Or raise the damage floor on STD and ADV Swarms and AV to the point where they can compete with the damage output of their proto variants without needing to invest millions of skillpoints or otherwise have to coordinate the equivalent of a synchronized underwater ballet in order to kill them with teammates.

The prices are fine, AV isn't.

Or raise the damage floor on STD and ADV Swarms and AV to the point where they can compete with the damage output of their proto variants without needing to invest millions of skillpoints or otherwise have to coordinate the equivalent of a synchronized underwater ballet in order to kill them with teammates.

The prices are fine, AV isn't.

Using prices to offset their power won't actually work. Rather, It'll just guarantee that only players who have millions saved in Isk will be able to tank spam on a regular basis. In other words, those that have been spamming tanks and protostomping since the beginning. Or buying Aurum fits.

Players who have been leasing their skills to PC matches, or who bought the blue prints, or another budgeting strategy, would still be able to tank spam. Prices don't actually have much influence on what we do and don't bring to a match, IMHO.

AV is quite effective, I can still 3 shot tanks with a forge, problem is there are so many rocking up and killing things quicker than I can kill them, by the time I've finished I've lost more money than a tanker and they just keep pumping them out. That's the difference to before, this buff made us strong, however the prices dropped so low everyone ran them.

There's a reason I run my proto fit tanks when I could just as easily manage on adv or even basic. That feeling of risk is there, only slightly but there, we need that back.

3 Shot Tanks with your Forge ... without their hardeners on surely.

The problem you listed (not being able to afford to bring out competent AV to deal with the number of tanks on the field) is exactly what's addressed in my post, when STD and ADV tier AV (the DAU forge perhaps excluded) are in a state where they're simply not equipped to be even the smallest of threats to a vehicular user then there's an issue.

Proto stuff is expensive and effective but Proto tier equipment shouldn't be the baseline for what even begins to start being a threat to any vehicle on the field and that's what I feel like is happening right now, if anything that should be what the guideline is for STD tier equipment and the damage progression between different tiers (for Swarms in particular) should be scaled back a bit to compensate.