Ships & Modules

Sorry if this is in the wrong section as the forums were kind of broad, if someone wants to move this or point me in the right one, I would be obliged.






I've seen this topic discussed widely on the forums, but haven't seen any viable solutions. So I have put together how I see the two in the hopes of getting as little flame as possible while hopefully getting as much constructive feedback as possible.

First off, I would like to state that while increasing the flat values of shield/armor tanking modules is not the fix to the problem, as no matter how I look at it, the mechanics behind the different tanking styles are broken.

Mechanic Wise:

Shield tanking is using raw energy to stop incoming dmg, yet doing so costs no capacitor, I have no idea how this is possible, but in eve it is, so we have to work around it. Armor tanking uses energy to repair dmg, this makes sense to me. IMO increasing the regen/hp of a shield, should take capacitor, as you have to put huge amounts of energy to do so, but eve doesn't work that way so we are going to ignore it, because we have to...

Shield tanking increases your signature radius, making you easier to hit.

Armor tanking reduces your overall speed and agility, making you easier to hit and making it harder maneuver. This is a key area I think needs to be fixed. Agility penalties are ok, but Agility AND velocity penalties are killing armor tanking.

I dont want a huge shield nerf, as I dont see it in anyway making the game better.

but the penalties to armor tanking are too high, losing agility AND velocity, compared to increased signature isn't balanced, as signature does not = velocity in terms of usefullness. That is one of the major flaws in the 2 different types of tanking IMO.


Fitting Wise:

Not factoring in where the slots are allocated, as this is up to much debate, armor tanking takes more modules to reach the area of effectiveness then shield tanking does in most cases and this needs to be fixed. Armor tanking modules need buffs to certain things AND nerfs to others to make it so the overall amount of modules needed to field a usable armor tank is on par with shield tanking.





From what I understand of the game so far, effecting the tanks in these ways can balance things while not losing the "uniqueness" of the different styles of tank, while effectively making the balance more broad and effecting all ships rather then just nerfing some, or having some be very overpowered.

I didn't list any "fixes" in this post because I dont consider myself an expert at eve in any way, and I posted it to get suggestions. Some ideas to think about would be:

Signature decreases for armor tanking?
Penetrating dmg on shields?
Dropping velocity penalties for armor rigs?
adjustments to modules + implementing mid slot armor modules?



Things I would reallllly like to avoid as far as suggestions:
Ancillary Armor Boosters...
Passive Armor Regen...

Any other crazy ideas are welcome, remember everything is a suggestion from one person's biased point of view, we all know this, and we have all seen your flames before.

Ancillary Shield boosters are ridiculously powerful at present. They are actually better than officer level shield boosters, yet CCP seems to think this is fine. Go figure. Anyways, ignoring the ASBs, armor and shield tanking are pretty well balanced in my opinion. When I started playing EVE it was armor tanking all day every day. If you tried shield tanking you were laughed out of most PvP fleets. The only thing that has really changed is the ASBs, yet now people seem to think shield are the bee's knees.

To address your points.

Imagine your shields to be a battery. Your ships' reactor (or solar panels) will provide some power to the shields, and some to the capacitor. We have modules that can shift some of this power one way or the other. Shields regenerate, because the energy from the ship's reactor is being constantly fed into it. Same deal with capacitor.

Shield and armor tanking penalties have different effects depending on what you are being shot with.

Increased signature radius means:
- You are targeted faster, meaning you are being shot/jammed/tackled faster.
- Missiles and larger weapon systems will hit you harder.
- You are easier to track.

Reduced speed and agility means:
- You cannot run away as easily.
- You are easier to track
- You take longer to align, meaning there is a longer window where you can be tackled/jammed/shot at.

These penalties seem mostly balanced. both of them mean you are easier to tackle, and easier to hit. It would appear that a shield tanker will be taking more damage, but will have an easier time disengaging. This doesn't seem that imbalanced to me. Armor tanking has other advantages over shield tanking, just as shield tanking has advantages over armor tanking.

Balance does not mean that the two systems should be the same.

The reasons these issues arise is the very large penalties applied by rigs. Without rig penalties, no one would be complaining about this. Perhaps the "solution" (to a problem I'm not sure is actually a problem) is to simply improve the various rigging skills to be 15% reduction to rig drawbacks per level (at V, 75% reduction in penalties).

I do know this though, a blanket buff to armor tanking is not the answer, and neither is a nerf to shield tanking. The two styles are more or less equal, but have different areas in which they are slightly better.

You may begin flaming.

No solution to tanking styles will be complete if it also fails to address the imbalance at the capital level.

FWIW, I'd keep mobility penalties on armour rigs and plates, but add them to shield extenders and rigs too, while removing penalties on active-tank rigs. Not sure about resist rigs. But that still doesn't address the capital imbalance.

I like the ideas, thats kind of the feedback i was hoping to get on both of the above posts, trying to figure out a realistic change that adresses issues acrossed all sizes. I dont have much experience with capitals, but lots of what im seeing for recommendations involves taking the differences out of shield vs armor setups, or changes that would seem to work, as long as they never change any hulls or implement new ones, hehehe.

I didn't really think about all the penalties stacking up from trying to use other rigs and such, was a great point. but I dont want to completely take away the drawbacks, ie if you rig so that you can squeeze on even more armor mods, there has to be some kind of penalty or I think we might end up back where we are now, just with the boot on the other foot. We need to address the core of whats wrong like you said, but keep some penalties, so that there is a drawback to rigging ur ship to fitting as many tanking mods as possible.

I've crunched every change I could see happening, but when I run it by a corp mate I usually find myself with an example of a ship that even with my fixes is rediculous, making it so now just that 1 ship is uber, so Im not really fixing the problems, just making them even more cookie cutter.

Great replies tho, great points in both I hadnt put a lot of consideration into.

Reduce the effectiveness of the ancillary shield booster would be a start. Increase the adaptation speed, reduce the high capacitor usage, and improve the effectiveness slightly of the adaptive armor hardener would help balance things a bit. Armor tanking needs help against the damage boost everyone got.

Ancillary shield booster obsoleted the other shield boosters in PvP if it is indeed more powerful than officer boosters and really needs adjustment. It's supposed to be tech 1 for crying out loud.

Ancillary shield boosters never made any shield boosters obsolete. In fact, they were mostly obsolete from day one in terms of small gang pvp. Active shield tanking was something that only a hand full of ships could pull off well...the ships with bonus to rep effectiveness and they weren't as good as their armor counterparts until you factor in crystals and boosts; cap management was also a nightmare as one regular shield booster consumes more cap than 2 armor repairs combined. The number of mid & low slots also played a big role on why active armor tanking was much better then and still is in some areas.
Taking a look from a general perspective, ASB has made active shield tanking more viable in pvp. Granted, it's a bit overpowered, especially when cruisers can get away with fitting XL-ASB but it does come at a hefty price that some are willing to pay and I won't go as far as to say it has completely wiped out all other forms of tanking. What is left to be done now is to adjust it's PG requirement then it should have its own place among other shield boosters.

Pretty sure he means the shield itself being hit costs no capacitor even though it obviously takes energy.

I always figured the whole Shield runs on a separate self sustaining energy that depletes with weapons fire and recharge over time. That the Shield itself is one big capacitor and the booster is just an energy convertor from the ships main capacitor to the shield capacitor. The Shield Extender is just an extra generator added on.

Still never figured out why ships like the Abbadon where Energy Shields make up about 10% of their total HP are even designed with Shields instead of using the generator space to double the regular capacitor. Seems a waste and if base Shield is anything like extended Shield just makes the ship easier to hit. Then again I wonder why they bother putting heavy Armor on ships designed to be Shield Tanked when it just weighs everything down

EVE is a weird game and I should try not to think about it..

I say make webs largely useless against armor tanks. Armoured boats are hard to move about so it follows that they're hard to web down as well. That'd be a fine boon, yes?

I can propose a buff to armor tanking that shouldn't affect capital vs capital engagements...

Surely most of you have played some sort of RTS game with armor, such as starcraft...

Take a Siege tank, it has HP of 150, and a base armor value of 1, that can be upgraded 3 times for a total armor value of 4.
When a marine fires at it with a 6 damage gauss rifle, the armor value is suptracted from the damage value.

With no armor, the siege tank would be dead in 150/6 = 25 shots from the marine, with its base armor, that becomes 150/(6-1) = 30 shots... and if the 3x +1 vehicle armor upgrades have been researched, and the enemy marine has no firepower upgrades, it takes 150/(6-3-1)= 75 shots from that marine to bring down the siege tank
Meanwhile, it has a negligible effect on an enemy siege tank, which does 30 damage per shot. No armor would take 5 shots, its base armor of 1 increases that to 6 as each shot does 29 damage, but even with the 3rd armor upgrade, the enemy siege tank is doing 26 damage per shot, and it still only takes 6 shots to bring down an enemy siege tank

What if we applied this to eve?
In addition to a % resist, armor just straight up does -X damage points from each incoming hit. We could set a base "armor value" for each ship, such that a cruiser/BC class ship taking hits from medium weapons sees minimal benefit from its armor, meanwhilea BS taking hits from small weapons has its armor shrugging off almost all the incoming damage.
Perhaps Armor plates (like 1600mm) can boost this value (i'd use these rather than hardeners, as they come in sizes)

When dreads and titans start firing at enemy super-Logis (err, I mean carriers), the damage harmlessly absorbed by the armor is insignificant

But... such a change would require a lot of additonal balancing... minnie arty would be OP'd compared to other small weapons when engaging larger targets, the minnie "Alpha advantage" would need to be scaled back. We could further differentiate the weapons within a size class by making the smaller caliber weapons actually put out more DPS by virtue of faster cycle times - ie you'd want 75mm rails against other frigates, but if you're punching against cruiser/BC armor then 150mm rails will be able to apply more damage.

In subcap engagements, this could be a huge advantage for armor ships, and the armor values would need to be tweaked to be not OPd, but not insignificant.

Cap ship armor would need to be relatively weak for their size, so that BS sized weapons don't lose too much DPS piercing it - and of course, if BS weapons aren't affected by it too much, then capital class weapons should be able to ignore it, and armor cap vs shield cap balance should remain the same

No you just made that up. My statement was that it has a lot more buffs from skills associated with it.


Yes it can. It can perma-tank without a booster or any need for modules which drain cap, besides the fact that even with active hardeners switched off, you can STILL get 650 DPS omni-tank with T2 modules.


Yeah, that sucks for shield tanking. Must be hard having so many options to make it so versatile in having different options for different situations. I'll concede that point. Shield tanking is inferior because it is too versatile.



Cool, thanks for telling me something that doesn't matter. I'll be sure to remember this useless piece of information next time I want to tell someone something they won't care about.



Because this thread is about DPS and tackle, right? We're talking about a comparison between tanking schools and how effective they are and the fact is, a Drake is capable of tanking way more than a BC should be able to. Why? Not because of the Drake's hull, but because of the skills and modules available to shield tanking. You must be really bitter to want me to post a bad fit so you can laugh at how useless it is in blob warfare. Did I touch a sore nerve? You seem extremely irate.