EVE General Discussion

The way you'd probably want to deal with a charge-driven repairer is to give it a really long reload time.

Another option is to use the heat system, but it's not hugely user-friendly and ends up with your reps being burnt out which is less cool.

I like this very much. Scripts.

Though all this looks very difficult to balance. I accepted as facts that active tanked ships are usefull in smallscale warfare and not in anything else, so I didn't bother finding a solution for scalability.

I would say, if you want to keep active tanking as it is, a small-scale warfare weapon, then apply the changes I posted. If you want to bring scalability, well then it needs some brainstorming.

The problem is, active tanking should be a valid option when in a bigger fleet. How to make it a valid option. How to absorb a huge amount of damage, while not being overpowered in small gang warfare.

Maybe some siege-like scripts for reppers ? Like, you get +100% HP repaired, -50% duration, -60% velocity for the duration of the cycle ? But then it rises more problems. Against a big fleet, your paperthin buffer (due to active setup) will melt, and you still won't have enough time to rep the incoming damage, despite having massively more effective reppers. The velocity malus would allow you to warp faster (like the web trick) and it might be a big balancing issue.

Or just like Cailais said, ammo for armor reps ? Just like capbooster charges. It would still be a pain to balance, but you can, for exemple, have 500HP/25m3, 1500HP/50m3, 3000HP/75m3, 5000HP/100m3, 8000HP/150m3 (The first value being the raw armor HP repaired, the second being the volume it would take in the armor repper). The armor reppers would have 50m3 and a 4s cycle for a small one, medium ones would have 100m3 and a 8s cycle, large ones would have 300m3 and a 10s cycle.

It would allow you to store 3x5000HP in a large repper, ready to unleash them when you're in low armor.

But then again it would be a huge pain in the butt to balance it and I'm not really in the mood of trying to balance all that :/

THIS!

I like the general idea of this, but the energy for reps would still need to come from the capacitor

I.E. Incoming damage causes the repair mod to use 1 energy / 2 armor hp rep, but now it repairs within 1 second. Thus, if your Archon just got hit for 6k, say goodbye to 3k capacitor.

Thus, ships can still get alpha'd, however anything less than an alpha gets repaired in full, charging the appropriate cap. While the rep mod is idle, it can charge a very small amount of cap to stay on.

This state would ignore already existing damage unless scripted to do so.

You already introduced a boost+limiter when you added heat why not abuse it?

Give them a ridiculously high performance and cap use when heated, as in factor 2 or more, and tweak heat .. massive cap drain combined with time-to-burnout gives you the desired effect of not being OP in large or lengthy engagements.

Rest can not be balanced due to the infinite scaling of Eve, only option for you is to design mechanics that make the scaling less of an issue by favouring smaller gangs ..... you know, the goal you have been droning on about since before I joined 6+ years ago

We were responding to Mr CCP's issue that active tanks aren't used in larger fleets.

There's a few good options for fixes that could be done. First, you could make overheat act rather more like triage, where you get +100% to the amount and the cycle time is 50%, then you just adjust the heat damage so you can only overload for 30-60 seconds. This makes it much more viable in PvP and it wouldn't change PvE much.

Another option is scripts or booster items that others suggested above.

Perhaps a bit more difficult, you could change rep modules to a dynamic cycle time or rep amount that asymptotically approaches a fairly low tank from a much higher tank. For instance, instead of a small armor rep II always healing 80 armor every 4.5 sec it could start healing 300 the first cycle, 200 the second, 150 the third, etc. until it eventually hits maybe 20-40 armor per cycle, then turning it off slowly recharges it back to full potential.

Not empty quoting.

This actually sounds like a very nice way to boost active tanking

I like the idea of being able to absorb and/or rep huge amounts of burst damage for a short period of time with active tanking. I'm not really interested in making it so powerful, that it becomes a real alternative in fleet fights compared to buffer tanking. The different tanking methods should have their strenghts and weaknesses, so you should not just focus on having active tanking replace buffer tanking where it excells.

One of the biggest beefs I have personally is, that it takes several reppers to realisticly tank anything these days. I don't want the ability to permatank in PvP with a single repper, but I would like the ability for a single repper to take advantage of all of my ships cap and provide that extra damage protection for those few precious seconds of trouble. Different scripts sound like perfect tools for this kind of a job. Please don't force us to carry another cap boost style item, unless you absolutely can't think of making it work by other means. I'm sure CCP can come up with sufficient drawbacks or cooldowns to using such alternative scripts, so that it doesn't become overpowered.

Again I don't want to try to overthrow buffer tanking. I want new abilitities to deal with different tactical situations. Anywhere where you absolutely need that burst protection this would be very useful. For example having a chance of surviving the few kms back to the gate when you hit a large gatecamp, surviving half assed suicide ganks as long as you have either buffer or active burst tank fitted, buying a few extra second of life for that all important tackler until other points get in range or anything where a few seconds of damage mitigation make a difference between victory and defeat, while at the same time you want to avoid the speed reduction/sig bloom of a buffer tank or simply can't afford a permanent, no hassle HP buffer from fitting perspective.

I want active repping having some kind of boost, but please don't miss this opportunity to explore the possibilities and problems such buff presents. Having more tactical elements in EVE combat is just as important element, if not more important for the overall gameplay, as just trying to make active tanking more competative compared to buffer tanking.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, as much as you would like to.
Active tanking is a tradeoff with ewar/sig (shield) and dps/speed (armor).
Active tanking in general is a risk when facing nuets; just as buffer tanking is a risk because you are not able to recover hp.

The fitting and slot usage "problems" you note are good problems. They balance the ships in a way that prevents you from fitting a ship with T2 mods and making it overpowered. If your active tank cyclone can tank 1000dps(for example), it should not be able to dish out 600dps. That's terrible, a T1 battlecruiser should not be capable of that.
Also, a shield tank does not hurt your speed and therefor ewar in the mid slots is less of a need.

I do however agree that cap boosters need some work. I think a 50% reduction in volume is a bit extreme. It would make active shield tanking too good perhaps; most of the time active shield tanks are used as burst tanks. As a result, 2min of cap time in eft can translate to much more than that depending on how the fight scales. I have been in fights where I did not use any cap charges while tanking damage and have also been in fights where I used them all.
Active armor on the other hand suffers. Perhaps there should be two types of cap injection. One that caters towards burst tanks, and one that caters towards sustained tanks. For example, if armor reps used a bit less cap and smaller cap charges took up less space. Then there could be a burst cap booster for 800/400 charges which would remain unchanged from current cap boosters and a sustained cap booster for 200/100 (scaled to module size of course). The sustained booster could cycle faster to accommodate the smaller cap charges.

The main problem I see is the desparity between active shield and active armor. Not only does active shield allow for a higher dps platform than active armor, it is also far superior in tanking potential. None of this fixes Gallente ships but if armor tanking became more viable it would help.


Indefinitely is a misnomer, you will eventually run out of cap charges if you cannot kill your opponent(s) fast enough.



That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to me. There should be tradeoffs between active and buffer. If active works well against large numbers also, there will be less reason to use buffer.


This would only be a "fix" up to the amount of buffer the active tank has. With a burst tank who cares if you can tank 7000dps on paper, if you only have 1000ehp you will die. Burst tanks repair a very large percentage of hp with each cycle.
However, this an is interesting idea. Perhaps active tanks (or at least those meant for bursting) could have a repair half-life. Where the first cycle during activation repairs more hp than a sustained repair, then each cycle afterwords decreases repair amount till it hits a pre-defined floor for the module being used.


This seems like a bad idea to start, but could be another hint at how to draw the line between burst and sustained. Perhaps sustained repair modules would also add a resistance bonus.


TLDR;
Come up with a way to separate burst and sustained tanking by changing repair modules and cap injectors. Either creating two types for both shield and armor, or making shield burst only and armor sustained only.