Player Features and Ideas Discussion

My god no.

Actually fix active, don't nerf passive.

As i'm sure has been stated somewhere in this thread, you are severely limiting many minmatar ships that are shield tanked and rely on speed. Who wants to fight canes, rifters, and ruptures who are ALL always armor tanked?

You're killing fitting variety.

Reducing speed by mere 10-15% is killing? lol

Back in 2005 and early 2006 they trippled HP. Now that was a kill. Active tanks became very niche precisely since then. Oh, wait, b00ns didn't even play back then, so what can they know...

Still, just a simple fact: my Prophecy had 2k armour HP when I first bought it. Nowadays it's over 6k.

nothing here

This is pretty dumb icbirt

Overhaul is much needed because current drawbacks on rigs make no sense - and if anything, it's literally impossible to make them balanced while sticking to a (fail) concept of signature being equal to velocity. Penalties should be of proper significance, otherwise it makes no sense in having them at all.

Signature radius penalty is a joke. It might make some sense only if they increase it to 50-60% (per rig, so that at lvl 5 it's 25-30%), but why should shield rigs enjoy special treatment? It's much easier to just penalize meaningful stat - like velocity.

Sooo maaany teaaars ! :
Minmatar tears on top of that ! I love it

By the way, most people seem to never had ran an active tank

These changes are great
- no change for armor buffer
- nerf to shield buffer
This make them balanced as right now shield buffer had a pretty neet advantage over armor buffer
- problem with resist rigs for active shield tank
- buff to active armor tank
In pvp, you use armor active tank when your ship have bonus to it or can outtank it's ennemies, or when you expect to speed tank your ennemy and keep some regen (assault frig vs larger target for exemple, or tengu) ; speed here is very welcome ! I think it's a good buff ! No one care about sig unless there is a risk of being alphaed by a large arty ship ; and even then, speed is often better than sig
I don't really see a problem for active shield tank, but I don't use it ; and I think that many people don't use it because there is no drawback to shield buffer
If you want to purely sig tank, then don't use tanking rigs, but speed rigs. These rig keep the shield's advantage at speed by the way

As stated, active tanking rigs would like to not have any drawback, but sig penalty is not very harsh IMO : proof is that no one care about sig penalty for their shield buffer at the moment, so people must be able to live with it.

This is probably not the best move. Active tanking is fairly useless in situations using more than 3-4 people on each side in pvp and/or solo pve. Unless active tanking gets a Major buff its simple not viable compared to passive tank + logistics. Forcing speed ships to change to an active tank without a large buff in local rep amounts or something to that effect means they are far less aided by logistics which just about every gang should have at this point. and with scaling of the fights active tanking becomes less and less viable with more people. so if your small gang warfare is <4 then active tanking makes since. but a more realistic small gang fight would be 15 on 15. Unless active tanks get buffed to where they are similar in rep power to 2-4 logistics reping a resistance/hp passive fit, then all this will do is hurt gal and min ships.

Hey guys let's base our game design decisions on RP! It'll end very well!

Shield buffer fits are no-brainers largely because there's no practical alternative, which these changes would do absolutely nothing to address. The fact is that a number of ships that are currently buffer fit lack the capacitor and slot layouts required for active shield tanking, and on top of that it's essentially impossible to make an active tank soak up useful quantities of damage without using deadspace mods, crystal implants, and boosting alts.

I spend a lot of my time doing small gang work, and the fact is that even in those scenarios (which is where active tanking is supposed to shine), active tanking is not practical at all. You don't have the slots to do it and fit prop and tackle mods. You don't have the capacitor to run the boosters. If you use injection, you lose another midslot to that, sacrificing even more tanked dps or tackle. And even if you did have the cap and the slots, you'd still (in most cases) only expect to tank one opposing ship's DPS, if that. Active tanking is just ******* awful for PvP when considering any kind of remotely "accessible" setup.

When looking at this question semi-holistically, I have to ask what we are trying to accomplish. I know "re-balance active versus passive tanking, and promote usefulness of active tanking in small, mobile combat" was said, but it is not an easy discussion to have especially when wrapping the end with "while making associated rigs more compatible with Gallente armor repairing bonuses."

This leads us to talking about rigs. More specifically, talking about the penalty of rigs in regards to active or passively tanking. The problem with this is that the penalty of the rigs reflects the penalty of the type of tanking in question (Armor vs. shield). If you were to (for example) change it so that Buffer tanks were slow and active tanks were fast, you would have to do more than change rigs (not that this has been mentioned one way or the other), you would have to develop a new philosophy on how tanks are treated in general. So let’s take a look at some characteristics (not a complete list).

Armor Tanks
- Plates/Rigs decrease ship speed and agility
- Non-regenerative HP
- No resist hole
- Implants allow larger buffer tanks
- Influential modules use low/high slots
- Adaptive modules give significant bonus to resist but are passive

Shield Tanks
- Extenders/Rigs increase ship signature radius
- Regenerative HP
- EM resist hole
- Implants allow larger active tanks
- Influential modules use low/med/high slots
- Adaptive modules give significant bonus to resist but are active
- Tend to have low damage output due to more focus on low slot usage or gun fitting requirements.

Active tanks
- Cap intensive
- Can intake a moderate amount of damage for a potentially fixed amount of time.
- Limited buffer
- Limited low/med slots due to tanking module requirements
- Low signature radius and agility penalties
- Limited mobility due to tank/cap/ewar/propulsion mod usage

Passive tanks
- Not cap intensive
- Can intake large fixed amount of damage
- Limited regenerative abilities
- More low/med slots due to tanking module requirements
- High signature radius and agility penalties
- High mobility due to tank/cap/ewar/propulsion mod usage
- Tend to have higher damage output due to less focus on low slot usage or gun fitting requirements.

This only being a small portion of the characteristics for each you would have to consider things like: Should shield extenders behave more like armor plates lowering your ships agility and speed instead of bloating your ships sig radius. You would have to look at an armor crystal implant variant and a shield slave variant (Should also balance how they impact capital warfare since there is currently an imbalance with crystals currently being completely useless on capitals). With this new philosophy in mind would we then have to look at each ships base agility/speed/sig.radius?

This quickly becomes a discussion about how you feel current tanking mechanics are working in EVE versus how you want them to work. I personally active tanking works fine in small engagements (<10). It is only when the incoming DPS is so high that your small buffer is exhausted before you can cycle a repairer.

So, at the end of all of this we come full circle. What do you REALLY want to discuss?