Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've been thinking about the dominant opinion that PVP active tanks are garbage, and have let some ideas simmer. I haven't figured out an equivalent for active armor tanking that makes logical sense, anyway... here it is:

Shield Overcharge!

As I see it, it breaks down into some combination of these methods of implementation:

- All existing shield boosters get an overcharge limit
- A new set of overcharging shield boosters are introduced
- Separate shield overcharge extenders are introduced

Essentially, shield overcharge is an additional buffer above the existing shields that must be filled up when in space. It would decay over time back down to 100%. There are possibilities of it not working with remote reppers, drawbacks like it increasing sig radius as it fills, and questions about how it would work on the UI, but I thought I'd get my idea out there.

The primary idea here is that a ship would be capable of having a significant additional ablative tank that cannot be maintained without effort.

Abusable in what way? That you'd have another ship that has a buffer?



So... because fleet warfare is currently RR/buffer hurricanes and drakes, it should always be that way?

I'm not certain how remote repping a ship with a bit of buffer and a bit of active tank is abuse. You can do that now, except you'd be called out for having a bad fit. A class of modules like this could fit in an area of buffer/active tanks.

My intention in changing fleet combat is to remove the known elements. Expand the options of what could be fit beyond what it is today. Not being able to tell from d-scan what an enemy fleet contains merely based on the ships in it.

RR is not limited in scale. There is no way a local rep (run by one person) can compete with RR (run by n people) once you have enough RRs. It's just impossible to scale local reps to be equal to RR once you pass a certain gang size. It's just impossible to scale it and still have the game be balanced.

Active local tanks do have a place in PvP, it is in solo/small gang situations. But it is simply impossible for them to be equal to RR once you have a large fleet going without making completely OP in solo/small gang work and PvE. If you can local-tank a ship to withstand 50 ships shooting at you, no 10-20 man gang will ever be able to kill you.

I'm going to agree only to the point that local reps need to be more powerful than remote reps.

I don't believe that a 20% boost to armor and shield repair would do anything other than make small-gang combat a little bit more lengthy, and give people reasons to make a dps/tank balance.

Is this what EVE needs? I have no idea, but the fact that solo shield tanking is so much better than armor tanking might want to be looked at in the long run. The old circa 2002 idea was that shield booster is stronger than armor boosting but armor buffers can be bigger than shield buffers. I don't know if this ever really worked out this way. You can put 1600 plates on a BC hull, and x-large boosters on one as well.

The failure? Speed. Since eve is almost all about range and tracking, the use of shield boosting in PVP has not gone away, but the use of armor reps has.

And at the fleet level, I believe every shield battleship can fit a stronger tank than a comparable armor ship.

Armor reps and shield reps are about the same in terms of repair/cap usage, but this doesn't matter in PVP as often as it should, because the stronger shield reps make a big difference in the length of most short battles, and considering that the average shield tanking ship can out-run and armor tanker and

Some ideas?

- Make the Gallante ships with bonus to armor reps bigger: 10 to 20% instead of 7.5%
- Make the Amarr ships with a bonus to armor resistances bigger: 7.5% instead of 5%.
- Increase the HP bonus of armor plates by 10% (OR, really, rework all of them, because no one ever uses 50mm.100mm,or 200mm plates, and the 400mms are Barely useful)

If you do this, all the people for 'nerfing minmatar' would be quiet and there might actually be some balance in the game.

Just a random thought, probably junk that would completely not work, but could lead to some good ideas.

The size of the overcharge for a booster, in my mind, would not stack. If you fit a small booster, you would get something in the area of 200-300 buffer room, while an XL booster would get 4000-5000. Enough to absorb a significant portion of size appropriate alpha, without tripling a ship's EHP. In addition, I'd expect it to drain rapidly, similar scaling to the passive recharge where at the top it would drain 100-200hp/s.

I've been thinking about logical equivalents for armor. Because it's a tangible thing, it doesn't make sense that it'd drain over time, or couldn't be endlessly extended. I have thought of a different mechanic though: scaling resistance boosts. A similar overcharge bar for armor that, instead of adding bonus HP, adds bonus resistance. This bonus would be recharged only when armor is full, and depleted in parallel with armor as damage is taken. Again, like the overcharge boosters, a small booster could give a 5-10% omni-resistance buff while a large booster could be in the area of 25-30%. The idea here would be a hidden armor buffer HP bar that has something like 100-200 HP per point of resists. Doing armor damage reduces the resistance HP bar as well. Though, to keep it balanced, the resistance overcharge HP should not have any resistances.

The result is a logically consistent boost on both classes of tank. Shields can be temporarily extended beyond their normal capacities and armor can be temporarily hardened to a higher degree.

There is the possibility of introducing XL armor reppers and XL shield extenders, but that a step towards making armor and shield more homogeneous, which I don't think anyone really wants.

I like that idea too. Overheating plate could do the same thing as my above proposal, adding a bit of resist to your ship.

Just give active tanks much, much larger overheating bonuses. Being able to tank a small fleet until your repper burns out puts them on equal footing with buffer in survival time versus focus fire in small fleet situations, and in huge fleets you should be using a buffer anyway.

How does one fly a spaceship through a planet?