tl;dr

Shields and armor are practically balanced, the only imbalances are fitting, armor scaling, and shield repair. But fixing armor scaling would not buff shields HP, and fixing the fitting would not magically make you better or tankier.

To truly fix both in accordance to the EVE balance, both would need to nerfed and buffed. This will bring tears to many people especially shield tankers who do not use their shield repair, and those who complain about their penalty which is nothing compared to what it should be. It would also bring smiles to armor tankers as the speed penalty is reworked to affected one area of movement instead of every single form.

Leave armor and shields alone and tears shall be avoided.

If you do not agree keep reading.



There is a lot of complaint about shields not giving enough HP. You have to remember that shields give lower HP for better regen. I do admit there are some imbalances when it comes to fitting costs, scaling, and repair rates. The scaling favors complex shields more than basic, while also favoring basic armor over complex plates, an armor suit to repair takes 1/3 of a match which is uneccesarily slow, although we do have repair tools and triage hives these are relatively scarce.

But, one of the biggest problems that remain remnant from our struggle between balance is the bad fitting costs for both shields and armor, and the bad scaling. Shields scale a lot better than armor, even though the returns are lower while armor gives diminishing returns for worse fittings and more penalties. The fitting costs are a bit difficult to explain, as the HP scaling is what makes armor better to fit.

EVE side armor and shields:
In EVE a shield extender, give roughly half the HP of a armor plate of the same tier. A small shield extender gives 188 HP whilst a 200mm armor plate gives 375 HP. The fitting costs are 2/20 and 10/15 respectively; keep in mind EVE you have more PG than CPU, unlike DUST.

As for repair shields repair passively but it takes anywhere from 5-25 minutes to regenerate shields passively without boosters. When it comes to the amounts they repair it is difficult to explain as it involves more than just raw numbers, but shield boosters compounded with shield extenders repair quicker but it makes your ship less stable, armor repair slower and repair lesser amounts, not like Dust which is extremely low, than shields but it lets your ship be a bit more stable.

Applying it to Dust:
So how can we fix this in Dust following what I said above? Well there are two options either scale armor up and have shields follow, or scale armor down and have shields follow. Since scaling armor up would increase TTK to insane amounts scaling down would be the best option. Using a Complex armor plate every point of weight adds 27 HP, therefore a basic armor plate should then give 54 HP, enhanced 81, and complex 135. Cutting these numbers in half gives us 27, 40, 67.5 these would be shield extenders HP.

As you can see this is not so different from what we have now, except that the armor gives diminishing returns as it scales up but balancing this would barely increase the HP shields give. Although for some armor tankers using lesser plates is not only necessary BUT essential as the higher speed penaltiers are extremely draconian and detrimental to gameplay. Some see the speed penalties as just you are slower but they compound to much bigger problems; firstly you cannot jump or run away for cover, you are much easier to hit, and you cannot strafe whatsoever so the penalty also needs a small rebalance when compared to the laughably miniscule shield penalty. In EVE the shield and armor penalties are balanced by both increase the damage you take, in EVE your shields increase your sig radius, which is equivalent to a bigger hit box. In EVE the armor speed penalty does not change your maximum speed but instead your acceleration, you also have overdrive injectors and microwarpdrives to make up for this in your highs.

As for repair in Dust as a shield tanker you have anywhere from 3x-6x higher repair passively than what is achievable in Dust with the best armor repairer. This is a huge imbalance, where as in eve a shield booster gives around 1.5x-2x what a armor repairer gives. Discounting passive shield repair.

Meaning for repairs to be balanced your passive shield repair should be extremely nerfed and your shields to be repaired through a booster, which would repair at 7.5 -10HP/s passively at the sacrifice of some tank.

If you were curious about scaling armor up along with shields.

If we scaled armor up every point of weight would give 40,5 HP, thus basic would give 81 HP, enhanced 121.5 HP, and complex 202.5 HP; having shields follow basic would give 40.5, 60.75, and complex 101.5.

None of this is a suggestion but a big comparison to how the mechanics work in both game and how far we would have to go to create a copy.

That was a number for shield boosters not the passive repair, to be fair if we were to copy the balance from EVE shield recharges and energizers would be in the lows. Which makes a reduction to passive shields and the addition of a booster module extremely beneficial. Specially at removing dual tanking.