In a sentence, the recent shield nerf has made me chose between stealth tanking and shield tanking, two hugely important aspects of the battlefield right now.

I am a moderately active player who's been here for a while. I have enough SP that I have core skills in a great spot and I know how to take care of myself. By no means am I the best player.

With the advent of the Active Scanner in all levels of play, I had to greatly downsize my suit. I needed to lose the CPU upgrade that let me use higher tier equipment and mods, as well as the armor repairer that kept things running smoothly in favor of dampeners. With Profile dampening level 3, I need both a basic and advanced dampener to get by scans. Although it feels like an unfair trade, I have kept from QQ'ing and tried to work with what I have. I use a compact nanohive to get armor and HP back. I try to dip into cover after every pause in a firefight to check my stats and make sure I have enough HP to move on. You know, basic quality of life stuff for DUST.

With the recent Shield nerf, I have an even bigger problem. The few shield hitpoints I have (422 on a Raven BPO) will take even longer to regenerate out of battle. This feels particularly harsh with the current TTK. In addition, the only way I can balance that reduction out is to accept being scanned all of the time. And that feels like an even worse consequence, because no amount of reduced shield delay would make up for the concentrated fire I'd get if I popped up on scans. So even for a player who is trying to adapt with the times, this feels like a bind.

There are a few more things that I could do to fix this situation.

I could try to max out profile dampening so that I could fit one enhanced dampener and one regulator. But I would still have no way to replenish my armor outside of a nanohive.

I could run with more squads. While this would be a good fix as far as KDR, W/L and WP are concerned, it doesn't address the imbalance that I have in a one on one encounter with another player. It simply smooths it over with more numbers.

I could try to dual tank, but I would be getting the worst of both worlds by trying to do that as a Caldari.

In sum, I think that these shield nerfs were ill-timed. It would have been better to at least pair them with a change to the way bonuses are stacked in DUST (To allow people to dampen their profiles accurately and prevent ferroscale plates from reducing speed penalties), but I digress.

This is supposed to be a team based game, so maybe run with a Logi for your reps?

I have a RAVEN suit too and I find it very difficult to make a survivable fit with it. I generally run pure BPO fittings on the RAVEN so it doesn't bother me that much when I get cut down before I can react.

CAL Assaults are pretty much paper in the current environment so there isn't much you can do.

Didn't have to think about it - maxxed out profile damping months ago - seemed like a logical necessity.

So what would you suggest for someone in my spot (Or I guess our spot)?

Well, if you don't care too much about KDR I'd suggest making some pure BPO fittings. Otherwise I'd go with dampening and damage mods. You will have to stay away from non dampened blues, but it makes a decent flanking suit. You have to treat it like a slightly thicker Scout suit (think cardboard rather than tissue paper).