Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The best thing is the penalty change. The rest is mediocre at best. Further encouraging buffertanking via new useful skill - lolwhat? If you're that eager to introduce new skills, how about you invent something for reducing PG consumption on reps instead? Would make much more sense.

Seconding those saying that fundamental issue can not be fixed by addition of new shiny modules. In case of active tanking the issue has always been in passive tanks providing too much EHP.

Not sure if this was mentioned yet, not already through the thread, but.. cap booster hold? feasible? bad idea?

Posting to remind you that people actually use the armor rep bonus on the myrm and not the brutix. No one uses armor reps on brutixes or astartes/eos's. People use triple rep myrms to solo and single/dual rep myrms for pve. Please keep the rep bonus on the myrm and change the brutix to something actually usefull like tracking or optimal/fall off.

I think you should stick with the new skill, and have a big OH bonus built-in for all armor repairers.

Then trash that AAR idea (and the ASB while you're at it).

So you're thinking AAR+800 plate? Interesting, but I'm not sure where you're going to find the grid for that.

-Liang

ok so what are you thinking for a brutix?

aar and 1600?

upon reflection the aar might be usefull with a buffer tank...

I would have liked to have seen a buff to active armor tanking via the already existing armor repper modules in game, personally. Regular old fashioned sustained active shield tanking will still be wildly superior to sustained active armor tanking.

its not that bad with heat on and hamerheads i get 660 dps

plus 50k ehp so not bad

i can fit the rig thing if i have a plus 3 pg inplant plus a pg rig...

i dunno i am trying to make the best out of the situation i guess

Incursus will be impossible to kill .. utterly impossible .. if it changes one repairer and installs the new rig.

Each cycle will pull back 315 points of armour, hilariously more than half the base armour of the hull .. for as long as the repper has charges it will in essence behave as if it had a dedicated Inquisitor supporting it (almost anyway) ..... and it still has room for a second vanilla repper as well as injector.

Is that really the intention?

As for plates .. severely disappointed to be honest, lower mass penalty is good but had hoped you'd tweak the fittings upwards a tad .. they are stupidly easy to fit compared to active rep, so easy in fact that oversizing is the norm and has been for a long time, it is not uncommon to see frigs with 400's, cruisers with 1600's and BC with 2-3x1600.
Keep in mind that active rep on a 'pro' level requires cap support (injector) for most fights other than ganks and as insurance against neuting.

So now that we know what the idea/concept is, lets discuss a replacement for the Gallente repair bonus

[Brutix, ]
Medium Armor Repairer I
800mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Damage Control II
2x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I
Warp Scrambler II
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I
[empty med slot] choose your poison .. would go for twin or TD .. ~50 grid left

7x Heavy Neutron Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M

2x Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I (place holder for new rig)

Funny thing is the repairer, just 4 heated cycles and it adds more armour than a 1600 plate would have added .. kind of nasty.

I don't think the problems with armour tanking in PVE are adequately addressed by these changes. Let me explain...

Solo PVE in armour is currently worse than shield because the "gank" of armour ships is limited by the need for a reasonable "tank". Unlike a shield ship where the gank & tank use different slots armour ships complete to fit both in the lows, and in PVE the mids are relatively useless. So armour needs a big boost to hit parity with shield.

And how to do this? I think you have the right idea because your changes are focused on reducing the number of lowslots that an armour tank needs. This leaves more room for damage mods. Two of your proposed changes help solo PVE:

Firstly, since active tanks no longer have a speed penalty let's assume you can replace a hardener with AB to speed/sigtank instead. Yay, one free low slot for gank! But of course when you're flying with hybrid or laser turrents AB reduces your DPS too, and it really only reduces incoming damage from BS rats. Speed tanking helps drone boats but not hybrid/laser boats.

Secondly I guess you expect the AAR to be used in PVE sites to tank full room aggro while killing primary DPS sources. Then once the charges are gone the ongoing damage is low enough that your 0.75 repper can sustain. Nice idea! It means dual rep ships can become single-AAR and frees up another lowslot. But the AAR needs to reload occasionally, and you can't stop repping for 60secs in PVE unless you've cleared the room. That's fine, but what about PVE content without rooms, like anoms and other exploration types? Suddenly the AAR is not going to work.

tl;dr
I feel there are two potential savings in lowslots for solo PVE players who armour tank (replace hardener with AB, and replace dual-rep with single-AAR). But both have limited applicability and are not easy gains for armour tankers. High SP characters in Ishtars can take advantage of both, but low-SP chars in turrent-based t1 cruisers & BCs are no better off than before. Aren't these changes meant to help them too?

My suggestions for additional improvements: Straight buff to RAH cap usage (3.2 same as invuln so cruisers can use it), max resist (75%, stack with hardeners) and shift amount (10%, so it becomes effective in 20-30secs rather than halfway through your AAR cycle). Rework AAR mechanics so that it can be useful in PVE which doesn't have rooms where you can idle on a gate reloading.