Ships & Modules

Can we please stop talking about SBAs like they've ever been mounted on a PVP ship? Thanks in advance.

-Liang

Ed: And while we're at it, can we stop pretending like it makes any sort of sense to compare a 2 slot shield tank to a 2 slot armor tank? The proper comparison is XL SB vs 2 LAR. All this nonsense about SBAs is simply that: nonsense.

For a long time that was true. It remains to be seen whether it is still true. The AAR is unquestionably less impressive than the ASB - however, it doesn't need to be an ASB for active armor tanking to be viable. I think people haven't given the new changes a fair shake yet, and all the doom saying is just too premature to be based on any sort of objectiveness.

Ed: Honestly, if these threads that armor tanking was still massively underpowered weren't popping up everywhere we'd know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the pendulum had swung too far the other way. I think it'll take some time before people stop being stubborn about "Armor Sucks, LOL" long enough to actually look at the changes.

If you are discussing efficiency, then you should discuss slot efficiency. A low slot and fitting space on an armor tanker is eminently more available than a mid slot on a shield tanker. You should also discuss opportunity cost - what else can you not fit in that mid slot?

FWIW, I just ran the numbers and I'm pretty confident that I can take a traditional HAM Drake in an active tanked Omen (no links on either side - though it probably wouldn't matter a whole lot if the Drake had links).

-Liang

Ed: Ran the numbers again, in a bit more detail (for example, the drake can no longer overheat forever). Looks like I could probably take a Tengu linked Drake with only the AAR as my rep, but I'd end the fight in half structure. Still, it'd be a hell of a killmail so I may try this out sometime soon. :)

I didn't use an SBA in my comparison.

You are free to present your facts that prove that active armor has some kind of advantage that balances it in comparison with active shield.

Please do. Then get back to us. Otherwise this post of yours is idle speculation.


Well Cambarus can answer for himself.

But what can I say. Some of you downplay the importance of available low slots. Damage mods, nanos (in synch with rigs for speed and agility which can't be fit on an armor tank because they nerf armor hp), lots of things can go in low slots that are valuable and armor ships would love to fit. You really can't just say but but my mids are more important than your lows and you get more lows so it's fair to compare as equal - one XLSB to 2 LAR - and ignore the fitting costs and slot subtraction inequity.

Bring a HAM Drake to Amamake and we can have a go at it? :)

-Liang

Which is why we would rather fit an ASB there than a cap boosters. Active armor does not have any spare mids because they are used for boosters.

I'm not sure where you're reading about slots in that post of mine, as the slot issue was completely separate (though worth looking at nonetheless)

I realize that with all the different arguments getting thrown around, it can get a bit confusing, so I'll try to clarify some things here:
First off, whether or not armor is more efficient than shields for active tanking is NOT the deciding factor in whether or not it's balanced. Yes, efficiency is nice, but it is but one of many things that affect balance. The reason I argued efficiency is because someone said that armor is more efficient for cap than shields, which is not only wrong, it's easy to prove that it's wrong, and I'll get to why in a bit.

As for the actual balance itself:
I'll illustrate this with a metaphor that hopefully gets my point across:
Imagine a scale. A literal balancing scale with each side weighed down by the various advantages of each type of tank. Now imagine removing one of the weights from the armor tank side of the scale(so moving from buffer tanking to active tanking on the comparison). There are 4 possible outcomes here; the first being that the scale was balanced, and removing the weight made it imbalanced, the second is that it was imbalanced to begin with, and removing the weight balanced it, the third is that it was imbalanced before, but removing the weight swung the balance in the other direction, and the fourth is that the weight was effectively nothing, and there was no change when it was removed.

Now, since how much a tank can actually, you know, TANK is definitely not an insignificant advantage, we can discard the last scenario. Then we look at passive tanking and whether or not it's reasonably balanced at it's core conceptual components. Since you very rarely hear people bemoan the uselessness of passive armor tanks, odds are they aren't broken, and a quick glance at eve-kill's top 20 suggests that shield buffers are also very viable, which means the scenario that best fits the current nature of the game is the first one, as it is the only one that has the 2 being balanced at the start . If you have 2 balanced competing ship types, and you remove a major advantage from one, is the other not basically guaranteed to become overpowered?

Sorry if this seems overly condescending, but it seems to me like this, literally the main basis of why I see active armor tanking as being broken, gets looked over by people who instead focus on the various nits they'd like to pick, leaving the main argument untouched. I literally can't think of a way to spell this out any more clearly, so hears hoping that cleared up any confusion there may have been.
Here's the problem with this argument:
For armor tanks, you're filling the lows with tanking mods, and using the rigs for tanking as well.
For shields, you ignore SBAs, because they're not a realistic mod to fit.
How many fits do you see that dedicate literally all their lows and rigs to active tanking? That's going into bait tank territory, where SBAs would also be fair game as they're better after the first invuln for raw tanking output (and really ASBs are so much better at that role that it'd probably be rarer to see a LAR on a ship made for it than an SBA)

The only time an armor tank is going to be more efficient than a shield tank is if you only have one slot to work with, otherwise the shields will win out every time. "And no ship fit shield defense capacitor safegard rig either." Shields having the option of getting more tank with better efficiency, but declining to use it because it would be better to just up the tank difference even more is a pretty good sign that there's an imbalance in there somewhere.

There is a 5th option: that the scale is still moving and you don't know the outcome yet.



Ok, I followed what you were saying until the underlined part. I just don't know what you're referring to. Is it because you feel the maximum attainable tank is too low when compared to dual "oversized" ASB tanks?

-Liang

First, the obvious : in your magical ladder, you forgot to add a rung when going for active armor tank : active armor tank do NOT reduce your speed anymore ! Active armor tank is not slow anymore ! So what are the drawback of active armor tank ? It takes low slots ; it uses a fair amount of PG ; and it uses cap. On the other side, all your mid slots are free, and your ship may have a lot more lows than mid slots.

Second, about dedicating slots for tanking, there is some, if not a lot, of fit, of myrmidon for example, which use 5 of their 6 low slots for tank. That may not be all of them, but that is more than even what a shield battleship can do for solo pvp. Because when a shield ship is lucky to have 5 mid slot for its shield tank, a lot of armor tanking ship have 6 mid slots. Hence, mid slot are rarer than low slots. Moreover, you often required two midslot for point/prop whereas on low slot for dps is common. Hence, it's far easier AND common to use more slot for armor than for shield.

Your argumentation could possibly be valid only if all ships had equal number of mid and low slots. That is not the case.

Finaly, about the capacitor safegard rig : this rig only reduce the cap need of shield booster, then someone using three of these rigs will not add even 1 hp/s of tank to its ship ; that's why nobody use them. Resistance rigs are often simply better, and ASB don't use cap anyway. And the SBA ? In pvp, either you need capacitor (read cap booster), a second ASB, or resistance. The CPU a SBA take is also significant, and it come with a penalty to overheat.

As opposed to active armor where auxiliary nanopump is awesome, and even more now with only a slight PG penalty. In the end, you may achieve the same efficiency between both, but shield will have lost any tanking advantage, and armor will still have more low slots available than shield will have mid slots.

Hence why Liang keep repeating that what you are arguing for is module parity instead of balance. Asking for shield and armor to be the same with the same number of modules is ridiculous.