most inferior of the three main tanks is Armor Tank.

Three?
Other than armour and shield, the only tank type I can think of is structure, which isn't present in dust and is certainly not superior to armour in EVE.

Other than that, good post, +1.

I refer to speed, but it is a nebulous tank in DUST and hard to pin down specifics. Scouts can and will run faster than anything but an AR user could keep up with, but at the same time it really doesn't seem to be a recognized, 'valid' tank on the ground. As for REAL MEN HULL TANK I thought of saying four but even the certificate for it in EVE makes fun of how laughable it is, and not even HAVs have Structure HP.

Ah yes, speed, but as you said, it really is a 'nebulous' tank type.
It does deserve some recognition though, you're right. It's a significant factor in things, but it's not really a separate 'tank type' as such.

Anyhow, I do find it refreshing that you're looking at the roles of the tank types rather than pointlessly whinging about something getting a buff, 'so it must be OP'.

Incidentally, I'd be curious to hear what you think of something similar I wrote on the topic - P2, specifically.

Yes, speed tends to act as a supplemental tank as often as a main tank, and in DUST it is hard to judge what is speed tank, what is the hit detection running afoul, and what is physics abuse, though these lines will hopefully become more defined in the coming months.

Interesting read on your post, I feel strongly that these views mirror my own. You may want to add that Armor tends to play inherently better DEFENSE with extra HP, slots for damage mods, and local environment, while shields play OFFENSE with speed, the free slots for modular gear (hacking, scanning, etc), and the ability to choose range and cover. if you have the spare characters, of course.

Judging speed tanks is awkward, yeah. It's obvious that scouts have more of it and heavies have less, but you can hardly quantify speed tank.

Thanks for your thoughts - I agree with those, and I think I'll go fiddle with that now. In particular you make an interesting point on the modular gear, I hadn't thought of that.

There are a couple other methods of tanking, though OP is correct that shield, armor, and speed/size are the main three.

For example, an Arazu's main means of defense, when used as a solo ship, is to use sensor damps to reduce its victim's targeting distance to shorter than its own point range.

The Curse fights by draining an opponent's capacitor and damaging their tracking speed/range

Stealth bombers use cloaking for their defense, uncloaking 30km to drop bombs and then recloaking to get a new position.

These are all extremely situational, of course, but they represent some of my favorite ways to fight. ^_^

How about Stealth Tank? That's how I fit my Scouts.

In the words of some man/woman/ungendered transhumanistic clonebeing many years ago
"Armor is junk."
-Some Guy

It is generally assumed, both in EVE and in DUST that the most inferior of the three main tanks is Armor Tank. In DUST, the Plates give you a large sum of HP for a noticeable decrease in speed. Shields give you a lesser amount of rapidly regenerating HP. The paradigm seemed to be shifting in the last few updates with the introduction of new plates, though they were widely met with scorn and derision at their "patented uselessness." Using the basic idea of the modules for both sides and the 1.4 and 1.5 changes in store, I will attempt to assuage the fear of those who use Shields as their primary tank or Explosives as their damagetype.

First, the main traits

Armor
Large HP
Non regenerative
Shield
Small HP
Regenerative

With me so far? Seems balanced enough, correct? Choose Armor if you want a brawler, shields for skirmishers. Next the drawbacks.

Armor
Speed Reduction
Shield
Slower shield regen start (1.5 proposed drawback)

Armor is heavy, and makes the big brawler a slower target. Skirmishers can't afford a loss of speed, but having bigger barriers means they have to have a longer downtime between engagements. Next, repair methods.

Armor
Constant slow repair, needs Reppers (local or Logi) to function
Shield
Fast automated regeneration once exiting combat. Can add modules to increase regen rate or decrease downtime.

Armor gets a slight added buffer to combat HP, but has vastly inferior repair. Shields MUST disengage, but can choose to thanks to their greater speed and are ready for combat far before the armor tanker, under the same amounts of damage.

Both sides have equal weaknesses and strengths as of the 1.5 shielding changes, the only thing we need to hammer down are the numbers, not the principles of the defenses.

While this is true, as far as I know, a bug still exists for shields, making the timer till regen start after the first hit instead of the last hit. It means that incidental damage or continual damage, but with a 1 sec break after 5 or so seconds, shields start to regen. So shields are being able to do more than just skirmish, they can actively tank mid-combat.

That, in addition to various penalties to armor tanking (many of which are being somewhat resolved) such as poor progression vs. shield extenders, bad alternative modules, and increasing penalties to speed relative to gear (costing more speed per point of armor the higher the meta you go) makes armor tanking not as viable as shield tanking.

Side note: In addition, if you lose your shields you aren't dead, you will be soon, but not yet, so flux, the only true anti-shield nade, doesn't kill you like the normal nades. However, for armor tanks, out of armor means dead. I suppose a counter to this could be to create a nade that does similar damage to normal nades, but with a shield bias (so 120% or 130% to shields and 80% or 70% to armor). But that's probably never going to happen.

The bug may or may not still plague DUST, but I am not accounting for it here for the same reason people don't account for other in medias fix issues, if we started balancing against bugs instead of intended results we'd be here all week and still get nothing done.

Also, you may want to search for Uprising 1.4, they're boosting the viability of Armor Plating enourmously.

I did have an idea about Stamina being HP, allowing a 'hulltank' of sorts with stamina extenders. Once armor and shield are gone the bullets tear into you, dropping stamina along with sprinting and jumping. Hit 0 and you collapse from exhaustion and expire without immediate medical help. It's flawed as hell, but I thought it sounded cool. :p

While this is true, as far as I know, a bug still exists for shields, making the timer till regen start after the first hit instead of the last hit. It means that incidental damage or continual damage, but with a 1 sec break after 5 or so seconds, shields start to regen. So shields are being able to do more than just skirmish, they can actively tank mid-combat.

bug still exists for shields

they can actively tank mid-combat

regen start after the first hit

According to CCP, that is intended and therefore not a bug.



That is a lie. You see... meaning after the delay from being damaged or depleted it starts to regenerate; however , as soon as they are hit again, the delay comes back into effect. So, shield tankers cannot actively tank mid-combat.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that CCP said it was a bug, and that someone did the math that proves the bug makes active armor tanking obsolete.

Something along the lines of Armor has 5 points per second max with a Proto repper, 5 seconds for an Assaults shields to return unmodded, shields gain as much in one tick as the proto repper does in five. I'll do some digging, think it was on the thread previously linked here.

Hmm... I guess I'll check again to see if they changed the status from "Working as intended" to "Bug"...

[P4] Regeneration
Another core issue is the problem of regeneration. A lot of people get confused here about the mechanics and the value of some of them.


A lot of people believe that the shield recharge delay is very significant and that the under-fire recharge quality of armour repair modules is also very important.
The short answer GÇô ItGÇÖs not.
The long answer GÇô In the 4 seconds or so it takes for shields to start recharging, a complex armour repairer will regenerate 25 HP. ThatGÇÖs a bit less than 1 assault rifle bullet.
On the fifth second, the shields start to regenerate as well, at a rate of about 25 HP/s. At this point armour has repaired 31.5 HP and shield has repaired 25 HP. Those two numbers are so close that itGÇÖs not even worth a bullet, most of the time what would kill the shield tanker in this instance (assuming equal HP) would also kill the armour tanker.


Of course, this assumes that the shield recharge starts under fire, and this is another misconception.


The shield recharge DOES start under fire if your shields arenGÇÖt depleted. The timer starts from the first bullet that hits you and doesnGÇÖt reset with subsequent bullets. I have tested this repeatedly, and general gameplay shows this to be true as well. Once it starts another bullet hitting will stop it again, but youGÇÖve still regenerated some HP, enough to prevent the under-fire ability of armour tanking from being useful and gaining a meaningful amount of HP over the shield tanker.
Remote armour repairs do not fix the regeneration gap. The normal repair tools repair armour at a very similar rate to shield regeneration, and this requires the assistance of another player who has to fit equipment and stop using his gun while heGÇÖs repairing you. This gets better at the prototype level, but that requires a large SP investment, lots of fitting resources, and itGÇÖs expensive to run prototype equipment.

There are multiple tank theories.
Active Armor
Passive Armor
Active Shields
Passive Shields
DPS
Speed
Stealth

As you can already know half this list doesnt work that well in a shooter.

Well armour based suits can use logi for reps but shield based, logi is useless to them cuz by the time they can rep your armour you will die since they cant rep shields