Discussion of tanking imbalances:
So some people have been asking if we care about some of the design problems inherent in our current tanking situation, and if we're going to redesign these ships to compensate for these problems.
Firstly, we are very aware of the many problems we're facing in tanking design at the moment. The balance between active and passive tanks, and between armor and shield (and honour) tanking are both in need of work. ASBs have made parts of this problem better (adding new interesting gameplay and making "active" tanking more popular) while making other parts worse (too good in many circumstances, and skewing the meta further towards shield). Armor and shield tanking balance suffers because mass (and velocity) penalties are far more severe than signature radius penalties in most circumstances, and to a lesser extent because of the difference between shield hitting at the start of a cycle and armor hitting at the end. This is especially harmful for active tanking Gallente blaster ships that need that speed to get within range.
These problems are real and we are working on them, but the solution isn't to skew the ships themselves too far in the opposite direction. Our goals are to hit the problems at their source.
That being said there may be things we end up doing to these ships to help smooth things out, such as reducing cycle times and/or tweaking the mass of the armor tankers down a bit. We're going to keep working on these ships up to and beyond release in the Winter.


What about reducing the cycle times so the reps can hit fragile frigates faster?:
It's definitely an option we're keeping open, both to help deal with the armor/shield imbalances and also because these ships will so often be repping low buffer allies.