Player Features and Ideas Discussion

For the love of all that is good, she is ONLY making a point about resists vs. regen.

This has nothing to do with, "Oh, but Amarr ships are shiny." (OMG, what an insane comment.)

Or, "Minmatar ships kite." So, what, that is not *the point of the article*. Take that to the "I fly a kite" post.

Or, "Gallente ships fight up close". Who cares. Does that change anything to do with the *numbers* shown?

Or, whatever other pet topic you have or pet peeve you have.

The point is PROVEN. Get over it.

I think that you should look at your clothes before you go off to work, look at them closely then decide to put on a pair of socks because, who really cares about the rest of them.

You can't gripe about it all you want but looking at a single aspect of a ship when considering balance is asinine.

But good luck with your I hope CCP comments on this as it's hard to comment on an incomplete analysis.

Either troll or daft.

While this is true you would also have an Abaddon that will outlast the heat death of the universe so.... worth it.

This argument is silly. Yes, active tanking bonuses are generally weaker and more restrictive than resist bonuses. That's a good thing, though, because it allows for more variety in terms of ship-level balancing. Suppose we have two ships in the same class, A and B, and that we want to give them both tanking bonuses. Let's also suppose that A is significantly better than B in some way that is not directly related to tanking - maybe it has more raw DPS, better DPS projection/application, or is a lot faster and more maneuverable. We can compensate for that advantage by giving it a weaker and more restrictive tanking bonus than B, with the net result that we've got two ships that are on the whole well-balanced against one-another but which have very different strengths and weaknesses, and which accommodate different tactics and playstyles.

The alternative - giving identical tanking bonuses to both ships - would make ship A unambiguously better than B under all circumstances, which would obviously be bad in terms of balance. To rectify that, we'd have to take away whatever advantage A had in terms of firepower or maneuverability, with the effect that A and B effectively become reskinned clones of one-another. Doing so would decrease the overall variety available within the game and the scope for using different styles of combat. In short, it would make the game less interesting.

If you have a problem with the overall viability of specific ships with active tanking bonuses, then by all means complain about that and explain how you think they should be improved. However, it makes no sense at all to base your entire complaint around one bonus being weaker than another given that what matters is ship balance and that bonuses are only one component of what makes different ships good or bad.

Proper solution is to improve active armor tankers in their niche, not just normalize them to be more of the same. This game is becoming bloated with copy paste buffer fleet ships and this needs to stop asap...

As for specifics of changes? I'm a bit low on time but I'll go into a modest amount of detail...

1. A change from 7.5% per level to 10% rep bonus on all hulls just as the incursus and t3s have.

2. More low slots on select active tanked BCs, and BS. +1 for brutix, astarte, and maybe the Hyperion. Both the Brutix and Astarte should be seeing the addition of 1 slot each with the upcoming bc changes anyway, a low slot would be a perfect fit for both ships. The addition of a low on the Hyperion is a bit more difficult as the ship is already modeled to fit 8 turrets so a high slot is out, and the 5th mid is needed for a second cap injector to run guns/reps as well.

3. Medium Cap boosters... I think medium cap boosters need to have their capacity increase to allow a t2 to fit 2x navy 800s, or 4x navy 400s. Both the Brutix and Astarte are more or less restricted to fitting on one med cap booster due to only have 4 mid slots. A single med cap booster is not capable of running guns and both armor reppers, let alone provide any form of modest nuet defense. An increase in the capacity I feel would at the very least improve the capabilities of specifically these ships more than any other in the small scale, close range brawling niche they were obviously intended for.

4. A change of the active armor tank rig drawbacks to something other than speed.

Different ships for different styles of play. Normalizing everything into fleet boats is beyond boring, especially when we have hundreds upon hundreds of ships. Hyperion should remain active, megathron should remain the fleet ganker.

Infact it has already been shown that resist bonus is as good for active tanking as a rep bonus.



Holding onto a crappy bonus because we're all afraid of homogenization is just silly. It's time we admitted that a rep bonus as a primary bonus on a tech 1 ship that will only ever have 2 bonuses just doesn't work as well as ships with a resist bonus. You can try and argue that this is how it should be but you're wrong to do so. Because at the end of the day all you've done is doom a good ship to mediocrity because you feel that the game needs "flavor".

Maelstrom vs Rokh: Maelstroem is used because it's the only BS with 8 projectile turret hardpoints. Its active tank bonus is mostly ignored (except for PvE, of course). On a side note, I don't know much about Rokh usage in PvP.

Brutix vs Prophecy: The Brutix has its uses for being a monstrous blaster platform, but the active tank bonus is once again mostly ignored. This also makes it primaried alot and exploding pretty fast, despite having a "tanky" bonus. The prophecy just has too low PWG and CPU to be of any real use.

Cyclone vs Ferox: Cyclone has better offensive potential than the Ferox, but due to having a second bonus limiting it to small engagements, the hurricane is more often used in larger engagements. The Ferox is completely outperformed by the Drake.

Incursus vs Punisher: The active bonus on the Incursus is much higher than on other ships, and buffer tanks are not as important on frigs than on other ships because most of them can still be volleyed, even wth a buffer tank. They mostly rely on speed to survive and buffer tanks are lowering their speed or increasing their sig too much.

Please stop with that racial identity stuff. If the game was based on this, the Amarr and Caldari Navies would have crushed the Gallente and Minmatar a long time ago because of their better performance in fleet fights. It's just silly.

I didn't say that resist ships outperform active ships when active tanking, I said that they can do it just as well.