Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey everyone, I want to speak with you today about something near and dear to all of our hearts. Yes, I'm talking about armor tanking. We all do it, some of us love it, and real men hull tank. Regardless of our various levels of participation, we've all at some point had a 'wtf' moment when browsing through the various armor plating modules. Now, finally, I'm here to propose a solution that will restore some sanity to our lives.

ARMOR TANKING AND YOU:

I'm going to start off by identifying some of those common issues that I have identified over time. I'm going to skip the part where I talk about the fundamental nature of active and passive shield and armor tanking, under the assumption that, while complex, the general "idea" of tanking is working as intended in EVE, and that whatever roles and common fittings that people have assigned to ships are inline with the intentions of CCP.

Issues:

- Tech 2 armor plates give NO benefit over T1, but use more powergid, effectively making them useless

- Faction (meta 6 and 7) armor plates are identical to T2

- Storyline plates use less powergrid than their T1 counterparts, but this minor benefit is in contrast to their rarity

- Smaller plates, namely the 50mm, 100mm, and 200mm variety, offer little if any benefit in effective armor HP over various resistance mods, especially the Adaptive Nano Plating, which can uses no CPU or Powergrid.

- The armor/powergrid in comparison to Shield Extenders grossly favors Shield Extenders, while the drawbacks of plates are more serious, especially for smaller ships (Low slots = firepower, and added mass means slower and less agile ships, whereas midslots = tackle/EW and increased signature Only means more damage taken if the ship can be hit)

The goal

Update the current matrix of armor plates with the spirit and purpose of armor tanking in mind. The result should be T2, faction, and storyline modules being employed by capsuleers, along with smaller plates having attributes that reflect their difficulty in fitting to frigate, destroyer, and cruiser sized hulls. All this, while maintaining the balance between shield extenders and plates. Namely, shield extenders should be more efficient HP/PG.

The fix

I want to start off this proposal with what is NOT changing:

- All armor plate modules will remain named the same
- All armor plate modules will retain their CPU/Powergrid, mass addition and meta level


Step 1

- Replace the current Armor HP bonus meta-level schedule with the following for ALL plates:
---- Meta lvl 0: default
---- Meta lvl 1: 5% more HP than T1
---- Meta lvl 2: 10%
---- Meta lvl 3: 15%
---- Meta lvl 4: 20%
---- Meta lvl 5: 30% (Tech 2)
---- Meta lvl 6: 30% (Storyline)
---- Meta lvl 6& 7: 50% (Faction)

----> The above percentages mimic the increases of shield extenders (also 5% / meta), but with smaller increase for Tech 2 (30%, instead of the 40% given to T2 shield extenders. The rational is that faction shield extenders receive the same 40%, but here faction will be 50%, and that there is no counterpart to the 1600mm plate, so this is a balancing issue. Also, a 30% increase is less game-changing.

Step 2

- Change the current Meta 0 Armor HP bonus to the following: (shown with the resulting bonus at [T2] and (Faction)) :
---- 50mm: 200HP [+260HP] (no faction mods)
---- 100mm: 400HP [+520] (+600)
---- 200mm: 600HP [+780] (+900)
---- 400mm: 1000HP [+1300] (+1500)
---- 800mm: 2000HP [+2600] (+3000)
---- 1600mm 4000HP [+5200] (+6000)

Here is a comparison: new value / old value for meta 4 (rolled tungsten)
---- 50mm: +240 HP/ +131 HP
---- 100mm: +480 HP/ +263 HP
---- 200mm: +720 HP/ +525 HP
---- 400mm: +1250 HP/ +1050 HP
---- 800mm: +2400 HP/ +2100 HP
---- 1600mm +4800 HP/ +4200 HP

well thought out but deserves testing as 99.999% of new proposals.

great idea and well thought out and planned ... this almost seems like it was missing when they add in the new t2 modules with last patch ... the t2 drone links and omnidirectionals ect ect.

makes sense and will not invalidate shield tanking but bring them more in line as it should be ... i fly both armor and shield ships (honestly is really easy to train for both tank styles) so i am not in favor of either but this seems like a good way to bring the tank styles into balance

+1

2 words

A NUTE

Yep, T2 being worst then tungsten (T1) doesn't makes sense... the same happens to 4lif-booster and 100mn microwarp II...

So +1 to this!

OK, OK, I'm agree that something like that would make them overpowered. I ran the numbers and I agree, maybe 10% would do the trick. This thread has Nothing to do with that comment. I only wanted to mention how these bonuses are not used in nearly the frequency that say Amarr's armor resistance bonus is. It's much more common to fit an oversized plate onto a Harbinger or Absolution to give it some surviveability in a battler than it is to put a rep on any of these ships.

You might be right that a boost to active tanking would benefit smaller gangs, but it also reduces that need for teamwork and the necessity for logistics. I would rather have better specs for armor plates and some ships with active armor repairer bonuses than an across-the-board increase in active tanking. The latter simply negates the differentiation of the methods. Active and passive armor tanking should both be viable in PVP.

I saw your post Rawls, and I was going to make a citation to its presence as a partial inspiration (I went looked for similar threads before I posted this).

I liked some of your ideas, but I believe it is both overly complex in certain areas and not enough in others. Simply 'doubling' the current bonus of armor plates is going to leave many things overpowered in my opinion and your method of making the mass addition dependent on volume or something of the sort doesn't actually work. This is why: A 1600 plate currently add a Ton of armor at a small (3%) increase in mass to a battleship. The SAME amount of armor would be added to a battlecruiser, but with the same (3%). This type of over-sized application needs to have a penalty, and since the amount of armor does not scale, the mass addition should not either to keep things more in line with how they are now. I really don't believe that CCP wants people in Harbingers to ass 5200 armor and then be flying around with relatively the same speed and agility.





I think we all understand that for engagements over a certain size, logistics or remote repping is going to be the nature of the game--there is no disagreement from me on this point. I don't believe that any changes are needed there. My point is more a reflection on the popularity of these ships actually Using their bonus is Any engagements. The Astarte and Eos make decent solo ships after the hybrid buff (and I'll admit I haven't fly either in over two years on TQ), but I would be surprised if their popularity increased when considering active-tanking setups.

I don't know if there needs to be a 1000MW plate adding 8400 armor, this seems more game-changing than anything else. The only change would be freeing up a low slot on certain battleship configurations. I'm not sure CCP would want to go changing the stats of EVERY module currently held by people and fitted to ships. Just a more intrusive change to the game and I don't believe is needed.

As for the point about silly-slow battlecruisers...I agree that this is a little crazy and immersion breaking. I had the following changes in my first iteration of this idea:


Step 1

- Eliminate static mass increase for all armor plates and replace this drawback with a percent mass increase as follows
---- Meta lvl 0: 3.6% increase
---- Meta lvl 1: 3.4% increase
---- Meta lvl 2: 3.2% increase
---- Meta lvl 3: 3.0% increase
---- Meta lvl 4: 2.8% increase
---- Meta lvl 5: 3.6% increase (Tech 2)
---- Meta lvl 6: 3.6% increase (Storyline)
---- Meta lvl 6&7: 2.0% increase (Faction)

But then I realized that fitting a 800mm plate or a 1600mm plate to a BC would result in the same mass addition. This doesn't seem quite right! And if we make these percentages scale with the size of the plate, then we really need to cap it at the above %s lest we affect battleship class vessels more than we already do...

Something a bit more uniform might work, however. Let's consider that a 1600mm plate should add 4% mass to a ship. We could then have a 800mm plate add 3%, 400mm and everything below add 2%, and the faction versions could be 3,2,1% respectively. As it stands now, most plates add around 10% mass to a ship in a good setup, but if we're going to be adding 4,3,2%, is there enough of a handicap to fitting oversized plates?

Maybe this would help, but it's going to change the way plated ships move quite a bit. Maybe that's just what we need, but I hesitate to pitch such a substantial change when the Bigger issue is the actual value of the armor bonus.

I was thinking more along the lines of .1% per 10mm of armor. so:
50mm=.5%
100MM=1%
200=2, And so on, til 1600mm= 16%, a pretty substantial amount... especially since most people fit multiple plates.

I see your point, perhaps reducing that penalty by 75% would be more applicable.

edit: that would still increase the penalty to 4kg on bs's, but it's not as noticable on them.

edit2: I also see your point on the stat-doubling being invasive. perhaps a 3200 plate is in order instead?