Sole Fenychs
Sinq Laison Gendarmes
Gallente Federation
430
   |
Posted - 2014.05.16 20:59:00 -
[1] - Quote
Ok, first of all:
From what I've seen, skill bonuses to armor plates and reppers do not apply to ferroscales and reactive plates. That's one of the reasons why those modules are less attractive.
On tanking styles:
Shields might profit from higher customizability. This means that modules would simply have more extreme bonuses, with far higher penalties.
For example, shield extenders don't just give a bit of HP and a small penalty to recharge delay, but instead add a huge penalty to recharge delay and add a lot of HP.
The idea is that you are free to front-load armor, while paying the price afterwards. A front-loaded armor will be good in a stand-up fight, but it will take ages to regenerate and there's no repair tools to help you fix that issue.
Meanwhile, a hit and run player could use shield loading modules to have basically instant regeneration. They'd have a higher recharge delay, which wouldn't be as high as with shield extenders, but it wouldn't matter for someone who intends to go in, kill a few dudes and then go into hiding.
I'd also suggest changing the modules and their associated penalties to make this system abuse-free. Shield regulators + shield extenders might be completely broken otherwise.
As for active tanking, the idea of pulsing regeneration that someone mentioned sounds interesting. In contrast to shields, it would run constantly, independant of damage taken - A timer in the lower left, using the same indicator as active equipment, would indicate when a big chunk of HP would be restored.
This would affect the tactics - Amarr would use the brute force of their armor, while Gallente has to fight tooth and nail to survive, because each second of survival is another second closer to the next burst of healing. It also fits nicely with their close-range nature in terms of weapons.
For this, passive heal would still be active all the time, but active heal would be added on top. However, I'm not sure how exactly it should be implemented and if passive heal would need to be toned down.
My first idea was some kind of reversed stacking penalty - Equip a repper and you gain an inert active tanking module, which is not accessible through the player's UI, in contrast to other equipment. Add another repper and the active tanking module goes active and starts pulsing with a fixed cooldown. Add a third and fourth to strengthen the rep bursts even more. Hell, you could link this to reactive plates, which could lower the delay between pulses.
I'm not sure if that's even possible under your current constraints, though. |