As I've said before, the large difference in % resist between Armor Hardeners and Shield Hardeners was part of what led to such a sever difference in the power between Shields and Armor. We had 15% difference before this recent change, now it's zero, and you want to increase it to 20%? This seems counterintutive.

Also if its going to take a proto swarm launcher with a proto damage mod to just break the threshold of a shield hardener, don't you think this will be problematic when the AV user is using lower tiered swarms? Lower tiers should do less damage yes, but that's a serious design flaw if some tiers effectively have abilities that others do not. In this case only proto would really be capable of stopping shield regen, this means the original issue that caused the 60 to 40% nerf would will persist for 2/3rds of swarm launchers....I just can't agree with that design.

In the past, Armor and Shield Hardeners were always within 5% of one another, so while I agree that if the Armor Hardener is going to have better duration/cooldown then there needs to be some resistance advantage of Shield Hardeners. Either decrease armor to 35% and keep Shield at 40% (this would be most similar to what it was in chrome, as vehicles had a natural 10% resistance from skills and armor was 25% and shield 30%), or simply increase shields to 35%.

Additionally we need to get Regulators into the low slots and likely ease up on their fitting. As I've stated before, 2 Complex Regs would drop the recharge delay of a Gunnlogi to 1.8, which means it would begin repping in between shots of most infantry AV. It's difficult to see how this will affect the overall power level, so we should get that fixed and see how it affects the meta.

Also shield boosting should be a more common thing in shield tanking in general, but currently they're far too hard to fit to be worth it. PG cost of boosters needs to be like....cut in half. If armor can heal constantly, shields need to be able to heal in large spikes of HP. Boosters accomplish this, but not at the fitting cost they currently have.


So while I think you are correct in that something needs to happen to help shields out, I think a jump to 60% would be unwise, and there are other things that can and should happen first before we go for a change that extreme.

1. We can easily lower the threshold as well as buff the hardeners. 80 damage for instance. But being able to rep through swarms shouldn't be something only armor can do. Even if we go to active reps as True proposes, armor still has the ability to repair damage through attacks. A large part of the disparity between shields and armor is based on this, even at the infantry level. Active or passive, if reppers are up and running on armor, they always work, with no way of stopping them. Shield not only have lower reps than armor, but also can have their reps stopped. There should be a circumstance where this doesn't happen, and 60% hardeners allow for this.

2. I don't think fitting is going to help Gunnlogis as much as you think it will. For all intents and purposes, when activated a proto module is essentially the same as militia. The only difference is cooldown time. We can currently fit a Gunnlogi with basic active mods and proto passive ones and it would perform no different than a Gunnlogi with proto active mods, save the proto one can get back into the fight sooner. While one could argue the merits of faster cooldowns being an advantage, the problem arises when modules are up and running. Armor is simply better. It gains more health per hardener, can have higher reps than shield, and those reps are unable to be stopped. As I mentioned in the OP, armor gets far more ehp per hardener than shield. This is another part of the disparity. Armor simply takes more shots to kill of anything, even with the major armor bias of AV weaponry, both infantry and vehicle versions. This is why I suggest 60% hardeners; it closes the gap in terms of how much ehp they give. And even with 60% hardeners, armor still gains more ehp than shields do. I don't want to nerf Maddies though; I'd rather bring Gunnlogis up to the Maddy's level. Thus my proposal.

Another way of thinking about it: make AV weaponry deal more damage to tank weak spots? Make more weak spots? Increase size of current weak spots? Make weak spots only affect tanks if it's armour; when in shields there are no 'weak spots' (not sure if it already works like that).

I don't know if buffing tanks and vehicle modules after such big changes to them have only recently occurred is the right move. I'd rather let the dust settle first. Not to mention any buffs to tanks will undoubtedly lead to buffs to AV which puts LAVs and Dropships even further down the path of getting one shot. Even if shield hardeners are usable by all vehicles, tanks are the ones with the capacity to fit multiple hardeners which is essentially where they truly become devastating; other vehicles don't have such a luxury. Don't forget about our lighter vehicles when thinking about what tanks need.

Which is why I'm interested in seeing tank weak spots being worked on to make it almost an art to kill a tank efficiently. Especially the mechanic of making weak spots only effective in armour damage.

Let's say we make all repairers active as of tomorrow. Even then, armor repair is still objectively better than shield repair because A) you will be repping more than shields can, and B) you cannot stop the armor repairer. These two points together cause the imbalance; shield has less reps per second, and you can stop those reps at any given time. This is why I want a buff to shield hardeners. It allows shields to have similar abilities to armor, namely unstoppable reps (albeit lower than armor gets) while hardeners are on, and large amounts of ehp when they are on. Even with regulators giving shields a delay of 1.8 seconds, that is still higher than armor's repair delay of 0 seconds. Active repairers will change how often those repairs happen, but it won't change the fact that the repairs themselves are superior to shields.

I was referring to passive repair of shields vs armor repairs. 112 hp/s if I remember correctly? but shield boosters working under fire would certainly do wonders for shield tanking. Now that I'm thinking about it, that might actually be better than 60% hardeners.