Why not just buff all armor reps?
One of the aspects I really like about the ASB is that it allowed CCP to decouple burst tanking from sustained tanking in a new and interesting way. Burst tanking is key for most PVP active tank scenarios while sustained tanking is more common for PVE. We wanted to carry that aspect over to armor tanking, allowing us to create new burst tanking gameplay without making current sustained tanking gameplay overpowered.

You completely free to not use the AAR on ships with small cargoholds, I give you permission.

And also super overpowered.

this.

i dont mean to be harsh fozzie but i have been waiting for this to be looked at for a long long long time and am rather disappointed that this has not been addressed...

with the most respect possible

- fuk

It will be interesting to see a rep/sec comparison between a hull with a 7.5% repair bonus and a hull with a 5% resistance bonus.

Not sure the repair amount hull bonus is helpful enough even after these changes to active armor tanking. Please don't give both Gallente BCs a marginally useful bonus.

So does anybody still use ASBs? I ripped them out all of my fits as the "die in one minute" module. At least they were useful once when they could be fit in pairs and one module worked while the other reloaded but now we need three (or is it four?) for constant boosting and IMHO it became trash.

Will the armor asb share the same trajectory? I only ask because thie game doesn't have enough useless modules in it already it's definitely better introducing more crap instead of fixing what's already in it.

+1 on all the other proposed changes, though.

Also how about removing the speed penalty from armor modules altogether? It's space after all. Just leave the agility penalty thatr's enough IMHO.

Brutix will be the new Cyclone? I think AAR will be awesome in combination with some buffer to help it survive the reload.

assuming that the aar with be eq or less to a medium armor rep i can fit electrons with a 1600

[Brutix, ]
Medium Armor Repairer I
800mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Damage Control II
2x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I
Warp Scrambler II
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I
[empty med slot] choose your poison .. would go for twin or TD .. ~50 grid left

7x Heavy Neutron Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M

2x Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I (place holder for new rig)

Funny thing is the repairer, just 4 heated cycles and it adds more armour than a 1600 plate would have added .. kind of nasty.

With a 3% PG implant I would make the Brutix:

High:
Neutron Blasters II x 7
Mid:
Experimental MWD
Small cap booster II
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler
Low:
MAAR
DC II
EANM II x 2
MFS II x 2
Rigs:
Armor nano pump
Armor overheat rig x 2

With damage implants and drones you can get 700-900 DPS between Null and Void. The small cap booster along with the considerable cap buff will insure you get your 9 charges worth out of the MAAR and keep your guns firing. Balls out like a proper Gallente ship.

It will fit if you skip the plate. You will get about 1300 out of each of your 9 cycles.

dudes

the new Brutix has 7 lows and 50 extra grid

7-4-6 there was only +1 low slot for a total of 17 slots. I have accounted for the 50 extra grid. You need a +3 implant for the fit.

I say absolutely to the new mods and rigs. They offer fantastic opportunities. The new skill I'm kind of 'meh' about. You could just lower the mass of 400 and 1600 plates by 25% and all others by 45%.

I understand all too well that the 100m+ SP crowd needs new skills to train. But they need new skills at the top of the pyramid. I have always felt like there was a giant leap between BS and caps for example. And there is lots of room to flesh out the cap field. (After you burn them and supercaps to the ground and start over in that area of course.)

I agree. I like the mechanics behind AAR. But unlike ASB it does not solve the issue with armor tanking.

ASB solved 2 issues: It gives nice burst tanking capability. It decoupled active tanking from capacitor use. It granted shield tanked ships neuting immunity (together with capless guns), It has slighly lower fiting requirements than T1 variant.

AAR tend to solve just single issue: Give armour repairs burst tanking capability.

No other issues people have are being addressed. The high PG requirements of medium and large repair fits (as you need dual rep at lest to be able to fight). Quite large capacitor usage on medium and large armour repair modules. And relatively weak amount repaired per second eve on bonused ships.

If you take the Brutix and throw one tech one MAR on it you get 363 reps per cycle overheated. Add three armor nano pumps and that goes to 478 overheated. So 478 * 2.25 * 9 cycles = 9680 repaired? Still sounds nice to me.

Putting one on a non bonused ship nets 7047 hp.

As I said before the issue isnt speed, armor does not need to be like shield tanking.

The problem is that the sig radius penalties for shield tanking are ineffective, and do not have the same crippling effects as the speed penalties for armor.

IMO armor ships should be slow, but relatively difficult to hit due to smaller sig. Shield ships should be fast, bit the increased sig should make them easier to hit.

The issue is that sig radius has very little effect on the amount of damage received, while transversal velocity (maneuverability) has a huge impact. Make sig radius a part of the tracking calculation aswell, so that a large signature radius nullifies some of the effect of transversal velocity.

Sig only has an effect on gun size/ ship sig, it has not effect on tracking whatsoever, its kind of stapled on there like an afterthought.

I don't know if this is possible... but I think the Ancillary Armor repper would be much, much, much better if you could "chose" when to activate the "ancillary" portion...

Essentially, if you could use the rep at 3/4 t1 amount until you activate the ancillary reps to give you a boost to repping when you most want it, rather than just at the beginning of the cycle, it would be a much better module!

Powergrid usage penalty on active rigs
When looking for a replacement for the speed penalty on active tanking rigs our goal was for the penalty to be something significant (useless penalties are something we want less of) without being onerous. The rep PG penalty had the advantage of being much easier to work around through fitting adjustments than the speed penalty, while being significant enough that it could not be completely ignored. I'm open to possible changes to that mechanic, either through changing the penalty itself or adjusting the PG use of medium and large reps a bit.

Reducing ganglink bonuses and increasing effectiveness in other ways
As I've said before, this is something we definitely want to do. Links are both too effective in their direct bonuses as well as their ability to be used off-grid. However getting this specific issue fixed is going to need to wait until after 1.1. Once we have the room to implement some changes to the way warfare links work from the ground up, expect changes to a lot of other modules and mechanics to happen at the same time.

Paradoxically, allowing oversized mods reduces player choice because the oversized mods end up being the better choice. Choices are only meaningful when it's not obvious which choice is best.

How many shield tanked frigates fits use small over medium shield extenders?

How many cruiser fits use 800mm plates over 1600mm plates?

How many people even use 50mm, 100mm plates and micro shield extenders?

If you disallowed oversizing of modules and instead gave each shipclass two types of plates/extenders/repairers (a "light" and "heavy" version) then you could balance them against each other within the class. Lighter plates/extenders wouldn't have to suck anymore when compared to the heavier plate/extender and you could bring the two closer together in terms of effectiveness to create some real choices. Right now you can't do this because they are shared by multiple shipclasses and what's balanced for one isn't balance for another.

In fact this system opens up the door for more variety as you could for example give light shield extenders a totally different penalty (say cap recharge) than heavy extenders (sig radius).

So all said, I think my proposal would be an excellent way to increase player choice while making balancing much easier (and arguably actually possible).

Dual rep fits can now fit one repper and have the same effectiveness for 2 minutes while decreasing cap use, freeing a lowslot, and freeing up a ton of grid. This is a very significant fitting change IMO.

I sincerly hope if this occurs that the cap use drops similarly, otherwise it negates all the advantage of the dropped rep cycle.
We already have a crazy situation with Armour Reps where the higher your repair skill, the more capacitor your repairs use.

Do you even play Eve? Do you know what falloff means? What is this fit that allows your maelstrom to tank over 1.2k DPS using one ASB at a time? I also said I overloaded the ASB in my calculation of the tank, not just the armor tank. Using all weapons, tank, and EW modules for over five minutes on one cap booster isn't enough?

New update, we're planning at the moment to reduce the powergrid use on medium and large armor reps.

Mediums by 20%
Larges by 10%

We were hoping to get these and all the other latest versions of the changes up on Sisi today, but we had an unrelated issue with our Sisi build system. ETA for Sisi is as soon as possible, sorry for the delay.