Read the numbers; even with 60%, armor gains more ehp than shield.

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.

Reping through swarms is not something anyone should be able to do without and active module but to put this into prespective for you a Shield HAV can rep through swarm fire, taking a hit, using a booster in-between volleys.

You however are highlighting a problem with Passive Armour Boosters as Rattati calls them in that they should not provide nearly so potent an effect when the modules pulses are constant and passive. If anything the effects of a Heavy Repair Unit should come in a similar form to the Shield Booster, and active module which pulses (however several times) to produce a prolific amount of eHP.

What you have to understand about armour and shield is that traditionally shield is depicted as a slow, constant, self repairing buffer that has module that aid that constant regeneration with spikes of eHP.

Armour is consequently depicted as static heavy buffer that has no passive repair abilities and relies on fitting specific modules to even attain any repairs at all.

Now I know CCP Rattati is apparently not a fan of 1-> 1's between EVE and Dust but I think in the case of vehicles this is a necessity.

Passive armour repairs need to die in a fire.

Consider however that prior to CCP Wolfman's Passive Armour Repairers the old Heavy Efficient Armour Repairer boosted 414 armour every 3 seconds for a total duration of 15 second and a total repair value of 2070.

Per second repair values are 414/3 = 138 (what we have now with armour repair skill V and without a native rep value).

I'm fine with the Maddy repair values but only if they are short duration.

Alongside Pokey's suggestion of a 35% Armour Hardener and a 40% Shield Hardener I believe this would do a great deal to balance HAV. Now Armour HAV pilots have to control their repair values as they won't see and instant boost , will have slightly less total eHP, and have no repairs at all past a 15 second window of engagement. More importantly its possible them to ambush armour HAV and deal a big chunk of damage before their reppers come online.

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.

You bring up some interesting points. I have a couple of disagreements though.

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.

Before we continue.

Dropships.... Think about them too...
In the case of reps.

Just saying don't forget the little guy! What happens to tanks affects every vehicle.

1.
You could lower the threshold yes, though my concerns about raising the resistance to drastically (essentially recreating the initial conditions that caused issues in the first place). And while you may be able to avoid the unbreakable shield regen, you start to run into issues where excessively high resistance values can quickly cause issues. I really think its going to be safest if we keep their resistance values close to one another, and buff shields in other ways.

I mean the whole tradeoff is that shields get regen without the need of a module. Obviously with the addition of native armor repair changes this a bit, but the fact remains that passive shield regen is significantly higher than natural armor repair. I think trading very fast regen with delay ultimately balances out against slow reliable regen.

Now the issue obviously lands in the fact that you can apply multiple repairers to increase passive repair, pushing your armor repair significantly higher than the natural shield recharge which CANNOT be increased. That needs to change and I've been telling Rattati this for a while. Shield rechargers so shield vehicles can do the same thing to increase their recharge at the expensive of modules just like armor can. This needs to happen.


2.
I was never a huge fan of the "flat bonus" between tiers of modules. Tiers of hulls should have tiericide like they do now, but modules should totally be tiered, and I agree that duration/cooldown is not enough to set them apart. At the very least in terms of hardeners, I think moving back to a small % difference between tiers would be appropriate. I also think Boosters should have a similar treatment.

You are totally correct about offering more eHP, and armor should have more eHP overall. Where should that spread be? Not really sure, but I don't feel comfortable with closing that gap with large differences with large differences in hardeners. I would rather we maintain small differences in hardeners (Shields with a bit more, around 5%) and if we have to, take a look at the HP modules themselves. However, I'd REALLY prefer to take it slow and make some smaller more obvious fixes first and see where things land and then re-evaluate from there.

Let me get your thoughts on something I was kicking around a bit a few weeks ago. Let's say an armor repairer reps at 100HP/s, which comes down to 6000HP/minute. What if you set a shield booster to regen 2000HP/cycle and allowed them to be used every 20 seconds, so they could regenerate 6000HP every minute. The overall regen potential is the same, but what it allows is the shield vehicle to access it at a moments notice, which can be particularly useful when you're fighting another vehicle where you may want to access a lot of HP regen in a short period of time. Obviously the numbers are simplified, but do you get what I'm getting at?

Also, thank you for being reasonable and reading what I had to say completely and clearly. I've grown so tired of the toxicity from others, so I appreciate your ability to have a conversation even if we don't see perfectly eye to eye. It is....refreshing to say the least.

I agree with your points. I fel like the problem with Gunnlogis is lack of ehp AND lack of reps, but we should get more modules out before evaluating hardeners. Although I still believe shield hardeners should be better than armor hardeners.

I like your booster idea, and I think that was what CCP intended from the beginning. Armor reps are slow but constant (not saying passive is better than active True, I tend to agree with you on those) while shield is quick and front-loaded. Although I would contend that shield should give more HP/minute than armor, since armor has more raw hp and ehp than shields do.

And thanks for the appreciation! I like having well thought-out discussions on this game. As much as we need to do, I haven't had this much fun with a game in ages. It feels nice to have a conversation on HAVs that didn't turn into insults and petty arguments on the side.