Camios
Minmatar Bread Corporation
99
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Posted - 2012.04.25 11:32:00 -
[1] - Quote
Rn Bonnet wrote:You can not balance the prevalence of active vs passive tanking. Many have stated that active tanking "has its place in small gang and pve." What they have not explained is why.
The problem fundamentally lies in the nature of active tanking. On an active tank the more DPS is applied (aka the more ships involved) the less net damage is required. On a passive tank the same net damage is required no matter how many ships are involved. A simple mathematical model of how long it takes an eve ship to die might look like this:
timeToDie = EHP / (NumberShips * DPSPerShip - TankedDPS)
If we take to ships, one with 100k EHP, and no active tank and one with 50k EHP and 1200 dps tanked against ships averaging 600dps we obtain the following equations:
timeToDie = 70,000 / (NumberShips * 600)
timeToDie = 50,000 / (NumberShips * 600 - 1200)
This means after six ships, the _beastly_ 1200DPS active tank is less effective than the somewhat mediocre 70k EHP passive tank. If you happen to like Big O notation (asymptotic arguments), assuming that we fix average DPS:
O( E / N ) > O ( 1 / (N - T)) for E > T
The problem is if you boost active tanking so that the crossover point becomes high, it now becomes impossible for ships to kill each other 1 on 1. Active tanking is more or less unfixable, beyond perhaps taking some time to insure that "active tankers" are more effective against 1 ship than an EHP buffer.
This is a good way of thinking that does not take into account some crucial things:
1. While active tanking gives you a stronger tank, it is not supposed to be cap stable. That means that in your calculations the timeToDie for active tanking is hard limited.
1.1 With inferno we're likely to see fueled shield boosters: once you run out of boosters, your tank fails.
So there is a time after when your tanks fails and you eventually die. Active tanking must not be cap efficient. And we can have diversity between shield and armor, as always: shield active tanking lasts for less, but it can be stronger; while active armor tank is more cap efficient but is also weaker.
That said, I think that having active shield tanking on Angel ships could really be interesting. Of course, we need fueled shield boosters for that, otherwise it is not feasible.
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