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Gonna add, that your ultimate goal is making ASB as good as normal Shield Boosters of the same price range are, just with different applications.

Also, when ASBs are finally balanced, you may start considering adding ASBs of higher meta levels, which would be awesome.

No doubt ASB's need looking into, but I just hope that you guys don't nerf them into oblivion. I mean these modules made active tanking a feasible PVP option, which wasn't the case in ages.

The issue as some people have pointed out is fitting more than one which defeats the purpose of having 60s of glory followed by the agony of the reload, and it is possible to simply cycle them.

However, proposing any changes which nerfs the amount of boost (one reload) to less than a single shield extender, will render them effectively useless, which would be a pity.

I would hope CCP to take a less lazy option (to tweaking capacity/cycle time/boost amount), and simply correlate the boost amount with the charge size. So basically with XL you get 100% of the boost amount with 800's and 50% with 400's. Everything else could stay the same including option of fitting more than one (it already really affects the fitting).

Please don't take the easy to do option, but adjust them properly!

Seconded. Seems to be odd changes considering.

Changes I would test first:
- One per ship.
- Only able to reload through fitting screen (ie. station or array needed).
- Boost amount dependent on charges used (opens up making capacity higher, for more choices).
- Signature increase.

Thing that irks me is that they perform and function like two modules while only taking up one slot .. as an Amarr zealot (ot the ship!) I suffer from chronic mid-slot envy and hate when everyone other than me and mine gets freebies!!!!11

@Sonic: You need to figure out what the purpose of these things are and take it from there. It feels like you (read: CCP) wants it to be an alternative to traditional buffers, which is fine, problem is that they appear to be designed to be able to supplement buffers in blobbier weather which has made them utterly broken everywhere else.

Your homework:
- Figure out what they are supposed to be. Alternative active tank or buffer replacement.
- Figure out where they are supposed to be (used). Small-gang or obesity convention.

Regarding the question of what we're trying to accomplish with the ASBs, then (as has been stated by some in this thread) the goal is to allow for a temporary massive boost. The key word there is temporary, as this is a requirement for the module to not go out of hand. The current stats on the modules allow for too much sustained boost. The problem is not the boost amount per se, so we will almost certainly not touch that.

Restricting ASBs to one per ship is a solution, but we feel it's fixing things with a hatchet as opposed to a scalpel. What we're doing now is looking at other potential solutions. Some good ones have even be mentioned in this thread, and for that I thank you. The danger with adjusting the stats just to make dual-ASB fits less powerful is to nerf the single-fitted ASB too much, so we're trying to see if there is a sweetspot somewhere in between for us to fall into.

Thanks for your feedback so far!

That is a very interesting take on the problem. I'm going to look more closely at it.

WOOH! Active armor supremacy!

Wait? What?

Current stats of single-ASB setups are so high that it's somewhat difficult to nerf the damn thing too hard.

My question is: why do you follow these ideas of having the same attitude towards single ASB and dual? At the moment single ASB is superior to passive tank setups, dual ASBs are too good in comparison to conventional active tanking. These setups have pretty different ideas and form 2 separate issues, which both come from sheer module stats.

I hope you won't argue that introducing, say, a damage mod which temporarily boosts damage output by 200% can hardly be balanced by definition, no matter wheather restricted to one per ship or not? Just don't create overpowered modules at all and you will be fine.

"improved" xasb boosts for (980/5) = 196hp/s for 45 seconds (9seconds*5charges). Extending that to 60 seconds to catch reload time on second xasb, a single xasb boosts (980*9=8820 / 60 seconds) 147hp/second for full minute and then second xasb takes over, and first reloads. LAR II reps for 71.(1)hp/second on lvl V character. Did i mention that it uses over 4.5x more powergrid, and that it uses cap(so you'll need to compensate with cap booster)?

I also want to fit 2 LARII on battlecruiser.

Reposted by accident

I'm seeing a potential misunderstanding about why the ASBs are so spectacularly powerful right now.

SoniClover, you guys are talking about trying to make them a great "temporary" tank item. Unfortunately I believe that's not actually what ASBs are. In their current form, they are actually statistically more similar to buffer EHP items.

Why is it a buffer fit item? Well in small-gang situations, the rep amount and rate on the ASB is so strong, that under ideal circumstances (the circumstances where ASBs are overpowered), you're virtually guaranteed to get off all the charges in your ASB. This is even more realistic on double ASB fits, or oversized ASB fits that push the rep per second well above the amount of damage the ship would normally fight against. There's also no way to stop the target from getting the shield boosts (i.e. by neuting it).

In such cases, the ASB literally behaves as well as LSEs or plates, but at a ridiculous slot economy.

Consider the following for "one" slot, even post-nerf:
- Large Shield Extender II: +2625 shield, +sig
- 1600mm T2 plate: +4800 armor, +mass
- Large ASB (390 per charge * 7 charges): +2730 shield
- X-Large ASB (980 per charge * 7 charges): +6860 shield
- X-Large ASB (navy, overheated, cyclone - 1482.25 per charge * 9 charges): +13,340.25 shield

Now of course the fitting costs for an X-Large are much higher than an LSE. But on certain ships (ones that are good with ASB fits), you can get around this by only sacrificing a low slot and maybe a rig or two.

Think of the implications of this as a buffer fit item. Instead of spending 3+ mids on LSEs, you can spend one mid, a low, and a rig to get a fantastically greater amount of "EHP," without the downsides of increased sig or mass to boot! And depending on the ship, a second ASB can be mounted without spending another low. The value of 6+ mids, for 2 mids and a low slot essentially. With this slot economy, you can fit resist mids to further your shield economy even more, or damage mods to push your ship's DPS and EHP way, way out of its normal ranges.


People seem to have been looking at the reload as the way to balance the drawback. It really isn't. In the situations you'd be using ASBs, you only really need to get a handful of charges consumed for it to have been "worth it" compared to buffer fit. (So obviously, they're not a factor in large/fleet fights, like all active tanking.) Any time you reach the reload point on an ASB, it's already performed astoundingly well.

To properly balance ASBs, I believe you will need to instead look at the total shield given by all the charges in the ASB vs. other single slot buffer items. (Though this balance needs to be done in the context of ASB rep per second, because the current assumption is you get all or most of your charges successfully fed before you die.)