"Guy gives meaningful feedback and comments regarding topic at hand"

"Reply results in being called stupid and nothing else"

Yep, that's Dust for you.

If only precisions were on low and range amps were on high, then it would have been meaningful.

But that was stupid though, right?

I would love to see a much higher base shield recharge rate or maybe have energizers/rechargers receive a massive buff.

Why would I as an assault want range amps? Hell why would I as an Amarr player (besides the scout) was range amps in the highs when I could have Shield Re-chargers or Damage Modules.

That solves nothing.

The wide majority of infantry suits have:

Poor shield regeneration values
Very long shield delay/depleted delay times
The damage profiles on weaponry(and the trend of ridiculous high alpha damage plus this the stealth abuse issue in this game) make it so that nearly all weapons can have a vicious effectiveness on shields. It wouldn't make sense for a 60 point damage gun to have 30% more power against shielding when shields have the disadvantage of less HP and the gun is already so powerful.
You need to have high shield HP to live, to improve your bad shield delay, and your bad shield recharge value.
Three modules you need to get for basic survival when shield tanking, which is a heavy investment.

With armour on infantry, you have:
Ability to round up a very large sum of HP in armour
No weapon has any extreme damage profile advantages against armour besides explosives, which not many people use in the first place.
Some modules don't follow the more HP layout of armour, and this allows shielding modules to give more HP than them (e.g., reactive plates)
Regardless you can get past this.
Some suits can tank enough armour to match that of a heavy suit, be only a little bit slowed, and once you have 10 HP/s in armour and up you can have better survivability than shielding(because of how armour regeneration being quite close to instant on infantry where shielding you have to wait often over 3 seconds, which is enough time for someone to find and kill you)
Besides this, you hardly need to invest in modules or skills for armour.

True, you of all people. Unless that's a troll because information is incredibly valuable

It honestly seems to me like you are pick out ever fault Shielding has and not acknowledging its strengths while at the same time saying "this is how I want to play......but I don't want to do it with armour."

Passive regen means **** all under concentrated fire its more often than not less than one bullet the only time passive armour repping does matter is when you get several seconds of it,

This evening I've been running my Regen/Speed Amarr suit and honestly there is rarely a time I cannot find 5 seconds to regenerate my HP, would be easier if I was doing this with shields/

I'm waaaay late to this thread Dubbs, but what if shields were always repping, just like armor is? Isn't that the way it used to be in Chrome? I don't remember and I've been drinking... Remove the delay while under fire, but increase the delay when depleted. This would make regulators even more useful. Tweak the amount regenerated as well, since the Cal Scout would be even more OP. Nothing crazy, like 40 instead of 50HP/s? Regens higher than armor, but you can't get anywhere near the amount of shields as armor.

The shield delay on armor tanking suits is nowhere near high enough, imho. They get the best of both worlds with a few second delay for their shields, as well as a high, always on, armor regen. Plus their native weapons are made for wrecking shields.

Shoot, Complex Ferro give more HP, AND cost less CPU and Grid than a Complex Extender.

Move armor reps to highs?
Remove shield delay?
Increase depleted shield delay?

I'm definitely in the camp of armor based suits are at an advantage, but shields are really close to being equal. A few small tweaks could level the playing field.

The thing about armor vs shields is lack of high slot choices for armor tankers, while shield tankers have a wide variety of low slot choices.

If you are using all your low slots to be a pure armor tanker, you now have to choose what to put in your highs. You can now choose to boost your melee damage, boost your sidearm/light/heavy weapon damage, increase shields, increase shield recharge, or boost scan range. Lets look closer into that.

Melee damage on a pure armor suit is laughable because of speed.

Unless you are a scout, scan range is also laughable due to poor base scanning precision.

Shield recharge is increased by a percentage, and armor suits have a very low base shield recharge, so you get very little reward from that percentage.

So if you are making a competitive fitting, your only real choice for your highs is weapon mods vs shield extenders. Shield extenders are, I might mention, a very inefficient module since they will regenerate very slowly, and have a very very large delay before they even begin to recharge slowly.

A pure shield tanker, on the other hand, has myriad choices for his spare low slots.

Does he want to make his shields even better? Regulators.

Does he want to improve even more on his speed advantage over armor tankers? Kincats.

Does he want to be a marathon runner and outdistance the armor tankers? Stam mods.

Does he want to hack faster? Code Breakers.

Is he low on CPU/PG? PG upgrades and CPU mods.

Does he want to hybrid tank? Plates, ferroscales, reactives, and reppers.

EWAR? Dampeners and Precision Enhancers.

Those are just off of the top of my head, I may have forgotten one or two. All of the listed are viable for a competitive fitting, save for maybe the precision enhancers if you are using heavy/medium.


The disparity between armor/shields isn't because of shield and armor modules, but because of every module EXCEPT shield and armor mods. Not enough choices for armor tankers.

:) everyone screams regen when it comes to shield dropsuits because that's the only advantage it seems to have. I've already named at least 2 or 3 advantages to armor tanking in this thread.

that was a bug Booby...I don't think that CCP intended on shields to rep through damage.

I never said that shield tanking doesn't have strengths.....I'm just saying that armor tanking has more. It seems to me that you just want to acknowledge what shields are good at but not that armor tanking has more benefits.

The shield delay on armor tanking suits is nowhere near high enough, imho. They get the best of both worlds with a few second delay for their shields, as well as a high, always on, armor regen. Plus their native weapons are made for wrecking shields.

Shoot, Complex Ferro give more HP, AND cost less CPU and Grid than a Complex Extender.

Move armor reps to highs?
Remove shield delay?
Increase depleted shield delay?

I'm definitely in the camp of armor based suits are at an advantage, but shields are really close to being equal. A few small tweaks could level the playing field.

I agree that Maddys are better in combat, however, it is very hard to actually fit damage mods on a Madrugar without completely sacrificing most of your PG/CPU. That's why a fuel injector is always the go-to module.

Equally, the native weapons on shield dropsuits tend to be made for wrecking armour.

Armour suits have lower shield regen values, much like shield suits have lowered armour regen values. They're never going to catch up to a shield suit's regen unless they fit stupidly, although the reverse is not true. 20 HP/s is not particularly useful when it applies to 150 HP.


Why are people so obsessed with this comparison?
A complex extender has massive native regen, a complex ferro does not. That is why the ferro gives more HP. A full extender fit is viable, a full ferro fit is not, because it will take hundreds of seconds to regen.



Moving armour reps to highs immediately buffs armour tanking absolutely massively and I can't see how that can possibly be a good idea. You would be able to have 1000 armour HP Amarr assaults with 30 HP/s with that - that is insane and far from balanced. That movement is not necessary at all.

Removing shield delay ends up being silly because when comparing fittings with similar numbers of tank modules they're already quite balanced, and that would break that immediately. For example, a Calassault can reach 600 shields with 52 HP/s and 2s shield regen delay - a Galassault at 600 armour will have 30 HP/s without a delay (ignoring the encumbering effect of plates). What will happen to that if there is no regen delay?

Increasing depleted delay... Why?


I am dubious. Especially as these proposed tweaks are far from small.

Besides it's natural resist profile vs short range high DPS weapons like the SMG, Combat Rifle, and(not fitting into the DPS category) Mass Driver is a very nice set of benefits in my mind (this coming from an armour tanker), coupled with natural speed, and utility lows all seem like perfectly good reasons to shield tank to me.

Regen isnt even an advantage for shield commando/assaults, the regen on them is so slow you have to fit 2+ regulators to get it down to a decent level, doable for the assaults but expensive for min comm and downright impossible for cal comm, and the regen on the scout is stupidly high/low respectively in both hp/s and delay. The Caldari sentinel has very low delays but I think is more balanced given the nature of the suit. On top of that, you generally have little to no armor regen on the shield tankers, so you end up with a big armor pool you can only really dip into once in a long while.

This wouldnt be a huge deal if you could play a skirmishing standoff style game in Dust consistently, but since objective play is almost always CQC work and the current mechanics and prevalence of scouts means you are basically in danger of being 2 shotted and/or surprise attacked at all times, skirmish play doesnt really work in any meaningful way.

Add to this the scrambler rifle being not just good against but downright overpowered against straight shield tanks, and after the armor repper buff and given that there still are no shield regen repair tools or nanohives, the armor suits take the edge these days simply because of how the game tends to play out.

I dont think its a huge imbalance though, and a few small tweaks could even the playing field entirely.

Tweaks I would suggest:
Tighten up scrambler rifle damage profile so it isnt overpowering against shield users, give it a max shots/sec. similar to the duvolle tactical. As long as this rifle can strip any quantity of shields in the game in half a second of furious clicking, shield tanking is going to be suicidal.

I would make assault and commando delays a couple seconds lower, and make the cal scout one second higher, with maybe 30 or 40 shield regen/s base.

Bigger tweaks:
Some equipment to enhance or work with shields.
More open area points that arent CQC hotspots.
Fix ******* scouts so there is a real counter to them, but thats just my own little axe I grind, ignore me. ;d

Besides it's natural resist profile vs short range high DPS weapons like the SMG, Combat Rifle, and(not fitting into the DPS category) Mass Driver is a very nice set of benefits in my mind (this coming from an armour tanker), coupled with natural speed, and utility lows all seem like perfectly good reasons to shield tank to me.

Not going to suggest Shield suits don't need transporters, or some kind of repping Hive but they have enough benefits in my mind to be worth considering.

Nor am I saying I would Shield Tank unless that was the Amarrian way. PIE frowns on the use of any dropsuit that is not Amarrian which I'm cool with.

HI AGAIN!

I'd just like to drop this note of shield v armor, relating to frontline assaults/sents.

Shield suits are more restricted in fittings. They have to use both their high and lows to get a fitting that has respectable HP, and a very strong regen. Since shield extenders extend the recharge delay, I then would either have weaker regen stats, or lose a low to a regul to compensate. Armor, since all their mods are in the lows, and their mods don't wound their own stats (Armor plate don't make armor reppers cost more to fit!), they have their highs open to whatever you want to fit.


Armor and Shield is in a very nice place right now, but it's worth bring up that fact.

But at the same time don't have a passive regen and must create their regen using module slots. Moreover suffer mobility penalties which in their own right are more than crippling enough.

But at the same time don't have a passive regen and must create their regen using module slots. Moreover suffer mobility penalties which in their own right are more than crippling enough.

I would like to start (or revisit) this conversation to see where the community's head is at as far as which is the more effective choice. I've had arguments with Cat Merc because he feels that armor tanking gets the short end of the stick and I can't believe how he could think that. Shield suits, tanks, ADS are at a disadvantage to armor suits in so many ways. And I just read a thread about shields vs armor in the feedback section and I want to open up the dialogue on this.

I'll start by saying I think that armor tanking beats out shield tanking, generally, more times than not. If you shield tank as opposed to armor or dual tank then you have to play the scared role. Even as a cal heavy....you are subject to flux grenades and +20% scrambler rifle (most OP rifle in the game) ammunition. Shields are your first line of defense. If your first line is your major line of defense and it is gone rapidly, you are strung out of luck. If you armor tank, and you get surprised and lose your shields to a flux or a scrambler rifle...you still have time to react and enough health to defend yourself.

I can really go further but I'd like to open up the floor for discussion...

And people are talking about the ability to lose low slots. Which mod would you rather be able to stack alongside your hp mods? Dmg mods or codebreakers, damps, range amps, any regulator, etc??

I just fitted a gal assault on protofits and realized that you could fit more stuff on a gal assault suit than a cal or minmatar. You only have 3 highs, so you won't be using a lot of cpu and you get tons more pg. Not to mention a shield extender is 54/11 as opposed to reactives and ferroscales that are 23/8 (pg/cpu)...favoritism much??

shield tanking sucks and willl die when rattatti introduces speed nerfs to shield moduals meaning bye bye shield tankers! and it will become Armor514 or more likly Amarr514.. since armor will be king

That's because stacking shields can give you similar eHP to someone that stacks armor, with a lot more speed.