Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The current ability of shield tanked ships to wholly dictate the engagement in k-space needs to be nerfed. Not 100% that this is the best way but it is better than nothing. Also, needs more shield tears.

They are not pointless, they are niche.

What they need is a meaningful advantage over passive ones - and superior mobility hits the spot perfectly.

No one expects that blobtards will switch to active tanks. It's not the point of these changes. The whole point of this is giving active tanks an advantage. Alternatively they can add a velocity boost bonus to reps/shield boosters, but implying penalties to passive things is just much more logical.

Also - all these tears they spill are really delicious :)

Death to your and your 40 friends' drakes.

As much as I am giddy at the concept of nerfing passive tanks and boosting active tanks, this is the wrong way to go about it.
Yes, passive tanking is insanely powerful, specifically shields.
Yes, active tanking is the black sheep of tanking, specifically armor.

The biggest problem is scaling the two types of tanking for different types of fights and different, uh, price brackets:
For roaming, active tanking is acceptable, but as the number of targets go up, becomes more and more useless.
Passive tanking on the other hand, is always acceptable, and becomes the method of choice as the number of targets begin to ramp up into the large scale.

Both are heavily augmented by link warfare, however one uses cap, and the other does not.
At the same time, shields regenerate and armor does not, giving a sizable edge to shield tanking.

These proposals don't change any of the above constants.
Active tanking will still be comparatively weak, and passive tanking will still be the ideal method.
As someone who routinely pilots active-tanking armor ships, I never stop to think how much slower my rep augmenting rigs are making me. Is it a downside, sure, but it's not something so ridiculous that I think a whole redesign is needed.

Since the speed/agility changes we (CSM6) made in Crucible, this proposal seems a bit outdated and unnecessary.
If you want to change the speed penalty from active armor rigs, go right ahead, but there's no reason to nerf the **** out of passive rigs. The number of ships that gain from this is far smaller than the number of ships that will be nerfed quite heavily.

There are a handful of ships that come to mind that would be heavily effected by these changes;
The Hurricane, Vagabond, Cynabal, Drake, & Tier3 BCs

The Hurricane needs a slap, but this isn't the way to do it.
It's got too much grid and too much speed. Reduce both stats at the ship, not in the rigs.

The Vagabond is a fine ship, leave it alone.

The Cynabal is too agile, has too much SS, and too much grid.
Reduce the stats at the ship, not in the rigs.

Tier3s are heavily niched ships, which are too fast/agile (moreso with links).
They're faster and more agile than HACs, which have no way to compete.
Reduce the stats at the ships, not in the rigs.

I think that about sums it up!

No, the whole point is to make them worth-while. The need more than a simple mobility boost to make that happen. The problem right now is that there are so many situation where an active tank doesn't actually provide much of a tank at all, and while you may deem it boring to see HP slowly drain away rather than see-saw back and forth at the same rate, making active tanks act more like passive regen would help fix that particular issue (also, since it would still be a matter of cap-for-HP, it wouldn't be the skewed-bell-curve regen of a PST, but a constant, linear recharge across the entire range of hit points… so it wouldn't have the same feel as shooting a passive Drake).

You'd still be able to out-DPS them or just alpha them into oblivion, but the circumstances where the tank itself would actually come into play would be a bit more common. Excitement isn't really a good balancing factor.

If you want to promote active tanking (and you should, across all races, not just Gallente and Minmatar) just remove penalties from active tanking rigs.

This is just a bad idea. First off, there's a reason that passive/buffer tanking is better in pvp. Second, maybe you should look at the problems w/ active tanking before you go breaking stuff. Third, armor rigs make you heavier, shield rigs make you bigger. This makes a great deal of sense (with a few notable exceptions) as generally most armor rigs give you more max armor hp/resist, thus it makes sense that you would get heavier, likewise with the shield rigs and sig radius. Maybe if you JUST changed armor nano-pumps, it might be something of a reasonable idea. Cutting and pasting penalties however is just the kind of bad idea that has much larger reprecussions than the CCP team these days seems to realize. Not only that, the whole idea is damaging to what you're trying to fix. The problem is that most pvp doesn't last long enough for active tanking to make a difference, not that you're either too big or too slow. The fact is that you're just better off stacking alot of cap-independent hp and hoping you kill the other guy first, mostly because 90% of all pvp happens on station.

Addendum: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In this case, active tanking isn't broken, it's just got squeaky floorboards, which isn't an excuse to suddenly put in carpet, as you will still have the same problem, if not a worse one as the loose floorboard is gonna wear a hole in your brand new carpet.

Agreed. Sweeping changes are bad, just have many smaller little tweaks to get it right.

I think this is actually a great ideat and would be good for balancing. However, you will face fierce resistance from people who want to keep their winmatar canes and so on...