Player Features and Ideas Discussion

! WARNING !

Carebears crying for permatanks !



Burst tanks FTW !

AAR made for PvP... hell yeah.. go back to your rainbowland with your shiney fitting farmers :P

It's not even competitive. That gets it into tanking range of a shield-tanked Myrm, but it then does ridiculously low damage compared to the shield Myrm (which still tanks a bit more DPS while fitting three Drone Damage Amps). It's really, really sad that a Myrm with every single low slot, every rig, and half it's med slots devoted to tank still doens't quite tank as well as a shield-tanked Myrm with half of its low slots devoted to Drone Damage Amps. The only reason anyone ever armor-tanks a Myrm is they foolishly read the description and thought that rep bonus should get used, but never actually ran the numbers.

The large armor reps aren't that great either, even fitting requirements aside.

On the other hand, that will just widen the gap between the shield and armor fit Myrmidon's dps. The shield version will still be able to fit more damage amps than the armor...

Confirming I am indeed a carebear. Why would you fit an AAR on a MYRM instead of an XLASB?

Btw when I actually carebear, my armor ship needs cap transfers and RR to hold up as well a passive shield tank.

Is my title pretentious enough?

We've got the resources all properly committed so I'm now ready to share with you all our initial plan to fix some of the biggest problems that face armor tanking in this game. Sorry for the extended period of teasing, hopefully the happy ending will make it all worthwhile.

I was going to go into this big spiel about all the problems with armor tanking in general and active armor tanking in particular, but you all know this so I'll jump straight to the interesting bits.

Here's what we're looking for feedback on:

Armor Rigs Updated formerly incorrect bonus on the Overcharger.

• New rig called the Nanobot Overcharger that increased the overheat bonus on your local armor reps by 100% (120% for T2). So with one of the T1 rigs overheating gives the rep 20% more rep amount and 30% faster rate of fire instead of the default 10% and 15% respectively. This effect is stacking penalized and gives no bonus when the reps are not overheated. Same calibration and build costs as a Aux Nano or Nanobot Acc rig.
• Change the penalty on all active armor rigs (Aux Nano Pump, Nanobot Accelerator, and the new Nanobot Overcharger) to increase the powergrid use of local armor reps by 10% instead of reducing ship velocity. Note this is increasing the PG use of the reps by 10% (or 5% at Armor Rigging V) not decreasing the total PG of the ship.

Plates

• Add a new skill to the game called Armor Upgrades. This skill reduces the mass penalty of all armor plates by 5% per level. (Int/Mem, rank 3, requires Mechanics 3) This skill affects all plates (including 1600mm) and is separate from the stat change listed below.
• Reduce the base mass penalty on all 800mm, 200mm and 50mm plates by 20%

Ancillary Armor Repairer

• Not the same mechanic as the ASB, please read to the end.
• Always uses the same cap as a normal (T1/T2/Named) Armor Repper
• When not loaded with a cap booster, has 3/4 the rep amount as a T1 Armor Repairer
• Loaded cap boosters triple rep amount (so reps 2.25x a T1 repairer when loaded)
• Same cycle time and fittings as T1 reps
• Same capacity, charge restrictions and reload time as an ASB, but the longer cycle time of armor reps means it goes longer between reloads
• Limited to one per ship

:Edit:
Incursus
With these changes we're looking to reduce the Incursus rep bonus from 10% to 7.5% because otherwise it would be wtfbbqop. Forgot to mention that initially :mybad:

Quick Q&A about the AAR:

Why limited to one per ship?

The longer time between reloads is a big part of the playstyle we wanted to give the AAR, but that with multiple copies would completely negate the burst tanking ideal. In addition, there is more of a tradition of lowslot tanking modules restricted to one per ship so I made the call that in this case the restriction would be worthwhile. The ASB debate is a separate issue unconnected. Please note that nothing is preventing current dual or triple rep fits from swapping one of their reps into an AAR.

Why keep the cap use consistent?

The elimination of cap consumption when loaded is a huge advantage of ASBs, but we decided with the AAR to build the strengths in another direction, focusing on greater stability instead. In addition, one downside of the ASB's zero cap use is the inability of one player to influence the tank of another through neuts. This works ok for the ASB but I am not inclined to expand that mechanic further.

Why not just buff all armor reps?

One of the aspects I really like about the ASB is that it allowed CCP to decouple burst tanking from sustained tanking in a new and interesting way. Burst tanking is key for most PVP active tank scenarios while sustained tanking is more common for PVE. We wanted to carry that aspect over to armor tanking, allowing us to create new burst tanking gameplay without making current sustained tanking gameplay overpowered.

So we are very interested in hearing your feedback on this proposal. Expect at least most of these changes to make it into the next Sisi build for playtesting (the AARs might not catch this upcoming build but they should at least be in the one after that).

Because its going to be better? do you realise how much 2.25 more is? Without gimping your fittings?

if u think shield is better.. use tha shield stuffz.. or use armor stuff if u think armor is better. Who care what u fitt on your myrmidon??

Even as someone who exclusively flies armor ships I want to see the asymmetry beyween shield and armor preserved and an armor repairer you can load with cap boosters for 0 cap repping blurs that considerably.