Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Since the AAR will have an onlinelimit of 1 and 60 seconds of recharge, any chance we will see the nanobot accelerator rig also decrease the reload time of the AAR?
Cause else, 60 seconds without repps running will probably only be possible in a double rep fit, making the module almost useless for setups that only have space to fit one.

My humble opinion in detail:

Armor Upgrades skill
Plate mass isnt the only speed killer for armor tank, the rigs are worse. This skill at level 5 will reduce the mass of 1600rrtp for 412.500, and that will increase speed of mwd propulsion fit BC for like ~20m/s. Its a horrible skill, especially considered how much skill intensive armor tanking is for new players, and you still have to train it for the same reason all your navigation skills need to be at level 5, speed is king.

Gallente are still fcked
Rep amount on just too many of their ships is useless in fleets/large ganks. That and slow ships with short range guns make them really bad in any pvp situation that includes more than 15 players. This needs to be solved, either by making rep boost apply to remote reps (to make them have small buffer but work better with logies than amarr) or to give some of their ships %boost to armor hp (to make them have bigger buffer but dont work with logies as good as amarr). Or even better, do both, give Gallente some versatility in their ship lineup.

Proposed Ancillary Armor Repairer
Is just plain terrible. Its mechanics is gimmicky, i dont see how can you implement the option to choose will it use batteries or just repair at 3/4. It accomplishes nothing new, it does not add more fitting options or versatility, if you use reps you are gonna drop one and replace it with new module. And the logic behind the way it operates is kinda dumb.

And i can already see ppl creating spreadsheets to calculate the best way to fill your cargo with different size capacitor batteries and ammo. Just drop it completely, and buff the repair skill or modules, all this does is add flat rep amount boost at the cost of terrible cargohold micromanagement.

Ancillary Shield Booster
The thing that actually made this whole mess even worse. In needs to be nerfed a lot, to make using standard modules again an option. Something like this would be ok:

Large Ancillary Shield Booster:
Fitting: 130CPU(+30), 170PG (+20) - bring it in line with shield booster + capacitor booster fitting requirements
Limit 1 per ships - to limit its use in pve and prevent new cyclone from achieving godhood
Shield boost - 375(-15) - bring it in line with shield booster + shield boost amplifier (it still repairs much more)
Its skill requirements are a joke, Shield Operation II for such a powerful module, at lest Shield Operation IV and maybe Energy Management IV.

And yes i know you only can fire it 10 times before it goes into long reload, but with careful management it will last enough. And Small Capacitor Booster with 150 navy charges wont exactly make your Large Shield Booster cap stable, Ancillary Shield Booster uses batteries much more efficiently. And it frees two slots ffs, that should be more than enough.

Even after these nerfs it will still be 5x better than standard shield booster in pvp, and if you dont limit it to one per ship there will be no one in game that uses shield boosters and boost amplifiers.

Armor rigs
The removal of the speed penalty is great thing for active tankers, but buffer tank also needs some sort of speed buff in the rigs. Currently proposed pg nerf is too much and will kill many pve fits (and absolutely destroy amarr in pve, yeah i know not important and all that but most of the playerbase are pve folk). All ideas i had are not really good but here they are, in case someone can work something out
-5% more cap use (only for active tanking rigs) - would kill triple rep fits, double rep fits probably wont be hit that much
-%mass addition - works great on battlecruisers, on smaller ships it gets worse than current rigs
-%mass addition only for fitted modules - lazy way, would work great but feels stupid (still makes more sense than AAR)

If this module doesn't run in gimp mode while reloading, then it should. Otherwise the entire point of it is defeated.

Armour tanking 2.0: Still a band aid on a sucking chest wound.

But if it continued to run whilst reloading what would be the point or the current armour repairers? They'd be totally redundant. ASB introduced something new - active tanking that was immune to neuting. The huge tank is a big plus, and the ability to fit mutiples makes it seriously OP. The AAR gains none of these. It remains a drain on cap and sensitive to neuting; it's 'burst' tank is more protracted than the ASB so more of a dribble of additional rep than a flood; only one can be fitted per ship. Please, for the love of keeping this game in some sort of balance, where is the rationale behind all this? I see ideas with promise being lumbered with a whole load of bad implementation making a bad situation worse.

You can only have one AAR on a ship, so that's the point of it; it makes a single-rep fit into a burst dual-rep, and a dual-rep fit into a burst triple-rep (at the cost of having a gimped "normal" mode compared to a standard rep and eating cap boosters to get the burst, ofc). If it doesn't run while reloading and can't run in normal mode while loaded and ready, then the way it works makes no sense at all.

One of the great bits of fun in EVE is the ability to try different fits and ideas out, indeed my entire corporation is based around trying to do that.

The Omen in this configuration can do a lot of damage, and still have buffer to potentially get repped, although its resists are not great at all.

The Vexor is also being used in a very similar way, not just by me, but by many others, because it can hit 900 DPS in that configuration.

A couple of days ago I took out a buffer armor fit Omen, but its not been popped - yet :)

I'm not trolling, but I do think there is often the feeling that 'My race sucks - every other race is awesome' in the threads, and in this thread, I felt that people felt active armor tanking was some how this terrible thing, when it fact, there are some nice fits for it, that work very well. Some of the best tanks i've seen lately were active armor fit. Again you need to copy and paste this link:

http://killboard.thedeadrabbitsociety.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=15571848

The related kill mail isn't accurate, the ? players listed here were not on the fight at this time. He warped in on us, and frankly, if it wasn't for the griffin, we'd have easily lost a Moa, maybe both. It took us a long time to get him down, as he kited away from us with the AB - the Moa's don't have the cap to keep their MWD on, so it was a case of slow and fast, slow and fast, which meant I wasn't always in optimal range.

Its a great fit, and for small solo play, I bet he has a lot of success with it. Solo, he'd have easily killed me, no doubt at all. Even against the two Moas I reckon he would have got at least one of us down.

For myself, I don't claim to be the most experienced player out there, and certainly not in solo work. But when I have fought against armor reppers, they have generally done well, far better than the ASB fit shield fits I've come across. Frankly, the 60 seconds reload is enough to cause them real issues now. I imagine the AAR will have the same issue, although it will still give some tank even when empty, which is interesting.

One of the most exciting ships (If the numbers and fits don't change) is the new Prophecy. I think this thing will be absolutely bad ass - it has a cap stable cap drain and 82,000 EHP, with web, scram and MWD. That is impressive. It too can be tripple tanked, and it will be interested to see how folks use it.

I think what CCP Fozzie is presenting is a great set of changes that for me, bring some balance to the state of play. But lets not kid ourselves that armor is useless.

Precisely, this module makes no sense. It's burst tank is not. It IS far more effective than the current reps for a short period, but that period is much longer than the ASB burst period. That means less dps tanked/second for that time period compared to the ASB(bear in mind the overheat rig was also a large part of making the AAR effective and has now been removed). Now add in the continued use of cap, the sensitivity to neuts, the restriction of 1 module per ship, and you end up with a module that on one hand

- does not rep whilst it reloads so is pointless regarding the non-selectable 3/4 rep without boosters option

-does rep whilst it reloads, so why would you ever fit a normal repairer in the first place? This leads to;

1.For a single rep ship you'd ALWAYS fit the AAR to have the burst as an option
2.For a dual rep ship you'd ALWAYS fit the AAR as the first rep to have the burst as an option
3.For a triple rep ship you'd ALWAYS fit the AAR as the first rep to have the burst as an option

With fitting between AAR and Repper being identical there would simply be no choice. Yet the argument for introducing these modules is to provide choice. It'd become the armour repairer equivalent of oversize fitting which is generally considered a plague on the game.

A lot of the problems with active armor tanking could be solved by increasing the efficiency of the medium and large armor reps, they are horribly inefficient compared to small reps and ALL shield boosters.

That's mostly because you are comparing regular sized armor reps to oversized shield boosters/ASBs.

The difference isn't THAT large when comparing regular size modules.

I'm repeating myself here but the main problem are oversized mods...