They are taken directly from the Uprising 1.2 trailer that CCP leaked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LlH2c5dyA
1:10 in.

They also have lower HP totals than the extenders

They're adding new stuff for shields.
I doubt it'll actually be effective given the stated purpose, but if it is good then that'll throw the balance even further out of whack
What's their stated purpose, I can't see any mention of that in the blog, do you have a link?

True but the Proto are only 60 as opposed to 66 making top value of the plates lower than shields even prior to including skills or regen

Quite.
This is only one part of the problem, though. It'd be nice to see CCP realise that the solution is not just chucking on new (and bad) modules.

Yes, they'd be useful for the currently superior tank. However, then you look at the other end, armour, where you have people with 450 HP and 12/13 HP/s.
-only- 20 HP/s regen is nearly twice as much as a pair of complex repairers can regen. Buffing that significantly would make armour repairers completely laughable in comparison to shield regen.

I would much rather see reactive plates in high slots than armor repairers in low slots.
Frankly, though, either would make armour far, far stronger.

There's a rumour going around that flux coils will only affect base shield HP and not the HP given by extenders.
This would be quite bad. I'm going to see if I can get confirmation.

well I guess at least gallente mediums look 10x cooler than amarr, minnmouse and caldari combined

So what's the verdict?

Ferro doesn't add competitive HP and cost more fitting-wise then plates?
Reactives cost a very high amount fitting and in trying to do two modules work do neither well enough?

Yes.

Taken from here:

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1004241#post1004241

Even with the buff it's still way worse than shields.
Plus we don't know if it was intended to be this way, it might just be a mathematical error.

There you go. You guys just need to play around with this stuff a little. I run the fit that I posted about because I run a lot of high end equipment. It suits my play stile. There is a lot that can be done with this though.

But it forces us to be very Logi dependant and our HP still doesn't exceed shields. In order for there to be a balance or a benefit different than shields we need to have equal HP and slightly lower repair, or Higher HP and lower repair.

About to try it out.

And why would we use any of the above instead of a plate or armor rep?
Especially the resistance one, 6% lol.

Give me a module with a 50% resistance against explosives and I'm in.

Or try

2x complex ferro
1x basic reactive
1x complex plate

1x complex energizer
2x complex extenders

800 EHP and 40 HP/s on shield repair, and 1 HP/s on armor

25 HP/s x 1.6 = 40, Gallente proto assault at level 5 gets 40 with a energizer. It might be an impossible build I made it up in my head.

I am relatively certain that stacking penalties don't work in the way that Son-Of A-Gun described. Testing now.

My repair build is 1 complex ferroscale with 2 enhanced and 2 repairers, try that one it is 7 HP less than yours but a lot faster.

What we need is a racial CPU/PG reduction to armor plates on top of a small buff to their HP, and a small buff to the HP/s to reactives and repairers, because even though we can now come close to the HP of shield suits our repairs our very low. When it comes to armor we should either have same or slightly lower HP for equal or almost equal repair, or higher HP but low repair.

And also we are still uncertain if this penalty thing was intentional or not.

For the sake of diversity I think Higher HP and lower repair is the better options. Maintains a clear pro/con to each tanking type and supports the value of Logi on the field while still making Armor more viable.

0.02 ISK
Cross

You are pretty funny, I like it

Look, check the high slots. You have Scanner, Shield and Damage. Scanner doesn't mean anything in midrange combat. I can see its use in sniper and shotgun close range building combat.

So that leaves you with a choice. Damage mods or Shields. For high slots, pick one. If you pick damage mods, you are an Armor Tank or a Speed Tank or Terrain/Profile Tank (Sniper). If you pick Shields, then you go from there.

So talk the "Slayer" talk all you want, Until CCP adds new High Slot modules

Damage or Shield.


[Edit]: Yea yea yea, you can run Damage AND shield. but you are gimping your tank.

Currently I'm ******* done with this.

I want to make am AmarrI RP toon, the one I made and spent money on was something I was proud of walked out of academy with less than 750 SP unspent with a KDR of 11 damn proud of that.

Joined the big boys only to find im goddamn not even able to compete due to lack of SP, Armour is gimped as hell, its not even possible to play armour all that well with its slow movement speed that means I'm being run down by every type of shield user in town.

Explosive weapons with no draw back to being used, while anti shield guns continue to sit with numerous repercussions for continued use including potential to kill oneself....

It's all just getting to me. After that my 11KDR went down to 3....then to 2.5, then to 2 and now its dropped below two because I don't have the SP, don't have any bonues for using armour tanked toons..... no wonder Im AFKING through this 3x SP even even if I did get 4 mill SP at the end of it (my current 2.5+ the 1.5) It wont fix the ******* glaring issues CCP is cocking around with and not fixing.

******* do something CCP

I disagree with these ideas very strongly.
That's far too much of a buff.

Cat Merc's idea, the one that I was supporting, isn't quite like that. I do like the idea of using fitting requirements to balance things out more, but I would be very hesitant to have 'super mods' which do massive things but need loads of resources, because then you get lots of slots free, and inherently slots can be used in turn for resource expanders so you can get more on. In addition to being disciplined with your fitting practices, you can get a situation where you can fit quite a few of these modules on and that ends up unbalancing things.

The other thing is that the penalties on those plates are very harsh. If you're going to go that route, I'd say 5/10/15 or 5/7.5/10, because if it's a jump from 10% to 20% penalty for only 60 more HP, then people will be hesitant to use them, especially with the massive requirements for the complex.

With the numbers you've suggested, I think that people would stick to using enhanced plates, or maybe even stacking basics. Indeed, stacking basics would have a very powerful effect because they have barely any fitting requirements, and they give very large amounts of HP. You could quite feasibly stack 3 of them on with a pair of complex reppers on a GaLogi and end up with 617 raw armour HP, in addition to a repair rate of 17.5 - 25 HP/s, without a very big penalty. That's actually really quite powerful, and you have to remember that it's leaving lots of fitting resources free. You could then quite easily get triple complex damage mods or proto equipment in addition to a proto weapon/grenade.

I think that the movement penalty for armour plates should definitely be there, but not in such a draconian form that it encourages people to use the lower tiers exclusively. A flat rate throughout the tiers might be ideal, like 5% all the way through, or otherwise tweak the penalty so it only affects sprint speed/stamina.

I do quite like your repairer - it's very similar to the Cat Merc idea and I've become fond of it. It's less that it's a straight buff and more that it improves role definition.




As a side note, I've been thinking about fitting resources and looking the the EvE model (which isn't the greatest comparison for dust, but in terms of fitting it really is very similar). What if HP, tank, and weapon modules were the main things which consumed powergrid? You could weight the requirements for those so you could fit a solid tank with them, but then have more CPU free for utility modules.
Basically:
- HP, and tank modules (e.g. repairers and plates) more heavily weighted for powergrid. Shields would take mroe CPU and armour more PG, but they'd still be emphasising the PG requriement.
- Utility modules (e.g. kinetic catalyzers and damage modifiers) more heavily weighted for CPU.

That would encourage people fitting a solid tank for one type of HP, but then taking advantage of the various utilities available to the tank type, like speed modules for shield tankers.
The dropsuit resources could also be tweaked so that, say, Caldari dropsuits could have lots of CPU but less PG, and Gallente dropsuits could have lots of PG but less CPU. If Amarr dropsuits were to be brought firmly into the armour tanking fold, in addition to slot tweaks they could be given a hefty chunk of PG but lacking in CPU.

What do you think?

I quite like the idea of tweaking the penalty so it's a sprint penalty or a stamina penalty rather than a sprint+walk+strafe+aiming+jumping penalty.
It does have the desired effect of making armour less mobile overall, but without penalising it so heavily in a firefight.
The penalty on aiming and jumping imo absolutely has to go - if you stack too many plates you can't get over some obstacles at all, and stacking plates makes your aim slower.

What this does is put armor in line with shields in overall HP it does not account for resistances, speed, or overall repair. We can't look it as add x HP to make up for the slots lost for repair. Armor needs to stay the same, and buffed through racial bonuses (% efficacy and % CPU/PG reductions) and a penalty not exceeding 7%; with the addition of all suits getting passive armor repair. Buffing armor tanking by buffing the modules is not actually a buff to us but a buff to everyone. If CCP increased all armor modules by 50% what would the armor HP of a Caldari vs a Gallente suit be? Only about 100 HP because of our higher base armor, this is because a Caldari has 3 low slots while a Gallente also has 3 low slots we always lose out on 1 slot due to armor repair.

Also limiting suits by CPU for armor and PG for shields would mean that some modules would need to have their requirements tweaked to not limit certain modules to suits, for example damage mods.

Also isn't that 2 plates 2 reppers make for an extremely weak suit? Even using your numbers...

Gallente is getting less HP for lower speed. Although he has armor repair and the caldari doesn't. If you removed damage modifiers and put both suits at lvl 5 CPU/PG skills the caldari will have repair and have around 100 more HP instead of 20 plus higher overall repair. Also the Gallente suit is more resource constrained, for example the use of locus grenades instead of M1.

I'm not saying its a bad idea but armor buffs need to be racially. Unless CCP nerfs explosive modifiers and speed penalty to non existance and then armor wouldn't need to be buffed actually.

Well I don't think that the suits should have their module distribution changed, but since the amarr are dual tanks looking at their distribution 2% for both shields and armor.

This is true, depending on role, 3 damage mods for most logi isn't a good trade off. It is down to play style and weapon choice in many ways true but I run close support in firefights and it's tank > dps for my role every time, if I can't take a few hits to employ the equipment I have on board I may as well not carry it in the first place.

That being said I don't think it would be a bad thing for the medium frame Assault and Logi suits to have a greater diversity between how they're set up (assault suits being more likely to have high slots on average for example when comparing the slot ratios within each given race. But that's race not role, logi will still require higher total slot count to balance out the base suit stats of the assault otherwise they simply become a weaker suit even before things like skill buffs are applied.)

0.02 ISK
Cross

ps ~ just trying to make sure we keep in mind that while mod contention is relevant to tank mod balance, tank balance does not include damage mods any more than it does upgrade mods or KinCats et al. Not every role is slayer based, nor should balance be.

I don't agree with the OP's assertion to move shield regulators to high slots. However, this does cause an imbalance in tank, this point I cannot argue. So suppose there was a high slot module that increased the passive regen of armor reps by a percentage? To start it out, keep this module at the same percentages as the regulators, and then buff/nerf that percentage from there. This allows both tanks to have a module that doesn't compete with their primary tank, and allows them to shore up where there tank is weak.

Also, armor plates do need a massive buff to hp they give. Especially considering how slow they regen armor now, they should have a ridiculous buffer, in contrast to the ridiculous regen shield has. This would make the two styles of tanking distinct, yet equally viable depending on the situation at hand.

Also, there should be a much lower, if not outright removed, movement penalty for plates. In EVE, shield modules increase the sig radius of ships, which makes them easier to target and hit with weaponry. But this cannot carry over to Dust as seamlessly. Therefore, remove/drastically reduce the movement penalty, and definitely remove the turn penalty. Alternatively, keep the movement penalty, but have armor suits move faster than shield suits. It would make sense lore-wise. For the first suggestion, perhaps the armor plates have energy coils embedded in them to increase the power flowing to the suit, thus allowing the wearer to cary the extra weight without encumbrance. For the second suggestion, the armor tanked suits would expect the extra weight, and would therefore add servomotors, or whatever sci-fi gizmo CCP so desires, to increase the strength and speed of the wearer in anticipation of this extra weight. This would also allow people to run faster than others in armor suits if they forgo their armor plates.

Also, to avoid abuse of dual-tanking, assuming some of the changes mentioned in this post were put into effect, armor tanked dropsuits should have reduced shield hp/regen. It would make sense lore-wise, as the race who cares about armor would sacrifice shield strength in order to push the armor envelope even further.

*Cough* Having to use it all on armor *Cough*
Besides, they gain a lot more CPU/PG than you can do with one module.

You should think about it this way:
Shields go to high slots.
Armor go to low slots.
Where do CPU/PG upgrades go?

That's why armor modules need less both CPU AND PG than shield extenders.

These are good stats but the racial bonus should be for every armor suit not the Gallente assault. By making the bonus only dor them it limits armor to being remotely useful just for them. All suits need CPU/PG reductions and efficacy bonuses. Also the reactive plates are best used for the medium armor suits not shield suits, because if we could stack 4-5 reactives our movement penalty is around 12% with decent HP buffer and a decent armor repair, stacking 3 or less you feel most of the penalty with little HP as a reward.

We can have more than 1 bonus :/ also our bonuses aren't actually racial, they apply to the racial role. A racial bonus would apply to both the assault and the Logi. The bonus could be applied to the medium frame skill since its pretty useless unless you dont want a role. The Amarr heavy needs HP not speed, their base speed is so low that any bonuses to them should be applied to the suit.

Speed is not a problem aslong as we have the HP to represent the penalty and the vulnerability we get from applying complex plates. For example if you take a Gallente and a Caldari suit and give them the same modules, the Gallente should have around 30%-40% higher HP than that suit since we are more vulnerable to weapons fire and explosives. The only way to justify for equally stacked Gallente and Caldari suits to have the Same HP is if there were an equal amount of shield and armor killers, and explosives did 100/100 and there was no speed penalty.

Also it doesnt seem possible to add more slots than what we have now without changing the fitting U.I. So more lows to the logi suits doesnt seem to be an option.

Tbh the caldari assault bonus is now even worse than it was before, running four complex extenders will net them like 21 extra shield more than what they currently were running, if it was 25% like the logi had it would be an issue but id rather reload faster than have 21 more shield.

The theory crafting has been focused on the shield and armor mods much more than the shield and armor suits.
The suits are mentioned but usually only in context with their fittings options.

While you are correct that the disparity within the suits (leaving aside CCPs upcoming changes) are not as huge that actually doesn't address the balance of shield and armor mods at all. There are some drastic balance problems within the two lines especially as compared to each other and that disparity is compounded by the suit discrepancies and the skills rather than being mitigated.

Ack, company just showed up, don't mean to be brusque but I have to cut this short.

Cheers,
Cross

The easy way to consider this is via some (fictional) % numbers. Numbers below are provided for illustration purposes only and should not be construed as actual game data, they're only here to highlight trends.

Say shield suits have an average of 20% more shield based HP and further that shield HP is 25% more effective than an equal amount of armor HP. Now let's assume that racial skills provide an equal % buff effect to both shields and armor say 10% (in reality the shield buffs seem to edge out armor here but we'll leave that aside). Let's further assume that shield and armor tanking skills both net the Merc a 33% increase in effectiveness of their chosen tank.

To keep it simple we'll say that first 20% has an actual 20 HP raw value.
That becomes 25 after efficiency.
With racial skills the gap becomes 27.5 (Now wait! You said racial skills were an equal % buff and you're disparity tally just went up, what gives? Good question. The answer is that while the % buff is the same the base value which is being buffed is not equal so the net gain is higher for shields).
Now the tanking skills are included, giving us 36.575 HP advantage for our totally fictional gap.

Even this compounded widening of the gap doesn't tell us the whole story however. Due to weak internal scaling for armor mods when compared either to shield mods or to fittings costs (once other drawbacks are included) the ISK and SP values of each tanking type are not kept in balance either. There is effectively a higher cost to run an equivalent tank with armor. When that is applied to our example case from above you have the armor tanker paying more to deploy in a fit that has a lower eHP, plus a average lower movement speed (sprint and standard) thus depressing the average eHP still farther.
All the related passive skills providing % buffs are by their very nature unable to close, and in fact only magnify, any gaps in effect or value between suits and tank types (skills linked to a single race can be an exception here).
So at best skill we now have a shield tanker who is faster, has higher eHP, is spending less ISK on average for it and gaining more net utility from passive skills.

But wait, there's more! Due to the competition for slot space only the shield tanker has a serious option in regards to fitting flexibility since Upgrade mods are available only in the low slots required to fit an armor tank. The mobility mods are also tied to low slots. Further shields have tanking mods in both high and low slots while armor has mods only in lows.

In short the theorycrafting shows that we need tanking balanced at the mod level first. With regards to both internal scaling and eHP value (not to be confused with raw HP value) in shield vs armor comparisons. Once that balanced base has been established balance in other related areas can be extrapolated without becoming a crutch for weaknesses in the mods themselves.

Cheers,
Cross

I think the best way to go about fixing armor is to keep all slots as they are, switch all shield mods to high slots, and either add s medium slot or have some modules go both ways. On top of that give all armor suits bonuses to armor module usage 15-25% (before applying other racial bonuses) , a reduction in CPU/PG of all reactive and ferroscale plates, a reduction in the speed penalty of armor modules maxing out at 5-7%, making explosives do 90/110, and adding passive armor repairs to all suits.

Essentially what this does is make the max penalty of armor tanking about 15%, also ensures that a max tanked armor suit retains 25% more HP than an equally max tanked shield suit of the same role. The armor repair should be small, nothing higher than 7, a reduction in CPU/PG or atleast just PG, ensures that a complex suit stays effective and has more diversity. In this scenario a Gallente Assault with a passive repair of 5, with all complex tank modules vs a Caldari assault with a armor repair of 1 will have a tankHP difference of 22% (168), and a speed difference of 2%. While this does seem like the Gallente suit has the advantage keep in mind he is marginally slower, his total HP reps 6.25x slower, although constantly and a higher number of weapons do damage to his main tank. This is only a comparison at extreme numbers, and only uses two max tanked Gallente and Caldari suits.

Edit: the reason all.armor suits need a 25% bonus to armor modules is because buffing armor plates only slightly increase the gap and would require possibly doubling the HP of armor.modules to ensure armor has higher HP like it is meant, the only other option is to give all armor suits an HP buff of 150-250. When I say before other racial bonuses is that i do not want racial suits losing their bonuses that makes them useful for example the Amarr commandos bonus, which should honestly go to all Amarr suits.

By different tank bonuses do you mean like Assault gets efficacy and Scout repair? I see where this is going but keep in mind that let's say a Caldari scout and a Gallente scout come face to face, technically their HP will be the same or the Gallente will be lower since the Gallente didnt get an efficacy bonus, that Gallente scout should have 25% more HP than the Caldari when both equally focused on tank. A different tank bonus should be applied after the 25% bonus, if not then some role suits will be balanced while others will remain UP.

Well it depends on the mindset of both players but,
lets say a Caldari suits equip 3 slots with armor modules, then we have a Gallente suit and equips 3 armor modules this leaves him with the decision of sacrificing his only form of repair to his main tank for a bit of HP or sacrificing that HP for a small repair if he goes with the repairer, his overall repairing and HP is actually lower than the Caldari suit, while if he goes with armor his HP is only a tiny bit higher than the Caldari. If we had passive armor repair and some buffs to modules, then armor repairers would be a choice not a requirement just like regulators are to shields.

Although I personally think that buffing armor via racial bonuses would be the best option since it gives armor the choice of always being higher in HP, and makes it more significant to us and at the same time it gives us the ability to sacrifice it for repairers and active tank, or to build on it for buffer tanking.

I think most people are going to swarm to plates now, so there is a high chance shields won't even need a penalty I think deoending on how 1.4 goes the next thread I make is to add a low slot shield HP module, or some fitting restrictions for HP modules by suit tank type. We are going to see some very crazy dual tank set ups, like 594 shield/595 armor Caldari assaults.