Why is the Repair Systems skill a two-edged sword?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Shouldn’t there be a way to scale the skill level at any given time. It’s the only skill I’m aware of so far in which higher levels have a drawback. In this case, you consume more capacitor. And since you can’t unlearn skills that effect is permanent. I like to be cap stable or close to it and I find myself not wanting to train the skill beyond level 1. It being able to run longer, in my opinion, trumps it doing a little more repair.

It should be either level scalable or get a capacitor bonus per level as well. When overheating, perhaps the capacitor bonus could be suspended.

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Repairing is useless imo. especially after you can warp to Upwell structures and get free repair without even docking? And afaik at best you can repair like 100 HP/sec but people can get like 700 DPS from a destroyer. So you are dead anyway, repairing just slows it down. Maybe i am missing something

I was thinking the other day of giving battleships a redicolous role bonus to the amount shield boosters and repair modules can restore. This way frigates, dessies, cannot kill them anymore. They can tackle them, they do all kinds of EW on them, and maybe kite them forever, but they cant kill them. Thats how it supposed to be imo.

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First of all, people use repair modules for running missions all the time where things are predictable and being cap stable is desirable for someone who doesn’t want to be bothered to actively manage their modules. Second of all, there’s a fairly big difference between 700 HP and 700 DPS. 700 DPS is going to be reduced by the ship’s resistances, while a ship’s repair amounts are not going to be reduced by anything. I don’t think you’ve factored that into your evaluation.

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Have you factored it in? How much damage is done to a ship at 700 dps if it has 70% resistance and can repair 100 HP per second?

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Not clear how you consume more capacitor . maybe something I’m missing in the skil description.

Not sure what you mean by useless and Easily rep waaaay more that thart (get 250+ on my Cerb fe)

** Edit ** Just realised you were probably be refering to raw HP as opposed to EHP … even then getting well over 100

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A battleship should be able to tank at least 3 destroyers fitted for maximum dps but it cant even tank 1. Imo it should be such that if you bring a battleship to the battle the opponent must bring one as well or 5x or more the amount of smaller ships. But thats not how the game works currently as far as i can tell. So currently battleships are just a vanity item. They have no strategic advantage as far as i can tell.

Another change that could be done instead is to make larger turrets able to track as well as a small one. This would make the bigger ships feared again?

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Why? Because you say so? And while I don’t have access to pyfa, I find your statement to be unlikely anyways.

One of the wonderful things about Eve is that bigger isnt always better.

Also, why should your opinion count for enough to change a basic concept of Eve (bigger isn’t always better)? What makes you so special that Eve should be changed just based on your opinion?

Congratulations, you figured out that bigger isn’t always better in Eve.

I take it you didn’t watch any of the Alliance Tournament this weekend. Nor are you well versed in wormhole heavy armor brawls (which leans heavily on battleships) or null sec defense fleets (Megathrons, Tempest Fleet Issues, Paladins, etc.).

Once again: bigger isn’t always better. And a battleships can one shot frigates, they just have to be at long range so transversal speeds are lower.

The idea behind bigger guna have worse tracking is that while those guns could potentially destroy a frigate with one or two volleys, a skilled pilot in a smaller ship has a chance to get under the guns to survive.

You need to take some time and learn how to play Eve before telling everyone what’s wrong with it. The fact you said battleships have no strategic value tells me you honestly do not understand how Eve works.

What I think is you want to buy the biggest ship and have an “I win” button. Sorry, that’s not how Eve works… and its a good thing.

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At the moment the bigger ships cant punch down, especially in pvp but the smaller ships can punch up. It should be the other way around imo.

battleships can one shot frigates, they just have to be at long range so transversal speeds are lower.

Frigs can go like 1000 m/sec easily. They can close the gap of a BS before it has even locked on. You can also warp in right on top

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Go get some game experience in both frigates and battleships.We can have this conversation again in a year when you learned more about fittings and how to pvp.Good luck o7

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yea yea you know better, the game is perfect, but ~noone is flying battleships (the killboards seem to confirm it) There is clearly something that can be better. I mean let me ask you this; What is the point of the battleship? It barely out dps smaller classes and it has worse tracking. It is MUCH more expensive, slower, it has more EHP but thats it? So you sacrifice tracking, speed and maneuverability, locking speed for EHP and pay a much bigger price? How does that help anyone in what situation. Also keep in mind that battleships have larger sig radious so they also take more damage, they are easier to hit. So the increase in EHP barely makes up for the increased signature radius they have. There is literally no reason to use them? They have 0 benefits as far as i can tell.

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Of course fw sticks to frigs. Cheaper ships to lose and better maneuvering than a bs

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you should go try a Level 4 security mission with a frigate or destroyer - you will quickly understand what a battleship is used for…

then come back to this thread.

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The battleship only barely gets over the finish line in level 4s. But thats because everything in the mission is predictable and the NPCs do not fly/fit/use their ships optimally. And usually you can warp out if there is trouble so the risk is minimal. In pvp and actual battle you dont have this advantage. Only a fool would fly a battleship in a warzone. Its kinda messed up. The battleship should be the number one ship for battle

Also dont listen to me. Even if you believe the game is on the right track and not much needs to change. Then how come CCP hasnt grown in oer 10 years? I think they have less employees than they used to even. They are shrinking.

This is in times whre Roblox is the second highest grossing game in USA (Released in 2006, in 2022 it came in second for game with the most revenue of all games in USA) Runescape also is seeing great success these days. The number of players on their servers are hitting all time highs, almost 100k online every day. And the game was released before EVE online. I am only bringing this up to help people understand that defending the status quo in EVE is like defending EVE dying. This is not hyperbole :slight_smile:

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I think we are finally making progress.

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Boy, wait until you discover the 20+ years of debate around TSM V.

Level 3 and Level 4 are required for T2 subcap modules. Presumably you’ll want those modules eventually, so it won’t be a permanent solution.

Armor repairers repair at the end of a cycle. Shield boosters give HP at the beginning of a cycle.

When you have a longer armor repair cycle time, you are delaying the same investment of capacitor now in exchange for the same raw HP a longer time away. For certain activities this means death. This is one reason why players tend to prefer shields better than armor: the investment of capacitor is now, and then the raw HP is also gained now with no delay.

Increasing the delay to “save capacitor” is the wrong way to look at the armor repairer: you’re already spending the capacitor now, why keep delaying receiving HP further? That’s only more time for things to kill you, and having that “extra capacitor” from stability doesn’t mean anything when your structure hits zero, that extra cap is just “could have been more HP” points.

If you are so strapped for capacitor that this skill in particular is making the difference, things you can also consider:

  • changing fit (eg: more capacitor stable modules, guns that don’t require capacitor, Meta 4 modules that go light on capacitor)
  • changing piloting strategy (eg: right click module → “disable auto-repeat” → now whenever you click it it will repair only once and not auto-repeat)
  • changing skill plan (eg: more capacitor engineering skills)

Hope this alternative perspective helps or is useful.

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It’s not the HP awarded at the start or end of a cycle that determine effectiveness, but the speed of the cycle. If shield boosters gave HP at end of the cycle it would not make any noticable difference 99% of the time. Armor tanking is like it is because you are sacrificing the effectiveness of shield boosting for a more cap efficient defense. Having higher skill levels undermine aspect this is counterproductive.

If you a taking enough DPS to enter structure within the timeframe of a single armor repairer cycle, you have already lost. I’d say you’d be toast even with shields in that scenario. Keep in mind that I am suggesting the ability to throttle the level so that the cycle speed can be increased or decreased as needed. If you need the level 5 reps you have that, but you also have the ability to scale it down to level 3 performance if that is more optimum for a given situation. I find it absurd that there is a downside to increasing the skill. If at level 3 it could use X amount of cap, why would I outright lose the know-how to operate at that level of cap consumption if I’m supposed to be more skilled at using the module at level 5? There can be situations where slower reps are enough to tank damage, however the lack of cap stability could result in total failure in drawn out engagements.

Higher engineering skills and fitting “enduring” modules is standard fare.

The thing about armor tanking is, because it awards HP at the end of a slower cycle, it is not a good candidate for manual management in a fight. Unless the fight is so easy you hardly need a tank anyway. You generally want it running constantly because, unlike shields, you don’t get the quick return on a dime. If you have it off, forget about it/get distracted and conditions change you don’t get the reps immediately and can’t quickly respond to new sources of incoming damage. You want reps always coming down the pipeline to mitigate this as much as possible. Especially considering, unlike shields, it is your last line of defense. There is no armor to buffer you if your tank is failing hard like you have with shields to cover your escape. Which makes damage controls a nigh necessity as a fallback. The need for these modules to take up a fitting slot is another downside for armor, whereas you can get away with not having one for an active shield spec and use the slot for something else.

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This thread is in regard to armor repairers; Active tanking modules which are definitely not useless. I thought perhaps you were confused and referring to hull repairers, but you seem to be legitimately stating that shield boosters and armor repairers are useless. How do you propose someone warp to a Upwell station in the middle of deadspace room that required a consumable key or an escalation that will despawn the moment you leave? Or systems with no Upwells? The impracticality of what you posted is astounding. I do not understand how anyone who has played this game, even a little, could come to such a conclusion. I’m perplexed. Has something been lost in translation?

And how did this thread get derailed into a discussion about the usefulness of battleships? You should make a separate thread about any issue you have with large hulls.

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I’m not quite sure where you’re getting your information from because it runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom.

Precisely, thus you always want it faster. So that the next round of cap investment → raw HP reward can trigger sooner.

What?

In my experience armor tanking on the whole is very capacitor hungry compared to shield fits. Especially when shields are fitted with the Ancil style boosters – they use charges instead of capacitor. This has let Marauders like the Vargur remain completely combat operational on zero capacitor: guns require no cap, tank requires no cap. Can’t beat that capacitor efficiency: 0 cap for some X raw HP. Can’t do that with armor. SAAR plus paste gives massive raw HP in comparison but still takes cap.

Many shield fits can fit oversized shield boosters – fitting oversized armor repairers are extremely rare. What armor reps give you in comparison to shields are generally better resist profiles and thus (when fitted properly) better EHP gains. They still take capacitor, and overheating armor reps makes them cycle even faster.

This conclusion doesn’t follow. As I don’t believe you’re accurately assessing shield boosting vs armor repairing.

This is a polemic, and not true. I have survived quite a few fights where it came down to overheating armor repair cycle timers and chipping away at structure in between. Even leaves behind the exhilarating 5% structure (or less) :slight_smile:

I agree. You already have that capability:

  • Turn auto-repeat “off”
  • Press button when you need it

or

  • Toggle repairer on/off quickly, as needed

“Turn on and forget” active tanking I have almost never heard of for armor fits in PvE except some very niche high end blitz-style battleship fits. For PvP it is not viable.

This is exaggeration that erases the truth of the matter. It is the same capacitor cost just in more frequent intervals. You haven’t “forgotten” anything, you just now know how to spend it sooner.

My recommendation: Press your armor rep button twice each time. Actively use your active tank.

Your points would be better-received if they actually represented the reality of the situation rather than making stuff up.

You are conflating:

  • Capacitor Cost for Module Activation
  • Duration of a Module
  • Fitting’s Capacitor Stability

The third one only ever matters for PvE when you’re in a situation where you are not applying enough DPS to really run the room well. The meta at this point is so pro-DPS-tanking that simply skilling up missiles / guns of choice will make it so that you don’t really have to run perma-active tanks anyway.

What are you talking about?

Active armor tanking is one of the top things to manage in a fight. Post-fights pilots analyze the timing of their SAAR rep presses and record their playstyle to get better at this, as a skilled pilot who has mastered this can absolutely punch up their weight class.

No, you don’t want your active armor reps running constantly because they are capacitor hogs.

It’s at this point I think you’re missing the big mid slot companion with active armor fits: the capacitor booster. They go hand in hand.

Look, the point of active armor reps are to reinforce your raw HP as even better EHP (due to resists) moreso than your opponent. Ancillary repairers bring even more EHP which can increase survivability immensely. This requires repping at precise points in the fight which requires piloting skill and constant assessment. You then time your cap booster injections to keep actively repping. This also gives you some neut resistance (especially if the opponent has stacked neuts like a newb) as you can then get active rep cycles in despite the neut pressure.

EDIT to add:

No, structure is your last line of defense. This is why a lot of frigate PvP fits use extra rig slots to buffer out their structure. Best EHP gain per rig slot used.

Damage controls are an almost certain necessity for any active tank: you want to maximize EHP gains per raw HP gained and very rarely is there a module that improves it when replacing a DCU II.

You’re close on this one. It’s that you can either:

  • Fit an armor tank, or
  • Damage modules (ex: Ballistic Control, Gyros, etc)

Shield tanks do not have to compete slots for tank/damage, but Armor does. This is another reason people prefer shields (which competes for utility/range control mods).

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@Murasame_Masamune So what you are saying is its impossible, or simply preferable to do escalations and abyssal runs with repair modules? Dont most people do these things fast and without taking much damage?

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Entertaining…

Ever been on a combat grid with battleships and dreads ? I kinda like this idea - for very selfish reasons - but it has zero chance to be implemented, and for very good reason.
Where do we go from here ? Titans ?

Why ? Because it’s a battleship, poorly fitted, and in the wrong situation ? It feels “unfair” to you ? What about catalysts getting hit by a rack of smartbombs, should they be immune too, or isn’t that “unfair” enough for you ?

First off, what you’re looking for is tactical advantage, not strategical. Second, if you don’t know how to use a particular ship you’re always right in that it will be underperforming. Not a ship issue, but a pilot issue.

… maybe the Hecate pilot who attacked my poor Armageddon running a Haven site in nullsec thought the same. The killmail says he’s wrong.

please link that particular killboard ?

Sounds like a pilot issue, not a ship issue.

Only a fool or a very knowledgeable player would fly a battleship in a warzone solo. Assuming you mean a pvp situation, of course.

Time to change the record, this one’s broken. Gets old after all the other threads you post the same message in.

Knowledge, experience, and an ability to overcome bias.

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