Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Is this like a massive troll or something?

This is insanity. There is a reason active tanking will never work for large gang pvp. As soon as you are in a situation where you don't have time to get off 5 or 6 rep cycles, you would get more ehp out of buffer mods than your reppers will give you.

In large gang pvp primaries fall fast.

The only way to make active tanking viable in these situations would be to buff it so heavily that active tank ships would be indestructible in small gang pvp... It would be like noob ships with logi support fighting it out.

Plus, if you are going to fit a repper, in a large gang fitting remote reppers and spider tanking gives the gang way more ehp than local reppers could.

I think this is just a fact of the nature of the game that needs to be accepted. Local reps only work in situations where you take damage slowly enough to get a lot of rep cycles off.... 1 v 1, small gangs, and pve.

All this change is going to do is make fast heavy hitting ships a thing of the past.

Fast + Heavy Hitting + Defensive. Pick two?

The goal is not to make active tanking blob proof, goal is to balance armor vs shield and active tank vs buffer tank. Right now, unless your ship is bonused or very fast, you don't have any advantage with an active tank in regards to the drawbacks. Active tank should be better in small scale engagement ; right now, active tank is only good on bonused hull, and even then, you often see them buffer tanked. Do you realized that a lot of people prefer to get rid of one of their bonus for a buffer ?

By the way, a blob going 20% slower will still be a blob, and that will not change anything to blob. Only people crying are minmatar/angel pilots which will be less winmatar (not by so much by the way).

The change may not be perfect, but it's a perfect start.

As someone who solo roams ~on an alt~ I already active shield tank. I have yet to master active armor tanking, because finding the right fits for my current piloting skills and my character skills are a work in progress.

1.) Blaster ferox's and Solo Cyclones are awesome. F the haters. Everyone who solo roams finds these at some point.
2.) I hear brutixes are the logic step for active armor tanking. I'm going to give it a try this weekend.
3.) The shieldcane/welpcane really ruins most active tank situations. If you get more than one of them, you're done.

If you think active tanking is broken, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0FdO7pjMkY
I use the ferox fit, and the rokh fit on my alt, and they absolutely rule. I've refined an autocannon Maelstrom (you'll see a similar one at the end), and cyclone as a minmatar version. If you need those fits, dig through the killmails.

They work. They are VERY vulnerable to neuts. CCP Please don't mess with neuts. The solo roamer is always vulnerable, promoting 3-5man gangs by letting them do their own thing is fun.

I would listen to the hatchery guys though, they seem to like their 15-20man nano roaming gangs..

No Troll: Goons don't only fly in 3x250man fleets. A lot of us like to do covert hotdrops, gate camps, small-medium gang roams. 5-15man is our current thing outside of fleet fights. The other day, I teamed up with some FA friends and convo'ed two bait ships for Dirt Nap Squad and asked them to hotdrop a 20man assault frigate fleet on us to see if we could kill them in our 6 hurricanes. We ended up dying, but it was fun as hell. No one was active tanked. Please don't immediately, categorically dismiss a point of view just because you think we blob 24x7.

First off, both active tanking and propulsion modules consume a lot of cap, thus I don't see how the speed + active model could be properly implemented.

Active tanking in pvp is very rare, it only really happens in 1 vs 1 brawling, and in such a situation it is only helpful if the active tank system is over-sized for the ship (think medium shield booster on a frigate). In which case the tanking system is going to take up a lot of slots and consume a lot of cap, leaving little or nothing for propulsion systems. CCP could make active tanking modules more powerful but there will still be a limit beyond which the only viable type of active tanking is logistics.


As mentioned before by others: All forms of tanking heavily benefit from resistance.Thus any resistance rigs penalties should not be focused upon one type of tanking or simply should not have any penalties.

If CCP really want to fix tanking in EVE Online then: Make sure that tanking rigs and modules don't interfere with tanking or any faction concepts. For example no speed reduction for use of armor plates (instead go for acceleration and agility penalties)

I got an idea, how about instead of messing with ships and modules we just add more skills!!!!

No im being serious, think about it, just add more skills we can train, skills on top of skills.

I know alot of skills have secondary tiers, but what about adding a third tier?

Theres a general concesus that active tanking is just bad in most pvp situations, and I totally agree, but heres my remedy, Add active tanking SKILLS, and i think the active tanking problem would then be solved.

My philosophy is more ships + more skills = more better.

CCP, While I appreciate your willingness to upset the status quo...


WHY?

There were real differences in how shield and armor ships behaved. This would remove some of those differences.
There is a multitude of other changes you could make to this game to make it better or even just more interesting. This one was an exceedingly poor choice.

Fix POSs and we can talk about goofing around with shield tanking module penalties... seriously...

On the shield side, things are even better! For a mere 1.6 billion isk (not including the price of a full set of low-grade Crystal implants) you, too, could have your very own Cynabal that deals and tanks ~330 dps. Includes a whopping 8k ehp shield buffer!

All you need to do is stack pirate implants, billion-isk deadspace shield boosters, and faction cap boosters + charges onto your 250m isk pirate hull and you, too, can have a ship that's useless for fighting more than one ship at a time. Although, in fairness, at least the Cynabal will still do over 600m/s!

I'm not sure what this proposed change is intended to fix. It's easy to see what it breaks, but what does that fix?

The biggest problems with the current frigate line up (as well as many other sub BC size ships) are:
1. Vast speed differences among a ship class that is required to speed tank if anything bigger is on the field anywhere in range. Speed reductions would make all shield rigs basically unusable on smaller ships.
2. Many T1 frigates lack the mid and low slots to ever be competitive with other things that can be trained for in your first week of EVE.

The solution shouldn't be too hard:
Even out / increase slot counts a bit. All frigates should be able to fit a prop mod and a point plus at least one slot for something else like web, damage or tank. Buff the speed of frigates which are required to armor tank by slots or bonuses to have enough base speed to be able to cope.


On a technical note, I'm curious how your ship coding works. Ideally you'd have a system where ship values for each ship attribute from speed to slots are all together in a single, easily modifiable table somewhere that's easy to change in 5 minutes--values could still be brought in at compile time if you need hard coding for performance, but other MMOs are able to make balance tweaks a lot more often than CCP has been.

I understand if some or all ship attributes were hard coded somewhere during early eve development, but if so, separating mechanics from attributes to make balance changes easy should be on the top of the development priority list. Instead of expecting to hash out the right balance in forum sperg, and then implement it and be done, we should be able to change things let players try them and then easily tweak them again after a week or a month if they don't turn out how we'd hoped.



All that said, I appreciate that you are taking the time to ask for feedback from the players. CCP has had a great turn around since last year in the amount and quality of communication and I hope it continues in the future!
~AO