Ships & Modules

That's right.

Reducing boosting values of ASBs in half looks pretty good.

Having a spare mid and neut-immunity might be balanced with a reload timer. But CCP decided that on top of that these free mods should give as much tank as the very best deadspace boosters. How can anyone sane consider it balanced?

I would suggest that the concept of the module is fine: a extremely short burst of tank.

I have no real opinion on what the strength of the mod should be. I posted some numbers, which are exceptional, but that is for a grand total of 52 seconds, then the ship is in trouble. (much much shorter with medium and small versions).

But I do believe that an armour equivalent should be created.

Neuts are overpowered enough as it is, tbh the fact that active tanking gets shut down by them while buffer tanking does not is one of the biggest balance related problems in the game.

Not really... I mean, in the only place active tanking is relevant in any way, which is small scale situations, neuts also hurt buffer tanks a lot, rendering two races out of four unable to fire under excessive neuting (and unlike an active tanked ship which will be actually able to fire because of injector but not tank, the buffer tank won't be able to fire).

Of course as it is, races with non-cap using weapons are very popular to say the least... but even for them, neuts shut down propulsion, shut down tackle, active resist mods, etc. Buffer or active tanked, neuts (from a larger ship, or a ship with neuting bonuses) are very effective.

Are they unbalanced? Well, if they were nerfed, it would probably shift the solo / very small gang game more in favour of smaller ships which would be comparatively boosted quite a bit. Some ships would become more or less obsolete in that scenario. Would there be more or less viable ships / fits overall? Hard to say.

I mean, ofc. you can just fly in gangs of sufficient size and then neuts are irrelevant more or less, bar maybe trying to shut down capital tanks or something of the sort.

To the OP: what prevents the other guy(s) to just kill whatever is tackling for that Vargur, since unlike AT, people will just warp off on TQ?

Please, for the love of god, no

I'd say that the fact that I will do almost literally anything possible to fit an oversized ASB onto any ship is a good indicator that we may have a new biggest balance related problem...

-Liang

Ed: And really, all this talk about how "ASBs only last for 30s-1m" is misleading. The reality is that they last much longer when metered back to previous active tanking values.

It's easy. Shoot them til they reload, then kill them. Ain't difficult to understand...

Because existing modules should be balanced prior to introducing new ones (especially when they're OP). That wasn't a "I wouldn't like this module for personal use" "no", that was a "jesus christ ASBs should be removed from the game, the last thing we need is another similar module" "no".

That's exactly the type of module that will bring change into the fitting landscape.

The controversy just keeps adding up to it. Couldn't ever have that much impact with a module
that's within the reaches of the regular ones. Then it would be "meh", or "worth a try" ...
... but it definitely wouldn't reach so far regarding peoples attention.

Module isn't OP ... it's perfect for bringing change.

Yep. Nobody runs a oversized conventional shield booster continuously. Even a right-sized booster can't be run continuously on a BC without cap booster support. It's the same with a ASB - you burst it, it doesn't run continously, so it lasts longer than the sum of the boost cycles. Yet, oversized ASB ships can still be jammed, making their OP tank useful only for creating enough time to chat with the victors before the inevitable.

Which brings up the only module even more OP than the ASB....