One does not 'simply' use two X-Large ASBs

No, he would have been aligned, and once he saw the enemy ship land right next to him he would have warped off to another obvious celestial and tried again.

...

Edit: CCP Look here

The ASB can do the job of a cap booster and a shield booster in one module, they should be weaker rep than a normal shield booster. How about they get rid of the reload time (or reduce greatly) and make it so that cap boosters can be loaded instantly but in return you get a booster that doesn't rep as much as a normal booster set up.

Why would this be good? Ships that are lacking mid slots can get a good active tank setup, but it will not be as strong as a traditional set up. It is also immune to neuts. Can be useful for the smaller ships, IE frigs, crusiers, HACs maybe. Heck, you can even use it on bigger ships if are going to fight energy neuts. But you will get less repair amount as a trade off.


Traditional active tanks will get boosted so that they can rep much more than they do right now (at the moment their rep amount is pathetic) They will be stronger than an ASB but are vulnerable to neuts and require a cap booster also fitted for it to work.
This will be more ideal for a ship that has many mid slots it can use for tanking. Useful for ships like BCs and Battleships, etc.

Strictly speaking PvP.

The climate right now is go ancillary booster or go home.

I was hoping when CCP said they wanted to "make active tanking more competitive with buffer" They meant actually balancing the current modules instead of releasing another overpowered one.

No matter what I do I cannot find a reason why I'd want to use a regular shield booster over an ancillary or dual-ancillary booster setup.

Not only do I dedicate more slots to doing the same thing, I end up doing it worse in the end.

It makes no sense.


Can CCP respond to what they are going to do about this? Are ancillary shield boosters going to be the only pvp module for shield active tankers or can we expect a REAL balancing soon?

No matter what I do I cannot find a reason why I'd want to use a regular shield booster over an ancillary or dual-ancillary booster setup.

And please do not throw meaningless words like "depth" at me. Especially not about pvp balance. When compared to some of the larger MMOs out there, Eve is a basement side project. The complete lack of 1vs1 balance in Eve may very well be a financial decision. That they don't have the manpower and income for it to be worth trying.

If you look at it from an objective standpoint Eve contains a lot of corner cutting due to the fact that it's made by a smaller developer.


"different" is the word you seek. Not deeper or more complex or meaningful. Just different. Aligning and burning out of another ships range or moving close to keep the turrets from tracking you is no more deeper than simple kiting an opponent in WoW or jumping out of their AOE effects and closing the distance as a melee character.

I'm curious,how many other games are there where there is a need to balance pvp fights that scale up into the thousands? While I do think that CCP is very sluggish when it comes to making balancing changes, I also think it's in no small part because the pvp in eve IS deep, moreso than in most other MMOs, and this is mainly because of how quickly it scales up, as well as the huge amount of meta-gaming. Balancing a 1v1 fight is easy, hell, balancing a 10v10 fight is easy, but doing so in a way that won't **** up the 1000v1000 fights is not.

As for the topic at hand; if SBs are useless, then it's a good sign that ASBs still need a nerf, there's already enough discrepancy between active armor and shield tanking, we don't need to be making it any worse.

Actually the more ships you have the easier it gets to balance. Which is why Eve is balanced around fleet pvp and not solo pvp. Eve has no solo pvp balance. But on the balance Eve attempts to achieve (fleet) the balance is pretty good.

How do you figure?

Cyclone or Sleip with HG crystal set and shield boosters can tank an absolute ridiculous amount of damage for a sustained period of time (pending cap management of course).

Because you have more variation on either side. Ships and setups varied in the hundreds that all do what they do best against their ideal targets with plenty on either side.

I'm surprised you would even call 1 vs 1 balance easy. What 2 ships fighting against each other are even closed balanced in this game?


Blizzard has been trying to balance 1vs1 for 8 years and you call it easy?

So when you were talking about "other large MMOs" you meant WoW. That does explain a few things :)

Typically in larger fleets each side follows a certain doctrine. You don't just show up in whatever you have, there's usually one or 2 ship types that make up the bulk of the fleet, and the only time you show up in anything else is that you don't have the skills or isk for the main ship type. There isn't really much variation on either side when it's 100 carriers+support vs 100 tengus+support. You either fly what the main fleet is flying, or fly something that compliments them well.

What does that have to do with the balance?

You said large fights are easier to balance because of increased variation, which is false, because there isn't that much variation. Fleets are built to support each other, not just thrown together, which throws a whole new level of meta-gaming into the problem of balancing. It's not just "how does A fare against B C and D?" It's "how does A fare when mixed in with K-P against literally every possible combination of fleet types?"

Your example would only be a problem if say one side brought 100 Carriers and the other side brought 100 Dreads but that's just the 1 vs 1 formula on a larger scale. In reality either side will bring a good ratio of each whenever possible and the balance remains.

Not sure the reloading make much difference. What i mean is, an ancillary shield booster needs reloading after his charges are used and the shield booster can't perma run because it needs cap and to be as good as an ASB, a shield booster needs to do almost 2 cycle and can't be shut down if neuted.

Or you can simply use 2 x-large ASB.

If you can't use 2x X-L then you are better using a buffer fit. An un-bonused X-L booster adds almost as much HP before reloading as 1x Large shield extender. It also cost 350 more PG and 100 more CPU.

Long story short, i rarely use ASB's because they only suit particular situations. Dual ASB sleipnirs are one of those situations.

Actually the more ships you have the easier it gets to balance. Which is why Eve is balanced around fleet pvp and not solo pvp. Eve has no solo pvp balance. But on the balance Eve attempts to achieve (fleet) the balance is pretty good.

After a near decade this game is surprisingly well balanced for an RPG.

Rule of thumb is if you think something is without use then you really need to re-evaluate it and the context around its use because something huge just passed under your radar.

This goes double so for the people who currently assume that armour tanking is worthless.

Micro shield extender, what passed under my radar?