EVE General Discussion

The way you'd probably want to deal with a charge-driven repairer is to give it a really long reload time.

Another option is to use the heat system, but it's not hugely user-friendly and ends up with your reps being burnt out which is less cool.

Another option is to use the heat system, but it's not hugely user-friendly and ends up with your reps being burnt out which is less cool.

Another option is to use the heat system . . . burnt out which is less cool.

heat system . . . less cool.

I like this very much. Scripts.

Though all this looks very difficult to balance. I accepted as facts that active tanked ships are usefull in smallscale warfare and not in anything else, so I didn't bother finding a solution for scalability.

I would say, if you want to keep active tanking as it is, a small-scale warfare weapon, then apply the changes I posted. If you want to bring scalability, well then it needs some brainstorming.

The problem is, active tanking should be a valid option when in a bigger fleet. How to make it a valid option. How to absorb a huge amount of damage, while not being overpowered in small gang warfare.

Maybe some siege-like scripts for reppers ? Like, you get +100% HP repaired, -50% duration, -60% velocity for the duration of the cycle ? But then it rises more problems. Against a big fleet, your paperthin buffer (due to active setup) will melt, and you still won't have enough time to rep the incoming damage, despite having massively more effective reppers. The velocity malus would allow you to warp faster (like the web trick) and it might be a big balancing issue.

Or just like Cailais said, ammo for armor reps ? Just like capbooster charges. It would still be a pain to balance, but you can, for exemple, have 500HP/25m3, 1500HP/50m3, 3000HP/75m3, 5000HP/100m3, 8000HP/150m3 (The first value being the raw armor HP repaired, the second being the volume it would take in the armor repper). The armor reppers would have 50m3 and a 4s cycle for a small one, medium ones would have 100m3 and a 8s cycle, large ones would have 300m3 and a 10s cycle.

It would allow you to store 3x5000HP in a large repper, ready to unleash them when you're in low armor.

But then again it would be a huge pain in the butt to balance it and I'm not really in the mood of trying to balance all that :/

I'm going to disagree and say that the real problem with active tanking is its lack of scalability.

With buffer tanking, your survivability against an arbitrary amount of DPS is always directly proportional to your EHP. No matter what situation you're in, adding 50% EHP keeps you alive 50% longer.

With active tanking, there's a range of DPS where you survive indefinitely (effective rep amount > incoming DPS), a fairly thin range DPS where it's "balanced" (effective rep amount ~= incoming DPS), and then a huge range of DPS above that where your tank is effectively pointless (effective rep amount << incoming DPS) and has no impact whatsoever on your survivability.

This is I think also a major issue with "blasters" - a lot of the blaster platforms have to choose between fitting an active tank which isn't going to help at all half the time, and fitting a passive tank which discards one of their major hull bonuses and slows the ship down to boot.

The tricky bit in resolving this is finding a way to let active tanking scale effectively at higher DPS ranges without making it totally overpowered for smaller engagements. The most obvious fix I can see is some method of boosting active tanking's burst repair potential without making it sustainable at those levels. Adding permanent resistance bonuses to reps makes the modules somewhat more useful but also serves to homogenize fittings towards primarily relying on EHP.

Active Tanking MK II
Active tanking now evolves to keep pace with modern warfare. Active tanking performance vs resistance bonuses ship increases from 2% to about 14%.
In the largest change, the overloaded state of active tanking modules receive a significant boost, allowing active tanking ships to momentarily deal with bursts of high damage within small gang warfare much better than before. Finally, as top speed is vital to acceleration in Eve, armour rig penalties were modified.

- Racial (Gallente and Minmatar) Active tanking bonus changed from 7.5% per level to 10%.

- The overloaded bonus on both Shield Boosters and Armour Repairers changes to include a (stacking penalised with active tanking mods) 5%, 10% and 15% bonus to small, medium and large Shield or Armour resistances (respectively)

Actual pvp 1v1 or 2v2 or other very small fights are increasingly rare as corps/alliances and bluelists keep growing in size, and ingame intel channels become more effective. So most combat happens beyond the range of DPS at which active tanking is viable, hence active tanking is generally a joke.

Active Tanking

Fitting recquirements :

This means, when you actually want to fit an active tanking ship (like the Cyclone or the Brutix), not only you'll have troubles with fitting all your guns/MWD but you'll also run into capacitor problems.[/b]

This would only be a "fix" up to the amount of buffer the active tank has. With a burst tank who cares if you can tank 7000dps on paper, if you only have 1000ehp you will die. Burst tanks repair a very large percentage of hp with each cycle.
However, this an is interesting idea. Perhaps active tanks (or at least those meant for bursting) could have a repair half-life. Where the first cycle during activation repairs more hp than a sustained repair, then each cycle afterwords decreases repair amount till it hits a pre-defined floor for the module being used.

This is I think also a major issue with "blasters" - a lot of the blaster platforms have to choose between fitting an active tank which isn't going to help at all half the time, and fitting a passive tank which discards one of their major hull bonuses and slows the ship down to boot.