Sure the Curse is often the primary in small scale fights but it has a major role if you face a skirmish gang with say 2 to 4 Scimis. With a dampener Drake+Curse setup you can beat those skirmish logi setup without needing any logis on your own. I don't have to explain to you what happens to the Rapier, Huginn and the odd Loki in such fights, they are dampned/neuted to hell and in case of the Rapier, Huginn primary too. Of course you have to make sure some scimis are dampned too, to beat the RR. After that it's a clean up job, damp and neut the Scimis either forcing them out of the fight or into your own optimal range.

The ASB will make small scale skirmish logi setups history, except the standard Drake+Scimi and so the Curse.

Ah yes the age old argument.

2007: Nano isn't broken because you can bring your own nano
2008: ECM isn't broken because you can bring your own ECM
2010: Logistics aren't broken because you can bring your own logistics
2011: t3 links aren't broken because you can bring your own t3 links
2012: ASBs aren't broken because you can bring your own ASB

If the only way to counter a module is to bring one of your own, then that module is not balanced. Everything in Eve has a counter. ASBs, atm, do not. And no, "bring more dudes" is not a counter.

I knew this was all fantasy the second you started talking about the mass use of damps.

Its not the only counter but the eve populace at large will simply sit and cry about it until somebody shows them how to beat it since they're too lazy to work it out on their own.

Everybody else just puts in testing and practice on the test server until they understand what the mod can and can't do.

There is no such thing as a armor passive tank. Passive tank refers only to a shield's natural regeneration. This can be increased with various mods and rigs. The Mrym for example can field a particularly impressive passive shield tank. As armor does not regenerate on its own its nonsensical.

Armor can be a buffer tank (plates, trimarks, resist) or it can be active (armor reps, resist, respective rigs).

Sheild has more options. Any shield tank will have a passive aspect though depending on the set up can be negligible. So a shield can have buffer (extenders, resists, rigs), passive (rechargers, rigs, and that low slot mod whose name escapes me) and active.

So bottom line is that armor repping currently sucks. The worst part about it is that the ships that have an armor rep bonus are all meant to fight close in. So that's in neut range. Further you have to sacrifice an incredible amount of slots to make it work. Your also slow as hell. So you get scrammed, webbed, neuted, can't control range and die. The Mrym is the only viable BC armor repper and has to sacrifice 2 mid slots just to make it work. And with smart pilots you'll stuggle to beat the neut cycle with you cap boosters. Now I can get better performance out of aux shield boosters with far less commitment of slots. Even on the Mrym that is freaking bonused for armor repping! You don't see a problem with this?

So NO having a viable armor repping mod would not dumb the game down. CCP came up with a great mod as its un neutable. Unfortunately they gave it to winmatar because that is what everyone flies.

I don't think the proper response is to say well then lets give armor ships an equally overpowered module so armor and shield are the same!

So armour and shield were the same before ASB release? Really? ...

But more importantly there was a variety of ways to tank the ships within the broad catagories of "armor tank" and "shield tank." Adding an over powered ancillary armor booster reduces all that variety to one of 2 choices 1) ASB fit or 2)AAB fit. All the various other fits can be thrown out the window along with the diversity in fitting ships in eve.

I think you are a bit too worked up about semantics. I disagree with your narrow catagorizations. Slaves are passive tank implants even though they add to armor which does not regenerate. But whatever.

There were quite a few viable active armor tank pvp ships. Triple rep and dual rep myrm. The dual rep did not require 2 midslots. Dual rep incursus, dual rep sfi, and various dominix fits not to mention all the tech 2 amarr and gallente ships.

The issue now is really whether the ancillary shield booster is so overpowered that all these fits are obsolete. I don't think the proper response is to say well then lets give armor ships an equally overpowered module so armor and shield are the same!


I think that just tramples the nuanced considerations in how you fit ships and gives you the dumbed down choice of if under 10 in your gang then "ancillary shield booster or ancillary armor booster take your pick they are the same."

Like I said right now as a mainly solo pilot I use the asbs allot. And there will need to be some fine tuning either with the mod directly or with how armor tanking works. But just creating and equally overpowered armor tanking mod is hamfisted and will dumb the game down.

Dual ASB fits need some serious fixing. There's no way anyone (Grath included) can try to pass them off as something that promotes solo/small gang fights. I wrote a ridiculously long post about what I tested on Sisi with Tinkeng (PL's logi pilot for every match) but it was too much so here's the tl;dr -

Corner A: Vindicator
HG slaves, T2 trimarks, Single X-type LAR, A-type EANM, Reactive hardener, 1600 plate, damage control, two faction magstabs with a legion giving bonuses

Corner B: Maelstrom
Dual ASBs, a single T2 invuln, a single T2 boost amp, LG crystals, damage control, 2x anti-EM rigs/1x anti-thermal, while receiving no gang bonuses.

That vindicator does 1350ish turret DPS, +250 from drones for 1600. Overloading the guns brings it up to 1800 with drones. Long story short, the vindicator won. However, it took until the maelstrom ran completely out of navy 400's which was over 5 minutes of punching eachother in the face. The mail lists the damage taken as 496,000 which was from the vindicator overloading two separate stacks of neutrons and 5 berserkers that were never killed. The vindicator ended with 50% armor and only 6 navy cap booster 800s left - the maelstrom never overloaded it's guns or lost his drones.

The fact that the multi-billion isk deadspace/faction fit vindicator had as much trouble as it did killing a junk T2 fit maelstrom whose mods couldn't have cost more than 30mil is simply astounding to me. ****, we probably could have called it even by giving the maelstrom a blockade runner alt who dropped more boosters... although it most likely would never have died then.

I see your point, but couldn't an active armor tank battleship with cap boosters pull off a similar result?

I see your point, but couldn't an active armor tank battleship with cap boosters pull off a similar result?

If only someone had warned us about this ahead of time.

Oh
wait

This is funny, people are acting like some great sea of 1v1s are being ruined by ASBs.


Its a myth, everybody blobs, and the ASB is the small gang blob equalizer. I roam about every night for 2-3 hours a night around lowsec, and what do i see, groups of 3-4 people looking for easy kills.

What has the ASB done to that? Oh, what, those 3-4 people are now getting curb stomped by a lone ship or not getting the kills they wanted at all?

Oh, damn...


Guess it sucks to be a victim of the environment you created.

Hey Grath, what happens if all 3-4 of those people have asbs you have to chew through. OK good talk.

Well if my name was dez affinity i'd use my neutral repping alt, my falcon alt, and my netural scout to see all that coming and get around it.

EDIT: And lets be honest when you were movin in your neutral booster alt you'd have seen them and avoided it anyway.


Dez Affinity, 5 boxing solo pvp and crying since mid 2012

Ok, obviously we are not going to agree on it but nor do I feel like having a pissing match about it. I don't think it will dumb the game down, but you know what if that's what you want to call it, then fine. Dumb the game down and give armor ships a more viable armor rep system. It would be great to have a module for armor tanking ships that would provide boosts without also having to sacrifice mid slots to cap boosters and also suffer the danger of neuting. Its the only way to balance things if the ASB is going to remain as it is. Which I'm fine with.

And let's say you don't have those alts, what then? Try not to slip into ad hominem, it does nothing to advance your argument.

The point is, why is one kind of asshattery better than another? Why is it ok to run around with 5 accounts that use falcon alts and neutral reppers and afk boosting alts but its not ok to have a powerful burst tank on something?


Its all the same crap, this myth about the great small gang pvp arenas of eve and their decline is all a load of crap by people that are either unable to gank, or being ganked, small gang pvp has always revolved around who has more ships, and more firepower, just like blob warfare, only the numbers used are different.

You're not outnumbered by 20 or 30, you're outnumbered by 2 or 3 and the outcome is usually the same.

If you want to cry about whats right and fair in EVE your trail should start well before the ASB, if anything, its tipping the balance BACK towards the TRUE lone player.

I think AT would benefit a lot more from banning/nerfing ECM than ASB.

*hides from the rotten tomatoes*

Edit2:
Granted ECM hasn't made as bothersomely boring matches this year than it used to in some previous tournaments.

It isn't so much nerf, but what is needed is instead of booster giving free boost. it should just reduce the cap needed per cycle.

So your new counter-argument is "people in eve are blobbing faggots so why even bother balancing the ASB"?

Your argument has slowly degenerated from "no no, it's fine, really" to "lol other things are gay, too"

I would reword that as 'removing options' - I might be willing to bet that ASB Cyclone/Sleipnir/Vargur are the most common ships this tournament. There is no reason to use another option because the ASB tank combined with a logi to fill your reload time makes the tank so strong that there is not a lot that can deal with it without your dps ship dying before the enemy ASB ship is dead.

Also, that setup we saw a few days ago with 10 T1 battlecruisers - cyclones, feroxes and....brutixes (I think? Can't remember. Doesn't matter.) The 4 cyclones and 4 feroxes with ASBs would take so long to kill with almost a minute straight of ASB boosting on each ship that even if the ASB ships were doing no dps they would still all survive because you have to spend a whole minute wearing down the ASB charges and then even more time actually killing them. The match would be over before they died.

Well if my name was dez affinity i'd use my neutral repping alt, my falcon alt, and my netural scout to see all that coming and get around it.

EDIT: And lets be honest when you were movin in your neutral booster alt you'd have seen them and avoided it anyway.


Dez Affinity, 5 boxing solo pvp and crying since mid 2012