Everyone is bitching about tanks, and rightfully so. Tanks as it stands are slaughtering everything left and right. This is as it should be, TO A POINT. A tank should be powerful and deadly, otherwise they have no use. They should not be so cheap as to lose 4 and be able to turn a profit. I should also not be able to get the same effectiveness from militia to proto modules. This is part of why tanks are hard to kill except by other tanks. For no SP investment, and not even 10% the ISK investment, I can run a tank that rivals a 10 million SP invested 500k tank. This is what cause them to be imbalanced. Because everyone and their mother can run them so easily and so cheaply, with almost no difference in performance from militia to proto. Thus the tank spam we have currently

Imagine, for instance, that the militia RR did the same damage as the proto RR, and the only difference was in the charge up time of the rifle. Why would anyone run the proto rifle when the militia one does the same damage for a tenth the price and a third the fitting cost? So I've come up with some ideas to make a proto tank as powerful as all tanks are now, while making militia tanks weaker, and giving AV some way to counter a tank either militia or proto.

Changing Active Modules

Currently, the only improvement in modules as you ascend the tiers is the cooldown time. As a tanker, this means that a militia hardener is just as effective as my proto hardener, so I gain no advantage beyond less downtime running my proto hardener. This should not be. I should have an advantage running my proto gear against militia gear. So let's redo modules to improve in efficiency, while retaining the same uptime and cooldown as you go through the tiers.

So currently, shield hardeners have these stats:

Basic Shield Hardener: 60% resistance, 24s uptime, 100s cooldown
Enhanced Shield Hardener: 60% resistance, 24s uptime, 80s cooldown
Complex Shield Hardener: 60% resistance, 24s uptime, 60s cooldown

I would have them changed to this:

Basic Shield Hardener: 60% resistance, 24s uptime, 120s cooldown
Enhanced Shield Hardener: 70% resistance, 24s uptime, 120s cooldown
Complex Shield Hardener: 80% resistance, 24s uptime, 120s cooldown

This gives my proto hardener a distinct advantage over a militia one (I can take more damage) while emphasizing the "wave of opportunity" concept CCP has for vehicles. It also means that even if I run 3 hardeners at max skills, there will still be a period of time where hardeners are down. If need be, perhaps even a cap on the number of modules of one type that can be fitted.

Tank Prices

Pre-1.7, tanks were insanely expensive, with some tanks breaking the 1,000,000 ISK barrier, while being annihilated by a swarm fit that costs about 150k. This was utterly imbalanced, and it is good that CCP changed them. However, they also reduced their price, and this is a large part of the reason that they are spammed as they are now. Currently, a militia tank sits at around 60k with no extra mods. This tank can easily kill a tank that has invested 500k into his fit. So let's change the base hull price, and slightly reduce the price of modules to compensate. This way, a militia tank can remain powerful, but it costs money to access it. This, along with the module improvements described in the previous section, mean that spamming militia tanks is not as effective as skilling into them and fitting them with good modules.

Infantry Counters - AV
So now we get to what should and should not kill a tank. Currently, swarms have horrid damage propogation through the tiers, with proto swarms being the only viable counter to a militia tank. I think proto swarms are actually right where they need to be. An armor tank must flee them even with hardeners up, and a shield tank can resist them and keep on repping. So let's then bring standard and advanced swarms up to proto's level. Current swarm stats are:

Swarm Launcher: 220 dpm (damage per missile), 4 missiles
CBR7 Swarm Launcher: 220dpm, 5 missiles
Wikyromi Swarm Launcher: 220dpm, 6 missiles.

Let's bring them to:
Swarm Launcher: 200 dpm (damage per missile), 6 missiles
CBR7 Swarm Launcher: 220dpm, 6 missiles
Wikyromi Swarm Launcher: 235dpm, 6 missiles.

This makes them useful at all levels, while still conferring advantage to using proto.

Forge guns will be taking a huge hit in 1.8, losing 15% damage to shield at prof 5 and losing half their power from damage mods. To be honest, I find this alright for the most part. An unhardened tank will still die in 4 shots to a forge gun. However, this also means that hardened tanks, especially shield, will be able to sit there and laugh as they try to kill them. Therefore, if CCP really does want them to be mainly anti-armor damage, we should emphasize that. Give forge guns a 5% increase in armor damage, up from the current 3%. This will allow them to deal more damage to armor tanks, while being less effective vs. shields. There is now a tradeoff. a prof 5 forge gunner will lose effectiveness against shield tanks, but subsequently gain effectiveness against armor tanks. This can also be applied to the swarm launcher and plasma cannon (a 5% increase in damage to their respective damage profile) as well as whatever Amarr AV is released down the line.