DeathwindRising wrote:the difference for me come from the increased stamina recharge which let me run or jump pretty much whenever i need to. its also not a little boost eith but almost double the stamina regen with chunk more stamina total. combined with the higher speed i can cover more ground faster than a caldari assault can. i just dont let myself get shot. i shoot someone til theyre either dead, or they turn to aim at me. im gone before they can hit me. kincats are high burst damage are my tank. its about having more hp or recharging faster, its about completely taking advantage of enemy flanks and doing as much damage as possible and then leaving before they can get you. thats why all minmatar weapons deal lots of damage in short amounts of time. you cant even camp with them, you have to always keep moving.
if you try that with caldari youll run out of stamina, and you take too long to regen your stamina, which makes it not viable.
i just finished a match where the enemy was on one end of a bridge. it was a dom match. they saw shooting at them, so i stopped attacking and around behind them. it only took me maybe 20 seconds to do this. i then sat there for 2 mins shooting and killing everyone from behind as they spawned onto the bridge. i died because someone spawned on a cru that was behind me.
after using the suit though, i feel that a 1 hp/s armor regen would be useful if only it was given to the assault suit.
You have touched on a few things I do agree on here. The old native 1hp/sec armor regen helped a lot more than most people realized as it allowed you to not need to rely on a hive or a repair/reactive plate to get your tiny amount of armor back, a huge thing when at most you have 2 lows to run your necessities. And the stamina and regen do help a lot for flanking and escape, allowing you outpace your opponents through endurance.
However the lack of proper cover over large portions of the map combined with matches swarming with super scanning/damping scouts makes a flank/hit/shift/hit/flank battle style unsustainable if you are against anyone who knows how to play the game. The fact that we can have some good matches when the enemy is incompetent doesn't mean that the suit you are running is running the way it should be.
Before 1.8 this suit managed to hold it's own for all of the reasons you have mentioned so far, but now that scouts have rolled in that for the most part can tank just as much eHP with more speed and passive damps/scans (and one even with 3 passive reps) not to mention their access to cloaks and 2 equipment slots, this suit is being overshadowed. All of the points I've made above have been suggested pre-1.8 and I turned them down every time because the niche was open and this suit filled it nicely. Now that the niche is better served by another suit, this suit needs it's own niche again.
I've (as it pertains to your thoughts on using damage modules with this suit) also suggested a couple days ago in one thread (the thread put up by Zatara) about assault suit changes that the Minmatar suit should have a direct bonus to damage modules in order to a) help it better fill the hit and run role better and b) to make at least one class that can get proper use out of them. A direct buff to the module would just lead to everyone throwing them on an otherwise brick-tanked suit again, and I would like to avoid that happening again if possible.