We all know that shield tanking isn't really viable anymore, so this got me thinking about hardeners for the suits.

Shield Hardner - Once activated it can last between the five levels, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This will allow a shield tanked suit to take a bit more of a pounding before the shields pop.

Armor Hardener - Once activated it can last between the five levels, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This will allow armor tankers to buff their armor reliability after their shields fail.

As stated, instead of having to implement a capacitor into the suits, these modules would just run on timers, and could have a lengthy cool down time to make their use a more tactical notion.

Also once activated, these modules could make the dropsuit "shimmer" akin to how a tank shimmers when it activates it's various modules. The shimmer will give players a heads up as to what hardener an enemy has active and will also just look cool. I mean come on, imagine hacking something with an armor hardener on and seeing the orange shimmer going across yourself...adds to the future feel, immersion, and general "I'm a future immortal super soldier" badassery.

Pretty interesting idea. What kind of CPU / PG cost are you thinking of with this? Any interaction with regulators and energizers...if you kick the hardener it extends your recharge time and capacity?

I was thinking of how a Caldari based heavy would actually work. If you have heavy, which by definition is pretty slow, and it's a shield based suit...that seems counter intuitive. Your shield hardener idea might mesh well with that.

Won't happen because

Every suit would need 4 resistance types, 4 ammo types for the 3 tiers of weaponry, new skills, new slots on suits to carry new ammo types and or switch between them. Crunching numbers for different suits to have different base resistances, new skills to alter these resistances, new modules to alter these resistances, passive hardeners, and then the active hardeners your proposing.

Considering Ccp can't even put my amarr character in the correct merc quarters (it's a gallente room btw) their entire company would implode trying to implement that.
Lives will be lost.

+1

This has been brought up before and I like how the periods of opportunity thing works for vehicles. I'd like to see the same design brought to suits. Make weapon damage modules active with cool down as well. Active shield boosters and armor repairers with long cool down periods could be interesting too.

Pretty interesting idea. What kind of CPU / PG cost are you thinking of with this? Any interaction with regulators and energizers...if you kick the hardener it extends your recharge time and capacity?

I was thinking of how a Caldari based heavy would actually work. If you have heavy, which by definition is pretty slow, and it's a shield based suit...that seems counter intuitive. Your shield hardener idea might mesh well with that.

You're thinking like a capsuleer. Vehicle hardeners give one resistance bonus across all incoming damage without regard to damage type.

You're thinking like a capsuleer. Vehicle hardeners give one resistance bonus across all incoming damage without regard to damage type.

Beat me to it.

The DUST hardener mechanics are totally different than they are in EVE.

I'd rather see vehicles and suits have capacitors and teach people how to run active mods on a stable cap suitor they power down mid gunfight and die. cooldowns just encourage tanks to retreat to the redline and camp for 60seconds.

If we switch to capacitors I'd like to see EVE style overheating mechanics with module specific damage. Overheat that large blaster to take down an enemy and see it fry. Run to some place safe to repair the gun or swap to a new tank. Require a repair tool to fix individual modules.

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.

We all know that shield tanking isn't really viable anymore, so this got me thinking about hardeners for the suits.

Shield Hardner - Once activated it can last between the five levels, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This will allow a shield tanked suit to take a bit more of a pounding before the shields pop.

Armor Hardener - Once activated it can last between the five levels, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This will allow armor tankers to buff their armor reliability after their shields fail.

As stated, instead of having to implement a capacitor into the suits, these modules would just run on timers, and could have a lengthy cool down time to make their use a more tactical notion.

Also once activated, these modules could make the dropsuit "shimmer" akin to how a tank shimmers when it activates it's various modules. The shimmer will give players a heads up as to what hardener an enemy has active and will also just look cool. I mean come on, imagine hacking something with an armor hardener on and seeing the orange shimmer going across yourself...adds to the future feel, immersion, and general "I'm a future immortal super soldier" badassery.

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.

You would probably need a hotkey to activate them as fumbling with the selection wheel would likely get you killed while you brought up your hardener.

Should be allowed ONLY for Heavy suits.
They are supposed to Tank damage hardeners seems legit.
In others suits it could easily become a "must have" and kill agains the game diversity.

Active modules should be by dropsuits :
Assault : Damagers : 3/5/10% more damage during 20sec.
Logi : Deployable turrets :30/60/90sec last :60sec of cooldown (Use the "small turrets" of vehicules damage cut by 2 and AI of big turrets)
Scouts : cloaking (Can't run and shoot during the cloak)
Heavy : Hardeners.

I lie your ideas.

I am also open to the possibility that only assault suites can run active hardeners, this would provide a good incentive for the slayers of the game to use these suits again.

Thanks ^^
Active hardeners : Only assault suits.
Deployable turrets : ONLY logi suits
Hardeners : Only logi
Cloak : Only Scouts.

For the ones who REALLY don't like the cloak idea it can be remplaced by an ECM Jammer unit :
Ennemy scanners is disabled in a range of 25meters.
Equipements are destroyed in a radius of 5 meters.
Active during 30 sec.
Cooldown : 60sec/45sec/30sec

Great idea but sad to say this will never happen.

TTK oh my!

These here wonderful threads would be flooded with nerf the dropsuit hardeners NAHHHHHHHHOOOOOWWWWW threads!

At the moment, infantry combat is just bricktank and/or damage mods. Ideally, this would change that.

Here's how it would work - It's similar to the 'waves of opportunity' mentality that's being applied to active tanked vehicles at the moment. You have active modules, and you have passive modules. The passive modules would work much as they do now - you put the module onto the fitting, and it applies the effect permanently whilst fitted.
The active modules would work differently, much like vehicle modules. You would go to the equipment wheel and select the module to activate it. As an example, you could have armour/shield hardeners - increasing your resistance and your effective toughness for a short period before cooling down. This allows you to get an advantage in things like cover to cover combat - giving you high burst HP.
This would be balanced by being in high/low slots - you'd have to sacrifice passive modules to fit hardeners or active modules, making you weaker than a passive user when the modules aren't active. This would make you vulnerable to things like snipers or ambushes in return for the strength you can get in burst periods.

There's a lot that could be done with this - you could have speed boosts, quick regen modules, shield/armour hardeners, damage amplifiers, hack ciphers, etc. It'd introduce a great deal more variety into what can be done with fittings, and variety is the spice of life.