EVE General Discussion

If you stop to think about it, this (or some variant of this) is pretty much the ultimate solution to about half the problems Eve is commonly accused of having.

It was correctly pointed out that scalability is the issue, because there's no upper limit to how much incoming dps is possible. Active tanking works in small-scale engagements, but becomes useless as the fleet size grows. Large fleet engagements are fantastic though, and we don't want to do anything to dissuade them from happening. But the reason people like small-scale stuff is because the individuality of each pilot matters more. With 500 vs 500 ships, individuals don't count. It becomes a race between the fleets over calling targets, popping them, and calling the next one. The fight looks great, but it actually kind of sucks.

MotherMoon's suggestion fixes exactly that. I would expand on it thusly:

As the number of ships aggressing you increases, interference causes your ships' effective signature radius to decrease. Additional ships would have a harder and harder time trying to acquire a lock, and those that do have you locked cause less damage as they have a harder time hitting you. Note I said aggressing rather than targeting, since you don't want allies being able to give you a boost just by virtue of targeting you. I acknowledge that this last point may need some more careful coding, but think of the results if this (or something along these lines) were carefully balanced and implemented.

A few pages back someone pointed out that in the movies, large fleet battles are far more interesting because individuals matter. You have frigates in 1v1 or 1v2 dogfights, squadrons of cruisers facing off against rival squadrons, battleship wings focusing fire on dreadnaughts, etc. If there were a scaling penalty on focused fire, balanced so that dozens of frigates could still viably target 1 battleship, or 3-4 cruisers could target 1 cruiser with only a slight penalty, I think fleet fights would be far more interesting. Tactics and fleet doctrine become more important, solid communication and experience become that much more valuable, basically strategy becomes a much bigger part of a large battle because you can no longer just mass a thousand guys with no experience and say: "Shoot what I call."

Active tanking becomes a viable alternative in any fight of any size, and the choice between active and passive tanking becomes all about what works best for the ship you're flying.

Killmails become meaningful, because your kills are yours, not you and 500 other shooters.

The only way I can see Active tanking of any kind to become at all useful in pvp is a simple change in the shield booster mechanics:

Make shield/armor boosters provide a passive resistance bonus akin to hardeners. Suddenly, your mid slot is not entirely wasted.

Fix current EHP stupidity. I for one believe that reducing EHP by 50% (give or take - depends on classes, too) will make the game much better.

pretty much the active tanking bonus is only really usefull for PVE...and to be honnest i am fine with that...

what i am not fine with is the bonus for active tanking on ships as it usually becomes a useless bonus for pvp...

see atry abbadons to prove the point...

so a solution could be boost repper mods and reduce the bonus to be 5% per level... but also make the 5% per level to increase either base sheilds or armor amount and increase the efficiancy of external incomming remote repair mods...

and then now you have a ship bonus that is on par with the resistance profile boost that makes internal/external remote repair better and you have a base hp boost to compete with the ehp boost that resists give you...

this could also help gallente to get close as ships like the brutix and hyperion would have 25-37.5% more base armor...

Well, i did and it works quite well actually. Sitting out a complete Angel Sanctum in a Dominix is quite relaxing without having to worry about cap use with double reppers and various other items one might use in the defeat of rats.
Slave implants (low grade) are required though..... Who needs a carrier?

Ohh and faction or deadspace gear is mandatory too..

Mothermoon has a great idea about more people locking, longer locking takes. That would spread dps and make fights more dynamic.

That being said, I have come to believe that the problem with active tanking is a fundamental issue and I believe there should be an XL armor repper just like there's an XL shield repper. On the topic of how armor tanking is different than shield tanking, I think there is a fundamental difference there too. Shield tankers have the ability to tank their ship as much as they like while maintaining high dps (shield mods are mid, damage mods are lows) or having a large tank and a good speed tank. I believe changing armor tanking to mid slots would fix a lot of the disparity. Blaster boats would then be on even playing grounds and capable of fitting a decent tank as well as speed tanking if they wish, or fitting for higher dps. They still have to get in range, and still go slow, but at least they dont have to do pittance in dps and have a high tank while their shield counterparts have both high dps AND high tank. Probably would be good to change the layout of mid and low slots too for blaster boats.

How would it break it if armor tanking modules go to mid slots and you change the slot layouts to compensate?

The issue is that with armor tanking you get your mid slots for ewar, you have to make a choice.

Some idea's I've come over while reading the first 3 or 4 pages of this thread. Haven't read everything yet, especially not the latest conversation, so please excuse me if this idea has been posted already:

Changing the capacitor booster modules from 'requires a charge' to a long-cooldown no-autorepeat module.
Upon fitting it, you get a malus on your capacitor-recharge-rate, as this module drains energy from the capacitor to store it like a battery. Then you can activate, and get a 800 cap-boost for large modules, 400 for med, 200 for small, 100 for micro.
Or maybe even make them work like your ship now has a SECOND capacitor which can be infused into the main capacitor. Recharges slowly at beginning, peak at 30%, slows down again once it reaches higher capacities. Injects all stored cap into main capacitor upon activation.
Effect: More dynamic cap-injections, no more cargoholds full of booster-charges. Better neutresistance as capacitor gets stored elsewhere.

Another one: Make armor-reps and shield booster be capable of 'overtanking': If you have full armor and run your booster / repper, you gain that repair amount as additional hitpoints. Additional Hitpoints decrease slowly over time and are capped at fix percentage of maximum hitpoints. Lets say you have 10,000 armor-hitpoints, your repper does 500/cycle, and bonus HP is capped at 25% of maximum HP. So after 5 cycles while having fullarmor, you are at your max-stack of additonal armor. If you get hit now, additional armor serves as a buffer tank. If you don't get hit and deactivate your repair-module, your bonus-hitpoints decrease over time, just like an inverted capacitor regeneratiuon or shield recharge. Maybe even design it otherwise, as it's a bonus-pool wich will flow into your real armor or shield once it suffers damage over time. You get hit, are at 90% maximum hitpoints, and now your bonus-pool slowly flows into your normal armor. This would mean: Once suffering damage, you have a more heavy tank, as you have a 'recharge' on your repper's side which will continue until your bonus-pool is exhausted. Would open a lot of tactical stuff to active-tanking, like bolstering up your bonus-pool before engaging / jumping, keep reppers running to create bonuspool in less cap-intensive phases of battle or just dont cycle your tank but let it overtank the enemy.


Just my ideas so far.

1. Target whichever person in your fleet is being primaried.
2. Use a comparatively harmless module like a small nos on him.
3. Nerf the incoming DPS.
4. ????
5. Profit!