When an armour repairer kicks in to repair damage, it has a short period of time when it overloads itself to repair faster than normal:

Two seconds at triple efficiency

Three seconds at double efficiency

and after that it returns to normal.

The caveat is that you only get the three seconds of efficiency a second time once you've been at full armour for twelve seconds. Similarly, you only get the two seconds at triple efficiency once you've been at full armor for twenty seconds.

Some of the major gripes about dropsuit armor is that it's so slow to repair, and that the 'repair under fire' aspect is really a non-issue because you'll still burn through your buffer under fire, even with wildly ridiculous amounts of self-repping.

The solution may be found in a game mechanic in Eve Online.

In Eve, repairers can be overheated, which increases their repping power, but causes damage to the module until you are forced to stop overheating or risk burning it out entirely.

The same game mechanic can be used in Dust. Imagine, if you will:



How would it work?

Say you're in a fight with someone with an assault rifle. You get shot, as you do, and take 200 armour damage from your total of 400. You're both badly hurt but you think you can finish him before he reloads.

You have a complex repairer, so under normal circumstances you'll be repairing 6HP per second.

Hmm,

206 (+6)
212 (+6)
218 (+6)
224 (+6)

doesn't seem like a lot of armor to take someone on after 4 seconds.

Luckily, you have Sponk's Patented Auto-Overheating Repairers, so instead your armour repairs like so:

218 (+18)
236 (+18)
248 (+12)
260 (+12)

Hmm, a lot more margin to take that redberry on. Sadly, you'll be stuck with +6hp/second after that so some friendly logistics team mates are still incredibly appreciated, but at least you have some front-loaded repairs to match the back-loaded shield regeneration of the shield suits.

In summary, this change still keeps the low sustained repairing power + high buffer of the current system, which I consider a unique game design decision, but increases the benefit of "repairs under fire" that is meant to differentiate armour over shields but in reality doesn't do much at the moment.

I like the idea but stacking reppers might make this a bit unbalanced. Maybe only one repper can be overheated at a time? Besides that +1

well when 1.4 comes out gall logis can put two complex plates and 3 complex reps and get more than 20hp/s!!! that's like a shield recharge all the time. Combine that with triage nano hives and a rep tool.
armor wasn't that bad to begin with.
id say the rep mods are pretty sweet already

Tl;dr

Just make active and passive reppers.

Add Capacitor.