Alena Ventrallis
Ahrendee Inc.
Negative-Feedback
3002
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Posted - 2015.04.13 05:47:00 -
[1] - Quote
So tanks have been all over the map in terms of balance. Underpowered in 1.6, 1.7 simultaneously removed a lot of vehicle modules and buffed tanks into almost unstoppable monstrosities. Nerfed in subsequent hotfixes by Rattati, they became nearly unused, and in Echo received a much needed makeover. However, we are now hearing complaints of "unkillable Maddies" and calls that tanks need to be nerfed again. The cycle of nerf/buff/nerf needs to stop. What we need to do is reimagine what tanks are supposed to provide on the battlefield.
Why tank speed is the problem, not hardeners
A Maddy currently takes multiple people to kill when it has hardeners up. I will repeat myself here, this is a good thing. A tank should be a citadel when hardeners are up. If hardeners do not allow tanks to be difficult to kill, they have no point in existing. Imagine if armor plates gave only 20 hp at the proto level. Sure they increase your health, but they wouldn't be worth fitting because the benefit they give is almost negligible. This is why Rattati buffed armor hardeners in the first place; they were almost completely unused until he upped their resistance. So their great survivability when hardeners are up is exactly how they should behave. A tank should be hard to kill when it's hardeners are up because tanks should be about stand-and-deliver gameplay.
Now here is the issue. I ran some calculations using info from protofits, and here is the results of my calculations: a Maddy with no plates and a fuel injector can outrun a Saga (28.13 m/s vs Saga 28.00 m/s) and keep pace with a Methana with no plates (Methana is 30.5 m/s top speed). This has led to tanks being used less as a stand-and-deliver fortress, and more as a hit-and-run fast attack vehicle. They are simply too speedy. I can quickly zip out of danger areas if I lose the advantage. This is why AV is so frustrated; not only are they needing teamwork to threaten my tank (working as intended) once I'm close to running out of hardener time, I can move faster than a LAV to escape destruction (needs fixing).
Eve inspiration
Now I know that Rattati does not like 1-1 relationships with Eve and Dust. But Eve has a lot of content and ideas that we can apply to Dust in order to achieve fun gameplay and good balance. Now specifically, there is one ship class that tanks could fill, one that has a spaceship counterpart Eve side. The largest class of all: Titans.
Titans in Eve are measured in thousands of meters, require massive amounts of ISK and large-scale cooperation to build. They have huge guns that can destroy other large capital ships. They provide incredible logistical abilities, allowing other players to bridge directly to the Titans location, and powerful buffs, like 7.5% shield or armor hp per level of the racial Titan skill. They sound OP, don't they?
However, all this power has some equally debilitating drawbacks. The huge guns on the Titans could easily make mince-meat out of any ship they can hit. However, Titan guns rotate so slowly, that they can really only effectively hit other capital ships. This means a large enough fleet of small ships can actually destroy a lone Titan with minimal losses. There are plenty of videos of fleets finding a lone Titan and destroying it, despite its incredible power, simply because the Titan cannot fight back against the smaller ships. It must have a fleet in support of it, or it will be destroyed. They are not the be-all-end-all of ships in Eve, but are simply force multipliers that make any fleet it's in that much stronger. They are great for logistics, killing other capital ships, and let me say this again, are HUGE.
My solution
As you can see, a Titan is very powerful when it is supporting a fleet, but is vulnerable to smaller ships when caught alone. So my solution is to change tanks into a vehicle that behaves similarly to how Titans do. so first, let's reduce tank's speed, both top speed and acceleration. Now I can be the citadel of defense when my hardeners are up, as they are intended to do. But when those hardeners start to cycle off, or AV becomes too concentrated, now I can't zip away and be safe. I will need infantry support to provide for me what I cannot, namely maneuverability. If I have two gunners with me, they can use their small turrets to kill AV threats to me before I become overwhelmed. If necessary, I can have them exit my tank and move in on the AV to kill them.
Notice how the dynamic between AV and tanks is in my proposed scenario. It takes teamwork on the part of AV in order to kill my tank (at least while hardeners are running) but now I must use teamwork in order to defend myself from AV effectively. This will stop tanks being used as fast attack vehicles (which should honestly be what LAVs are used for) and start being used as mobile staging points, less about speed and maneuverability and more about positioning and supporting infantry.
Whirly gun make much thunder! - Victor
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