What if you could rep citadels, with some kind of imposed limit such as the exact same mechanic and numbers as the DPS cap? DPS requirements to pause the timer wouldn’t change, so even if you’re repping all the damage they’re dealing, it’s still paused if it would have been sans logi.
Where this comes from is a citadel fight last night. We were running kitey ■■■■■■■■ and they were not. Net result, my Scimitar was bored. Very bored. We were well within rep range of the citadel. Repping the citadel would give logistics something to do to contribute to the fight - one we ended up losing.
Other advantages:
More potential for escalation… dudes drop in some faxes to rep, now you have a real reason to drop dreads/etc on them. DPS cap mechanics alone completely invalidate dreads in those fights as it stands now.
Defenders have more of a reason to stay near their structure (to provide reps)
By drawing out the fight between two active participants, more ships will have the opportunity to go to Valhalla, yet blueball structure bashes are not made longer.
This is an idea that has been tossed around my alliance as well, they thought it may be a good idea that you would have to use specific reppers for each timer, remote shield for shield, armor for armor, and hull for hull, which would give a use for remote hull repairers since no one uses those.
As a concept, yea, using the “right” reppers might make things more interesting. Would help produce a more varied doctrine list, if you wished to provide reps. I’m sure most groups have shield and armor doctrines already, but I can assert that more often than not we’re running shield comps - having a defined reason to break out the armor battleships would be fun.
I also kind of like the idea of shield reps for shield timer, shield/armor for armor timer, shield/armor/hull for hull timer. Just like a ship, even if it’s armor buffer, repairing the shields will still help… just… less so. Reminds me of a time we were bashing a structure, and a ferox on our fleet got WAY out of position (he warped to the structure instead of to the fleet). Structure had him pointed and webbed, he wasn’t going anywhere. We were probably 150km off with Ospreys.
Luckily, our blues had 40 Guardians and they were only about 60km off. So they kept him alive, much to their amusement.
Given how little they repair and how they’re always unbonused, I don’t ever see hull reppers becoming a thing.