Beren Hurin
Onslaught Inc
RISE of LEGION
1941
   |
Posted - 2013.12.31 15:33:00 -
[1] - Quote
Lets look at some math just to see how challenging this would be to balance and implement well. My initial thoughts would be that there would be some suits this wouldn't make sense on and some suits that would be dumb to then fit anything else other than hardeners.
Let's say hardeners added 60% hardening. So if a complex shield module is 66 to 73 HP depending on skills and your base shield HP on your suits are something like:
Lights: 70-125
Mediums: 90-225
Heavies: 405-506
A hardener would add more eHP @ 60% for unskilled shields at HP as low as 110. So, basically anything but an armor scout would benefit. The heavy's huge intial pool of HP would benefit the most to these hardeners by adding 250-300 eHP. This is much more significant than plates.
If you could stack two with the normal drawbacks, you could get over 1000 eHP on a medium basic amarr heavy suit's shields. Caldari medium frames could get 700-900 ehp pretty easily, depending on fitting cost.
If these modules didn't give a shield delay drawback like the shield modules themselves, they would likely be much better than the regular shield extenders in practically every way. However you could kind of justify them by saying they are kind of like a shield delay in that the 'cooldown' time is a period of time during which you do not have your full shields.
Alternatively, if you think about this from an armor perspective, are many suits that have a lot of low slots and even higher base armor would get even higher eHP unless the hardeners there were less. However stacking armor hardeners, especially if they lasted more than 15 seconds would potentially mean that the effectiveness of repairs would skyrocket. The proto 125 hp/s repped would multiply with 5 hardeners @ 50% to something over 600 HP/s I believe. Multiple reps would mean that heavies (or anything with 4-5 lowslots) would practically be invincible to light weapon fire during their hardening cycle and while receiving reps. These might be difficult conditions to satisfy in many instances, and could be countered by prioritizing fire on logis vs. heavies, but you see what would start to occurr. |
Beren Hurin
Onslaught Inc
RISE of LEGION
1941
|
Posted - 2013.12.31 15:54:00 -
[2] - Quote
An alternative are modules that have resistance profiles specific to different weapon types. These could be in the form of passive modules that are effectively lower HP versions of extenders/plates but with bigger normal drawbacks but also resistances to the different weapon profiles (rail/plasma/projective/explosive/laser).
The active modules would be versions without HP boosts, but with significantly higher resistance profiles (70-85%) against different weapons types. This would enable things like scouts, who would want to run quick close range setups to have >700 eHP fits against close range HMGs, SMGs, ARs and other shotguns.
However, it would also allow medium brick tankers and heavies to temporarily have the same eHP as HAVs (but without the resistance to light weapon damage).
I think these would bring about the most interesting development in the game though. As it would allow players to recognize the strong slayers' weapons that are fielded, and then switch into the suit most capable to counter that weapon. If you start to see a lot of rail rifles show up against your armor team, you switch to your dual rail-hardened amarr assault and start chipping away with your scrambler rifle.
The way TTK would evolve through a match would create for some interesting dynamics. The team that adapted after the initial setup best would be best positioned to capitalize quickest. In addition the most complementary squads (Damage wise) would be the most effective ones. Target selection and tactics would be crucial to overcoming hardened enemies.
We should not ignore CCP's warning though about TTKs that are too high. Once you get into the 3+ second time frame for TTK, bunny hopping, evasion, and strafing become the 'skill-game' rather than 'gun-game' being important. This further pushes the weapon meta into preferring splash weapons over direct fire, which just generally makes for less fun styles of play.
I think the 15-30 second timers for hardeners would be WAY too high, and something more like 5-10 seconds would be cause more significance to the way battles play out in the game. |