I think it would be nice if you could have an option to change shields out for a magnetic field designed to push away all metal, for example projectile charges and half the energy from hybrid charges. If someone also switched out their armor for a mirror coating on their ship, it would reflect energy turrets and the other half of a hybrid charge. Such a ship would be better optimized for ratting or ambushing a certain target, but it would be unable to defend from bombs, smartbombs, and missiles. Maybe there could be some kind of trade off for lowering scan res and sensor strength while gaining the ability to redirect missiles, too.
These changes should be implemented as new rigs if they are added, since making armor into a mirror is a little more complex than strapping a gun to the side of a ship.
In a way this is already in the game. Why do we have damage types, and why are certain ships that specialize in X tank skewed towards those damage types and weak vs others? You can already ultra focus your tank with specialized hardeners if you want to be strong vs certain weapons and weak vs others.
4 Likes
That’s not how damage is calculated in the game and it’d be dumb to fundamentally change how damage works like this.
3 Likes
So, you’re asking for a way to harden your armor and/or shields against certain damage types?
That seems like a very reasonable request at first glance…which is likely why there have been all sorts of armor and shield hardening modules in the game since it began…
2 Likes
I’m talking about a slightly different kind of hardener than the ones already in the game, where you become immune to one type of weapon but all other weapons pass through that layer of defense, instead of just increasing resistance to one damage type.
What you are talking about is more or less already implemented.
Hybrid weapons always deal Kinetic and Thermal damage. Beefing up those resistances makes armor/shields tougher against that ammo.
Laser weapons always deal EM and Thermal damage. Beefing up those resistances makes armor/shields tougher against that ammo.
Missiles, Projectiles, and Drones are wild cards and so there is no way to know for sure what resistance profile to have unless one is dealing with NPCs.
In fact… the same is true for weapon types in general. One does not know what weapons will be encountered unless knowingly dealing with certain NPCs.
As a side note: “Immunity” is not a word to the thrown around lightly.
When you say “become immune to one type of weapon” do you mean…
- highly resistant to that weapon type?
- cannot be damaged at all by that weapon type?
I can tell you right now… there is a “wrong” option between those two. And the other option is already implemented in a more indirect form.
3 Likes
Ah, I misunderstood you. Apologies.
This idea is even worse. Here’s why:
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It does away with the notion of hitpoints on any layer they’re used on. Using your example of “mirror” armor (which totally negates EM damage but lets all other damage through), it wouldn’t matter if you had 1 armor HP or a billion armor HP, the armor’s effectiveness would always be the same no matter how much damage your ship absorbed. Why? Because your armor never takes damage. The damage is either negated entirely or passed through entirely to the next level, it is never applied to the level the immunity module is equipped on. Armor plates, armor reppers, and any other armor resist modules would be rendered useless on a ship with “mirror” armor.
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It would make armor tanking OP as hell. Why? Armor tankers generally don’t care about shields at all, which means if they have a hole in their armor resists they just fill that hole with one of these immunity modules in their shields. Their armor never takes that kind of damage anymore, and their shields never drain because they never take damage. Poof, free perpetual damage reduction to your armor.
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It would make PvE against certain NPCs trivially easy. If you’re up against, say, Blood Raiders or Sansha’s Nation, you can be fairly certain that they’ll only be throwing EM and Thermal damage at you. Great, put an anti-Thermal immunity module on your shields and an anti-EM module on your armor, and you’re now almost guaranteed immunity from these NPCs. You can run with a full gank fit and clear missions very quickly with little risk to your ship.
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Have you ever heard of pipe-bombing? These modules would basically make pipe-bombers immortal against anyone they caught.
Shall I go on?
Hard no. -1.
1 Like
Balancing nightmare
I wouldn’t mind a shield adaptive module that adapts to In coming damage like armour has
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