Ancillary Shield Boosters are overpowered?
by A scientists life in Eve on Aug.02, 2012, under Eve online
A pretty obvious statement to make perhaps, but this was highlighted in very clear fashion last night as we helped a Corp mate test a Sleipnir fit.
EDIT: Please read the comments for this post. I think I was really trying to highlight how effective the ASB modules are, and although I didn’t say it I’m more in the camp that they should be limited to one per ship, like Damage Control modules. Also, I suck at PvP so my commentary on such subjects should be taken with several large bags of salt 
For those of you who didn’t see any of the Alliance Tournament X matches, you will have missed hundreds of Sleipnir Minmatar Fleet Command Ships all fitted with the new Ancillary Shield Booster (ASB) module. This module allows for a large boost in shield, but lets you use Cap charges instead of your ship’s capacitor. When you couple this with the Sleipnir’s ship bonus for shield boosting effect, suddenly you have a very potent combination.
In Alliance Tournament X, you were only allowed to fit one of these modules per ship. On Tranquility of course you can fit your ship how you want, CPU and Powergrid permitting of course. So following this, my Corp mate had fit up a dual ASB fit with high resists. Asking for us to help him test his fit with ships offering good DPS, we proceeded to undock 2 Tengu’s and a Loki. We conducted it as a battle. He comfortably tanked our DPS and, due to a bad warp-in, caught one of the Tengu’s quickly and recorded a “kill”. By kill, I mean the target called it and stopped DPS and left the field.
It was clear we couldn’t break him, but also he was using the wrong ammo which made the Sleipnir’s DPS potential even more apparent. We tweaked fits, he changed ammo and we then undocked, again. This time he burnt for me and his microwarp fit easily caught up to my Tengu. I managed to tank for a while but I was clearly going down and pointed. I cut my afterburner and burnt towards him and away from the station, realising that he was orbitting me so he could concentrate on managing his tank. when range was cut and his ship was aligned away from me trying to restore the orbit range, I flipped and hit the afterburner, managing to break the scram and warp off to safety. Of course if this had of been a disruptor instead of a scram I would have “died”.
As we clearly still weren’t breaking his tank, a forth T3 was added, another Tengu, and battle recommenced.
This time we were getting closer, but still not breaking, and then he ran out of charges. Instead of calling it when he ran out of charges, he called it when he ran out of cap. The ASB modules can also use your ship’s capacitor to work, but use huge amounts of it.
He was aligning to station to warp off, however there were now multiple flights of heavy missiles still in flight towards him, even though our launchers were no longer active. Mine was the last flight, and seeing his ship deep in structure, I was really hoping that his warp kicked in. It did, however it occurred to me that entering warp doesn’t usually involve a large flash. Comms went quiet for a couple of seconds, and then the obvious was stated. The Sleipnir had died, but it really had, all that was left was the wreck and my Corp mate’s pod… and I had a kill mail.
Oops.
Looking at the killmail made us all pause and take in breath. Over the three battles, the Sleipnir had tanked 240,000 damage. Given his high resists I think this worked out to over 1 million effective hit points worth of damage tanked.
Put another way, none of us had points fitted to hold him in place, and it took us probably about 20 to 30 minutes of battles with 4 Strategic Cruisers to kill him, and really he could have warped off at any time. Also, he should really have killed two or more of us, which would have reduced the DPS meaning he wouldn’t have died anyway.
Seriously – 4 T3′s to take down a Sleipnir?
Although it resulted in a loss of over 300 million ISK, viewing the killmail was actually worth it. My comment at the end – “OK, let’s log off Sisi and back onto Tranquility now”. Sadly we had been on TQ all the time.
-
Hi! Welcome to A Scientist's Life in Eve!
Thanks for visiting my blog! Feel free to leave a comment, and stay updated by subscribing to the RSS feed. Fly safe!
EON MagazineBuy Plex
Try Eve for Free!
No, they aren’t overpowered. All your test did was to prove that the Sleipnir, a Tech 2 Field Command Ship, could take on a small gang and hold its own for a period of time. Your “test” would not have had the same results with any other ship using an ASB, including ships like the Cyclone or Maelstrom.
Your strategy going against a Sleipnir STILL KILLED it and at the same time you ignored the Sleipnir’s biggest weakness: Alpha Strikes. An ASB fit ship is VERY weak Alpha Strikes. In fact, I bet it wasn’t even considered by you to synchronize your volleys so that you could out damage his reps.
The ASB Sleipnir only has about 4300 Shield HP and the ASB can only recharge about 1100 to 1200 Shield HP per cycle. With four Tengus, you should have been able to take him down in say five or six volleys depending on your missile skills.
I explain all this here: http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/ancillary-shield-boosters-overpowered/
lol I will consider myself told off from a “go back and learn to play Eve” point of view. My post was sort of tongue in cheek as it was impressive to see a ship stand up to that sort of punishment. As to co-ordinating our strikes, we were using missile spam and all in Kiting Tengu’s with the exception of the autocannon fit Loki, and as we were kiting at different ranges it was pretty difficult to think about co-ordinating strikes.
Also, of those of us shooting, I would only consider one of us even remotely competent at PvP – and that’s not me! I did make the comment earlier that we could alpha through the ASB if we had the right ships, but then in that situation I would have expected the Sleipnir to have not engaged our theoretical gang (or give us a nice juicy killmail if he did). The alpha you so rightly talk about was evident in ATX when Tier 3 BC’s tried to use the ASB module, and found their thin tank alpha’d through pretty quickly despite the insane recharge.
I guess from a noob PvP perspective it was just scary that the ship could withstand that sort of punishment for so long before we mistakenly ended the test with a fatality.
I do actually like the ASB module, and have one fitted to my Onyx (which is probably completely the wrong way to fit it, but I’m basing that fit around small gangs and not super tackling). I just think that it should be like a Damage Control module and limited to one per ship, so maybe the title of my post wasn’t really so helpful after all. I’ll add an edit disclaimer at the top I think!
Thanks for your comment, and the linky which was a very interesting read.
Yeah, for some reason I missed the Loki being part of the setup, and that would have made things more difficult to synchronize the attacks with.
As far as the Dual ASB fit, was it a Dual Large or X-Large ASB fit?
I also went back and did a check to see if my numbers added up correctly, with the four Tengus. Assuming each of the four Tengus could produce 1000 dps each for 5000 dps (if using Kinetic missiles), and that the Sleipnir could boost using just one XL ASB, which would be 1350 HP per cycle (which would be more than two large ASBs). With a cycle rate of 4s versus an incoming DPS of rate of one volley every 7.5 seconds. This is also assuming that the Sleipnir has 70% resists in Kinetic.
After running the numbers, he would have easily tanked your volleys until he ran completely out of cap. If he did so optimally, he would have boosted every 7.5 seconds against each volley which meant that he only lost 150 HP against you every round. A Sleipnir will get about two or three charges after he runs out of charges (so long as he doesn’t stop boosting). So, let’s say after a total of 109.5 seconds he would have been completely drained of cap under that barrage, as well as down half way in his shields.
Two more volleys would have destroyed his remaining shields, and then just a few more to destroy him. So, I was wrong in that you could out DPS his ASB fit Sleipnir.
However, if he could not break your Tengu’s tanks, you could have destroyed him in roughly three minutes of sustained attacks, and still took him out during his 60 second reload phase.
He was dual X-large ASB fit. What I didn’t mention is that he also had links running. He was basically pulsing the ASB when he needed to keep things as optimal as possible. Two Tengu’s were Heavy Missile fit and produced around 650 DPS each, the third Tengu was HAM fit and did nearer the 1,000 DPS mark. The Loki was autocannon fit and I’m not sure what DPS he was producing. This reduces the DPS of your numbers significantly, but yes, when he ran out of boosters he folded pretty quickly – sadly a bit too quickly to survive.
His DPS could break our tanks when he took us on – he could burn to a kiting Tengu and hit it – although it took him time and he struggled much more against the HAM Tengu which was a large buffer. The active tank Tengu’s were much more squishy for him, primarily being setup for PvE and not PvP.
Believe me, some insane active tanks that are not able to be nueted down can be made. I think under ideal conditions the best I achieved with any ship/ISK was something like 65,000 dps tanked for a time. Yes, those are legit numbers.
Still, as has been pointed out, these are not over powered setups. Active tanks have always been both strong and weak. Its a flavor of the month, and really nothing more then that. A one trick pony.
Honestly, if there is a problem at all…. which I would debate…. it is with Blue Pill, Fleet Boosting, and Crystals. By and large I am just as fine with the ASB as I am with any other shield tanking setup.
Yeah, my personal gripe is regarding offgrid boosting. It shouldn’t work that way at all.
Comparing DPS only is not very bright idea tbh. All you had to do in your ships is to web him (Loki anyone?) and keep him at range. I’m pretty sure that with 2xXLASB he had smaller guns, not 425mms. So outranging him would be an incredibly efficient tactics.
And really, scram on a sleip? Not very popular choice. If you want scram – usually you go with Claymore, which can tank even more.
Yeah broken module is broken. The sad part is ccp introduced these asb along with a couple other modules to “spice up fittings”… What we have now is a everyone fit the biggest ASB syndrome meaning that their intended plan of “spicing up fittings” instead just normalized them even more.
The opness of this module really starts to become apparent when you start looking at available counters. The only ones i can really come up with are “bring more dps” or “wait out his charges”. Both of which are not realistic in a wide variety of situation. In conclusion, no t3 should be tanking 20k+ dps, this is cap ship territory… The solution is either a very hefty nerf to this module or outright removal, expect changes in the near future.