As a full blooded tanker, there is no need to remove proto AV.

It is not OP, it is not even unfair to tankers.

An RPG-7 costs a heck of a lot less than a MBT, but can destroy it quite easily.

It is not terribly difficult to be an efficient tanker, especially in pubs.

In PC battles it gets difficult if you let the enemy take the high ground, but a single good sniper can prevent that, so it is in fact quite even. If your team has no snipers, then you are forced to be defensive, no big surprise there.

Ultimately, if you can't deal with proto AV, you are not a real tanker, just someone who wants to get big stats with little risk.

Arms have gone down to enemy action in Iraq, just to let you know.


Aside from that, tanking is not an elitist club. I am not that good, I run tanks 100% of the time and I turn a profit.

Most of the tanks I see go down are to driver error. Charging into fire, hanging around objectives like they wont get popped. Absolutely ridiculous antics from people who seem to think you can take limitless damage.

I have a fully specced Maddy, and I know how much damage I can take. One proto AV I can get away from, two and I might be in trouble, three and I'm done.

I don't see the problem. Proto AV is strong, but we only have standard tanks.

I don't know about removing proto AV yet but I do agree I'd rather see AV take a hit than to have no more tanks to shoot because it really is so much fun.

As players get more and more SP and start to diversify I see a real issue between AV and vehicles. 2 proto swarmers can hit armor tanks for something 6,500 damage per shot and the only extra skill they'll need to train is the swarm launcher skill.
And 2 proto forge gunners that are paying attention can knock RDV's out of the sky before they can even drop the vehicle.

Once you get away from randoms in pub matches with militia swarms it becomes obvious there's going to be a huge disparity between them and tanks might go largely extinct. Last build when we had marauders they could never survive our AV if I was with the my usual crew unless the tank could exploit horrible map design or had sufficient support on the ground to counter us and keep us from getting in to a good position and even then if only one bluedot had pulled out some high level AV gear that multi-million ISK tank was was dead. There was a lot more balance before this last nerf but even then high level AV had the advantage.

As much as I hate to say it the only solution might be some kind or restrictions on certain pub matches because at the rate we're going tanks are going to be good for nothing but pubstomping which will only lead to more whining.

Real tanks can be very easy to destroy if they don't have any support

I run proto-AV sometimes, but to be honest, it gets way too expensive. I see a tank drop in, I run to get my Ishukune out, and if the tank is already destroyed or on the other side of the map, I've just wasted a ton of ISK (admittedly much less than a tank costs). Even with the proto-AV, it takes a few shots to kill many tanks. Often they can get out of the way and start repping themselves.

Don't let the FG gunners get behind you. Shots to the back of your tank do WAY more damage than to the front. Also, don't run a railgun tank into the middle of a city - even with the heavy it isn't hard to straffe out of way of your shots. Also, get some ground support :)