Power grid armour fleets

They will but I guess some ships with resistance bonus is a fair trade if they fit 800's instead of 1600. Then we're about to get cruiser/BC rebalance, it will take some time but this means all parameters should be taken in account.
Only hope it's CCP Ybert(whateverthingIcanneverspell) who's in charge, he did an awesome work with all frigates, I can only think he would make all those cruisers/bc's something we would have tons of fun with like we do with frigs.

Armor Hurricane

1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
10MN MicroWarpdrive II
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Speed 1025 m/s

Without the plate and rigs it goes 27% faster (1311 m/s).



Shield Hurricane

10MN MicroWarpdrive II
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II


Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

Signature 1894 m

Without the rigs and extender the signature drops by 31% (1440 m)



What does speed affect? (besides getting around faster)
- Ability to escape and to catch targets
- Ability to get into optimal firing distance or to deny optimal firing distance to opponents
- Reduces missile damage in some cases and makes the ship harder to track in some cases.

In other words, speed is essential in almost every encounter and of great value. Speed is often the best "tank".

What does signature radius affect?
- Minimal effect on opponent's lock time (0.2 sec lock time difference when the Armor and Shield Hurricane lock each other)
- Affects opponent's tracking. This mainly makes a difference against opponents in larger ships using turrets a size class higher. In a Shield vs Armor Hurricane fight, there is basically no difference in damage (<1% difference, though I haven't performed an in-depth analysis. Let's just say it's going to matter in some cases).
- Affects missile damage in some cases. Rage HAMs do 11% more damage on the Shield Hurricane.

In other words, the drawbacks of increased signature radius are neglibible most of the time and only start mattering more in some circumstances.


This should explain a good part of the problem.

Yes. Armor has a very slight advantage when both ships are orbiting each other, but it shouldn't be much (27% speed reduction vs 31% sig radius increase in these setups).

The interesting part is the observation that shield tanked ships tend to have medium or long range weapons and due to being shield tanked, also higher speed. They can control better whether to actually engage in a close range brawl.

AHACs are really great too (and pretty much a hardcounter to drakes)

There is also quite a bit useful stuff you can use midslots for - Scrams, Webs, Tracking Disruptor, Sensor Dampener, Cap Booster, Dual Prop, ECCM, Projected ECCM, Target Painter. My AHAC Vigi has 4 midslots (obviously) and I wish I had more, because I could fill all of them with awesome stuff.

Thing is that you should never take a pirate ship or faction DED mods as example for any sort of balance because it's all fail at the end, see 95% or above people crying about Tengu when they clearly know absolutely nothing what they're talking about.

If you want to pick a decent example of how bad armor tank is pick a 6 low slot Dominix, yep has more mids but hey!! it's a hell of a drone boat...

Then take Mega, 7 lows already 5 for tank (+ rigs or you'll just die often before you get in range) but only 3 mids, so you're using guns that make you cap out with top skills, using a awful cap hungry MWD plus, you'll fit at least 1 disruptor because you don't want that shiny to go away just because he uses AB instead of MWD.
At this point, if you ever had to do more than 20km towards your enemy, your about to cap out, so you have no other choice but to fit a cap injector just to be able to shoot and move, we're talking here of an all passive fit, ad 1 LAR and it's a dual cap injector you need witch means no point, no web.

Pick Hyperion, the awfullest of all Tier 3 battleships because of it's silly slots layout, cap/pg. same problem than Mega but you will just have +1mid and less tank but not even more dps on the field unless on top of something because Hyperions are obviously also known for their awful tracking.
Now change it for a double LAR+double cap inj, you just have to fit lower tiers guns, still have dmg application issues because awful tracking and you don't have much better tank, you just have tank as long as you have cap booster charges that are vanishing FTL but then, paper thin loot piñata.

These are just some examples who by no means show they are useless, they can succeed and do in groups with logis tackling ships etc, but it's not like if something else couldn't do it too and easier for you group to carry on their back.
Ok since hybrids rebalance Blasters dps got interesting but rails still meh but this has little to do with the discussion apart from the cap hungry shooting side.

This kind of ship, and specially Domi and Hyperion, are by a strong margin a lot better shield fitted. What the heck?

It's just my point of view, the reason why we should not start saying "Armor tanking is omgfckpwn" just because Vindicators Bhaalgorns and other pirate ships that are most often what T1/T2/T3 base ships should have as base slots/PG/CPU in the first place.

Pick the new module, so if you're not using an armor afk drones killing red crosses Navy Dominix what interest do you have on it? -none, and it's not the silly skill that helps whatever, it's just a trolling skill nothing else.
Use it on caps? -probably, but from some of my friends flying those SC/TItans they don't even want to see the sight of it in their cargo.

I can't talk to much about Amarr since I don't fly those that much but Gallente yes, and no one around will make me change my mind about the fact imho armor tanking in general is bad and active armor tanking is total crap, eats too much slots/riggs, too heavy penalties, extremely cap hungry and overall there's absolutely no armor mods that bring the efficiency of shield tanking as a hole be it buffer or active (forget caps I don't even want to get in to that because they should all pop in a single boum to make this game a better place)

When CCP creates an item, they assign it a CPU and PG requirement based on some system. How much CPU is 1 PG and vice versa? Anyone knows?


Generally speaking, 2x Armor Repairer = 1x Shield Booster + 1x Shield Boost Amp.

If somebody knows the CPU equivalent of 1 PG then we figure out if there's some sort of imbalance in fitting requirements. It sure feels like 2x Armor Repairers are more demanding to fit.

Armor tanking viable? sure , but lets count the matches in tournament where active armor tanking was used?

I personally saw 0 active armor tanks
OTOH almost every shield fleet out there had ASB as a supplemental tanks.

Active Tanking was semi balanced before ASB. Shield uses the more important mid slots so it has the better modules - invuln (which gives a blanket protection you can't buy for armor) boost amp, which armor can only mimic with rigs and crystal set implants which armor has not.

Enter ASB - reps for twice the amount for less cap(it says it uses 940 cap but will run off of 400 boosters)and activation time is 4 secs.

Look at a t2 armor rep with maxed skills :400 cap , 800 repair , 11.25 secs duration
Now look at an ASB with maxed out skills :400 cap, 980 repair, 4 secs duration
running from boosters of course but that's also an advantage since you cannot neut a booster charge.

hmmmm.....

Now think what an ancillary armor repper would look like :

200 charges, 1600 repaired , 9 secs duration(uses 800 cap without the charge) - yes I can see everyone and their grandma using 1 :)

You're probably right about slots, I rarely check those from my office witch makes type silly things

Anyway the point I was trying to make is that by no means we should put aside regular/navy/pirate ships and T2/faction/DED mods to say at some point "x" ship does really good in whatever field.
Anyway I'm tired of my journey to edit the dam post because of slots to still finish with same opinion, I'll pick shield Tanking over Armor tanking every day, and my armor skills are by far better than shield ones.

Also, will never say armor tanking or active tanking can't succeed, they can but at the highest fitting/mobility benefit sacrifices you don't want to unless you're close enough to rep at station have logistic somewhere or are using a lol double cap injector double rep, and the last one only proves how lolish the fit has to be to ever succeed tanking something.

What I wanted to say is that when armor tanking, you almost always need three of your midslot for tackle (prop, scram, web) or you're not gonig to catch any target due to your speed. That mean that any armor tanking ship cannot use the midslot advantage armor is supposed to give to him unless it have four or five mids.

If you don't want to take the web, then you need a lot of speed, hence no armor rigs, and hence your tank is rather weak. Moreover considering that EWAR is CPU intensive, you then need to use armor plating instead of energized membrane, reducing your tank even more.

On the oposite, a shield tanked ship have almost all its lows free for anything he want, lowslot being critical more than sometimes useful as EWAR is.