Player Features and Ideas Discussion

+1 to that, it's also a bad nerf because it assumes that every incursus will be fitted with a AAR, what happened to the strapline about an exciting variety of fits and more room for player specialisation. Please reconsider this Fozzie.

The other armour tanker .. the venerable Punisher with its 'OMGOPtrollolol' resist bonus would be made completely redundant with AAR, rigs and Incursus 10% bonus ..

7.5% rep/lvl is roughly equal to 5% resist/lvl for the purposes of active tanking, which is the topic du jour, so with the reduced bonus they ought to be equal, right? WRONG!

Incursus has that godly third midslot (3 on armour frig is huge) that can make it all but immune to cap warfare whereas the Punisher gets a utility high for the, by comparison, grossly ineffective nos. No amount of range advantage (which is non-existent on frig level without range bonuses) can compete with an unbreakable tank.

So here is the thing: Incursus gets to keep its 10%/lvl but has a mid-slot moved to high rack, AAR and rigs are implemented as suggested and Punisher moves the high-slot to the midrack .. blasters don't really need the web after they had the tracking bumped.

Short: Burst tanking will break the balance unless repair bonuses are either nerfed into the ground or replaced with something else .. case in point: ASB .. those damn things find their way, even after being nerfed, onto everything with three mids or more, it is an abomination!

So add a damage bonus to armour repairers, explain it with: "Excess energy from nano.manufacturering within repairer is shunted to weapons systems

why do we need a new skill to reduce the mass of armour? Why don't ccp make all armour 25% less massive.

you're funny

Warning: Wall of text incoming.

First things first: Thank you Fozzie for actually reading all this stuff and taking criticism serious. I must say, I really like your new way of doing things in close contact to the playerbase.

Now, since I believe one should not try and fix stuff before even knowing what's wrong with it, I would like to take some time to think about the problems of active tanking, and active armor tanking in particular. From my persepctive as a solo and small scale PvP'er, there are two kinds of armor tanked ships that are viable to use:

1) Those that have damage mitigation and maneuverability. Examples for this are an Enyo or a dual rep SFI. You don't take huge amounts of damage because of your small signature and an active tank doesn't slow you down as much as plates would. Main problems with this are the speed penalty of armor rigs but mainly vulnerability to neuts, jamming, and snipers. Such ships also tend to have low dps because the grid, CPU, and slot requirements of an armor tank are high. And low dps is obviously bad since you want to kill something before that enemy Falcon arrives that surely is already on its way.

2) Those that tank absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage, so you can just stand at a gate and deaggo when too many hostiles are coming your way. This is most notably done in Maelstroms, but also Myrmidons, Vindicators and other ships. This playstyle works fine for those who have all the tools at their hands, such as combat boosters, warfare links, and expensive implants. Mostly crystals come to mind, but slaves or a Numon Family Heirloom are also really useful. For a rather new player, however, this is almost impossible to do.

Of course, there are also other types of armor tanking ships that work, but i think almost all of them are somewhere between these two extremes.

Now, since everyone seems to agree that something should be done to help active armor tanking be more popular, what could be done to achieve this?

To help with style (1), I suggest reducing cap consumption, fitting requirements, heat generation, and tick rate of armor reps. (Reduce rep amount so hp/second stays the same.) This would have a lot of positive effects. There would still be a notable difference between shield and armor tanking: Shield tanks would offer higher tank numbers but require more cap while armor tanks would have less raw hp/second but be more sustainable in the long run and less vulnerable to neuting. Your intended rig changes also wouldn't hurt fittings that work well now since reps would use less grid in the first place.

To help with style (2), you should make the tanking power of a ships less dependent on additional bonuses. The only way I can think of to achieve this is by making the modules themselves more powerful but at the same time, nerf warfare links, booster drugs, and pirate implant sets. For example, you could increase the hp/second of all reps and shield boosters by 60% but reduce the tank multiplier of a fully skilled Legion/Tengu to 1.5x and also reduce the bonus of Blue Pills, Exiles, and crystal implants by maybe 25%. Then, in the end, you would have almost the same tanking numbers that are possible today but newer players without all the resources would actually also be able to actually get a decent tank out of their ships.

Concerning the AAR: I think it's a bad idea. The introduction of the ASB showed that it is near impossible to balance modules that are so similar to already existing ones. First the ASB was so powerful that no one would use normal shield boosters anymore. You went on to nerf it, now it's damn near useless. I'm afraid the same thing is going to happen here. The way you describe the AAR, it would be better than a normal armor rep in almost any pvp situation, so the only reason to still use a normal armor rep is because you can't fit multiple AARs. This doesn't sound like good balancing to me.

Kyang.

CCP Frozzie... please consider the value of resist bonuses (Punisher) in comparison to Rep bonus.

A 5% Resist bonus is equivalent to a 7.5% Rep bonus... and the resist bonus is better at LvL 5 skills.
A Resist bonus is also extremely relevant to buffer tanking and remote repairs, where a Rep bonus provides no benefit under these alternative tanking scenarios...

Please, maintain the "active tanking" niche the incursus has by keeping it's bonus above 7.5%... If a ship is going to be pigeonholed by bonuses into a certain type of tanking, let it be superior at that role!!!

So I just looked at the Reactive Armor Hardener again, and I think I see why it's not a Massive Game Changer For Armor Tanks.

It's... well... it's just bad. The Reactive Armor Hardener is a trash module.

Compared to an Adaptive Invulnerability Field (just the Tech I version, I'm not even getting into the T2 Invuln and lack of a T2 RAH), the RAH costs even more per second, is notably less useful before it's done editing itself (like, for instance, when you're eating alpha in a fleet situation), and - here's the great part - can be fooled into editing itself very, VERY poorly if the incoming damage types are varied and/or lopsided. For example, if confronted by an arty/AC pilot loading Fusion, it will send fully half of its resist bonus to Kinetic instead of Explosive, even though Explosive is 83% of the incoming damage. Move up to a situation where you have three incoming damage types - from, say, a Vexor/Algos/laser-Dragoon/insert-other-drone-boat-here launching Warriors, or having more than one reasonably intelligent player shooting at you - and not only are the resists split entirely wrong, but they're also lower on all fronts than what an Invuln would provide to a shield tanker. If you have all four damage types incoming thanks to being in a fleet situation, congratulations, you're paying 4.2 gJ per second for a tech I EANM that will stop working when you cap out.

Meanwhile, unless you're in the RAH's specific "I'm useful now!" niche situations of single-typed incoming damage or exactly two evenly split incoming types, your shield-tanked buddy is laughing at you because his invuln is giving him more resists for less cap, and has been doing so for the whole gorram fight. In fact, if he has a T2 invuln, he'll also be laughing at you in the situation with two evenly split incoming types, because he'll be getting the same end-result resists for slightly less cap without the weaker period at the start.

Oh, and that cap drain I mentioned? It gets WORSE when you train Armor Resistance Phasing. -10% cycle time per level and -5% cap use per level add up to higher cap use per second - an extra 5.6% at level 1, 12.5% at level 2, 21.4% at level 3, 33% more at level 4, and a whopping 50% more at level 5. The skill is a trap option for PvE players, and still pretty damn questionable for PvPers given the aforementioned failure at adapting to lopsided incoming damage.

So, Fozzie, how about buffing the RAH? There are probably a million ways to do this - even my feeble imagination can think of:
-Raising the RAH's base resist bonuses while capping the maximum in any one resist at the current maximum value, so that it becomes useful in more situations without becoming outright broken in the niche situations it currently needs to be any good,
-Making the RAH edit resists more intelligently,
-Doing something about the cap use issues (including the Armor Resistance Phasing problem I mentioned above), and/or
-Making a Tech 2 version already.

How much SiSi work/testing are you willing to do Fozzie?

Don't think the AAR will work due to hull rep bonuses, exact same thing as we see with regards to shields/ASB so no reason to believe it will play out differently .. neuting will only get you so far when all the rep bonus ships have spare mids for injectors.

But I like the idea of the heating rig. Dangerously close to the "busting by way of heat" brainfart I have been wafting around the past couple of years, albeit my suggestion was to tweak the heat performance of the reppers themselves.

Could/Would you throw the overheating rig in original form and an enhanced form onto SiSi (ie. just the rigs, toss the AAR) .. I have a suspicion they will take us almost all the way home with possible tweaks to cycle times needed on MAR/LAR only for a homerun.

I strongly support this change however I think it needs to apply to ALL tanking links, obviously including shield and skirmish sig reduction.

I think there is a lot of inappropriate hate in this thread....

1.) I like the changes to the armor rigs... increasing the PG need of Armor Reppers is a much more PvP friendly drawback than the loss of speed!!!!!!! I also think that leaving the speed penalty to trimarks is a good thing given the significance of their bonuses.
-- However, what about Remote Repair Augmentors... Any thoughts on changing their penalties?

2.) The Plate Mass reduction and skill to reduce plate mass are both nice....

3.) The AAR is interesting...
--- I foresee this common use in active armor tanked tackler, that burst tank for the 30 seconds it takes to kill drones, and then can survive on a reduced tank by mitigating turret and missile damage from M/L weapons...
--- I'm not sure I foresee their use in terms of hyperions or myrms soloing small groups of people, as those fights last long enough that 30 seconds of "super-repping" isn't worth the minute of no reps or the greatly diminished reps thereafter...