Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As we all know, active tanking doesn’t work in a large-scale PVP setting. There is no effective method of making it so a single ship is able to tank a large gang of enemy ships without making its tanking ability extremely overpowered but on the other side of the coin a number of ships have active tanking bonuses where they are only able to fully maximize their potential when in a active tanking fit. The problem with these active tanking bonuses is that the resistance bonus on similar ships is nearly or as effective in the same active tanking role.

So what do we do? Do we boost these active tanking bonuses, while increasing the chance of making them overpowered, in order to be more effective in that specific role than the resistance bonuses but still leave the ships still relatively unseen in larger fleets? Or do we just scrap the active tanking bonuses in preference of the resists and start seeing higher occurrences of new ships participating in gang warfare and potentially new fleet compositions while at the same time still have the same participation of ships in PVE and small-scale PVP? I’m pretty sure everyone can agree that the latter is the better alternative.

Let us then increase the scale further to take a look at capitals, specifically triage carriers and dreadnaughts. Both ships’ siege modules give bonus to local repair amount, prevent remote repair or energy transfer, and lock them in place for a five-minute cycle. On the small-scale, they currently work moderately well as they are able to tank towers and small gangs until capacitor neutralization starts to occur. However, on the large-scale both of these ships fail catastrophically. Dreads can only be fielded in the initial engagement of a tower and only stay on the field for a minimal amount of cycles without risking massive losses. As soon as an enemy fleet shows up that is greater numbers than your subcap fleet can handle your dreads become next to useless in turning the tide of battle and are going to die if they get tackled or left in siege. Similarly, numerous killmails from the recent WN/CFC conflict demonstrate that triage carriers are unable to function in large-scale fleet engagements, as high alpha will simple melt the carriers between rep cycles.

So again what do we do? The first step to fixing these two capitals is to again move away from the active repair bonus on the siege/triage module in favor of a resistance bonus. Leave to duration bonus alone, but switch the amount bonus to a comparable resistance increase that doesn’t stack similar to a damage control. But what does this mean? By adding resistances you are essentially increasing the amount of time a given amount of opponents need to burn through your tank. You will no longer see a carrier or dread repping back their entire shield or armor in a single cycle, but you are much less likely to see these same ships getting volleyed between reps. An additional bonus of this change is that you are still getting a bonus from the triage module and the fuel used even before you turn on your repair mods and when you are no longer able to use them (i.e. capped out).

A second step if the first proves insufficient in proving a place from these ships in large fleet engagements, especially with the massive numbers of supers currently being fielded, is to potentially allow remote repair on sieged dreads (I’m not entirely sure if this would be the best idea for carriers). These are committed assets and will live or die based on the success or failure of the fleet, which is more than can be said for supercapitals. In their current form, even though you may have a massive fleet of capitals, these ships still come down to each man against the entire enemy fleet. All you can do is sit helplessly and hope that your fleet can kill more enemies than they can kill of yours. It’s a step away from the group helping each individual become more than what they could be separately. By making this change it shifts the dynamics of capital engagements from who has more to who has better tactics and provides a method in which smaller entities could potentially engage larger capital fleets and with superior tactics have the potential of winning.

TL;DR change active repair bonuses on ships and siege modules to resistance bonuses and potentially allow RR on sieged dreads in order to provide a larger selection of viable ships for gang warfare.