Galatea Galilei wrote:Coming from a PvE perspective, active armor tanking is not unusable, but it's so bad relative to shield tanking that I can easily fit a cap-stable shield tank on my Myrmidon that tanks more DPS than a cap-stable twin-MAR armor tank, even though the Myrm has bonuses for armor tanking! You're better off ignoring the bonuses and fitting a shield tank to maximize your sustained tank.
The new rig only helps when overheating, and besides I can't very well use it when I need three CCC rigs, two cap rechargers, and a cap power relay just to make the dual MAR fit stable. The other rig changes just remove the speed penalty, and do nothing to affect the fact that even a twin-MAR setup on a bonused ship doesn't heal as much damage as a passive shield tank on a ship that doesn't even have resist bonuses.
The proposed changes don't seem to come anywhere close to putting a dent into the inferiority of armor tanking...
Pretty much this. This whole set of changes seems like just throwing a weird, needlessly tweaky and kinda useless new module and yet another batch of one-off "must train to V" skills at the problem instead of just making a balance pass on the fundamentals.
If you wanted to get armor tanking back on track, you should have been looking at fundamentals like:
- Having the rep hit at the start instead of the end of the cycle
- Making standard reppers run faster with the same cap use, or just rep more
- Buffing hull active rep bonuses across the board to 10%
- Buffing base armor resist values across the board to give armor tanking some sort of basis for seriously competing with shield features like passive recharge and dual/triple/quad/lolASB tanking
If you wanted to get clever dealing with the speed disparity, how about something really nice like a role bonus for some hulls that negates 80% of the armor rig / plate speed penalty for the designated buffer tank / PvP boats?
As it is, this doesn't feel like "balance" at all, just a random set of things that will bring a bunch of unintended consequences, aggravate the already out of control SP bloat that is going on with the "rebalancing," and not even touch the fundamental issues that have been discussed over and over here for ages.