Oh hi I'm back again (for a while, anyway).

The new ancilliary boosters seem quite sweet for shield-bonused ships, esp. using crystals/pills. 60 seconds of essentially not receiving damage from a single ship (or even two less ganky ships) is quite damn powerful, and probably enough to make many ships win pointblank even vs slaved buffer-fits. At least, i can see a ancilliary-boosted Cyclone killing a slaved Hurricane (pills might be required, or not).

That said, it again missed the point when it comes to tanking and solo/small gang use. Instead of making active tanking modules take less slots and have less fitting requirements and cap consumption to make them comparable to buffer tanks when it comes to DPS (and speed, regarding armour rigs), they made a improved shield tank fueled directly off cap boosters.

The main problem of active tanks for solo / small gang stuff was not that the amount of tanked vs ehp lost is so low. Even a dual-MAR BC tank which tanks 350 ehp/s or so is not that bad in actual tanking ability, it beats the 3-slot (+3 rig slot) plate fit in survivability when taking less than 800 DPS (comparing two Hurricanes). If all other parameters were equal, I would often opt for an active tank, especially for solo work.

The problem is however very simple, the 3-slot tank takes 3 lowslots, and the dual-MAR takes 5 lowslots and a midslot, and ends up eating more PG and CPU, so you lose two gyrostabs and have to use smaller guns, resulting in a massive DPS loss. It is also equally slow, since trimark rigs have the same penalties as repair rigs. The huge DPS loss just makes it pointless to use the active tank, not the loss in survivability.

Boosting tanking outright is hardly helpful to the solo PVP-er; soloers (and small gangs, where a small gang is 2-5 people at most, not 50 BS) always benefited from DPS and the ability to quickly kill their targets.

The reason is simple, the sooner you can kill the other ship(s), the smaller the chance of the greatest counter to any solo ship appearing - namely, the other guy's gang/blob (or falcon alt), and the easier it is to exploit the mistakes others make, like bad positioning, gang/blob arriving piecemeal, etcetera.

Now off to actually install EVE and shoot someone, enough moaning from an oldtimer :)