What with the recent but insufficient armour buff and complaints about this new-fangled AA and the shortening of TTK, I think instead of dropping damage CCP should look towards increasing HP values of suits and relevant modules.

Or increasing CPU/PG of dropsuits so more modules can be fitted.

To be honest, it all points towards tiercide right now. The simplification (and according to many, the oversimplification) of the gun game to what people like to call 'twitch' shooting means that tiers are already losing their value. Being caught out of position with prototype gear will get you killed as easily as being caught out of position in militia gear. Coupled with grenade spam, running expensive gear in pubs is worthless.

Hence, implement tiercide, where all dropsuits are equalised. This will allow for implementation of more variants since variants don't have to be balanced over std-adv-pro tiers.

For example, a Gallente scout suit with reduced movement penalty for armour plates, and a Caldari Assault suit with a bonus to sprint speed. These variants are unheard of currently because implementing them is so much more difficult.

With tiercide and all these dropsuit variants, players specialise into ROLES, which highlight strengths and also weaknesses. Right now, logistics and assault dropsuits perform almost exactly the same combat-wise, and heavies and scouts are underpowered outliers. Variants introduce more to battles, keeps you on your feet, keeps you thinking about the next move. This is infinitely better than simply dropping damage by 10% and trying to rectify the game as a shooter when we all know we don't want DUST to be good solely as an FPS.