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[lucid whale]

While I definitely agree that we should try to port all PvE guns and tools to PvP, the armor kit would need extremely careful balancing. As is, it would completely upend the meta.

Currently spanner heals the equivalent of 20HP/s if used optimally, pipe wrench and FSK heal 24/HPs and the mallet is at 27.8HP/s but will often lose some of that to overheal.

The armor kit in PvE currently adds 312 armor with a 6 sec cooldown - this is the equivalent of 52HP/s. So from a pure numbers perspective, we would have to start by halving the armor amount or doubling the cooldown.

And then we get to all the other concerns:
-The armor added is actually "armor" and thus takes piercing damage but resists other damage types. This would completely invalidate most guns that aim to disable components or the balloon. ie. armor added to the balloon means that suddenly the flechette/flechette lumberjack deals almost no damage to the balloon.
-The armor would also allow for more tool burn
-And it allows for abusing lochnagar
-It might also make ships too easy to keep alive. The game depends on piercing weapons being able to deal enough damage that they cannot be out repaired fully. It is quite possible that adding 312 armor into the equation everywhere might make it very hard to ever get kills (against a well-crewed ship).

TLDR, it would need to function differently than it currently does in PvE, otherwise way to many other things would need to be rebalanced to accommodate it.

[exotic mural]

what do you mean by “allow for more tool burn”?

[lucid whale]

Moonshine for example, would need to burn through any armor applied to the engines before damaging them. So in effect, moonshine could be sustained for a longer time.

[exotic mural]

pilot tool burn, gotcha

buff hammer adds 25% armour to the hull (a lot less than 312). armour kit should be MAX that amount or light ships would become tanks

armour kit also doesn’t wear off like buff kit does so I would consider adding that as well

[lucid whale]

I think the biggest issue is really my first point. An armored balloon resists carronades and lumberjacks. An armored gun will be much harder to disable. Hwacha into armored engines will not destroy them. You would have to first shoot a piercing weapon at all of these components before hitting them with the proper damage type, and the gun damage types and ship layouts are not suited for this playstyle of requiring another damage type.

This could be solved by having the armor kit increase component HP instead of adding armor, or something along those lines perhaps.

[lucid whale]

Hwacha might not have been the best example to illustrate my point. Something like an Artemis relies on being able to disable components in single hits. If you suddenly need two hits to disable a light gun with an Artemis, this makes a big difference since you only have 4 shots total.

Here is the damage matrix. 312 armor is effectively 1248 protection against flechette, or 1560 protection against shatter damage.
Let's say we only give the armor kit +50 armor on engines, this is effectively adding 250 more to the existing 300HP of a light engine, if it gets hit by shatter damage. Which is almost doubling the amount of damage you need to deal. But wait, what if you shoot at it with a gatling, or a hades, then the 50 armor melts like nothing because those guns deal piercing damage.

But not all ships can bring a piercing gun into their bifectas, just to strip armor off of guns or the balloon in order to damage them.

Take the goldfish. If it has a front carronade, how will it destroy the armor on balloons? Or if it has a hwacha, is it first supposed to turn to the side to fire some gatling to get rid of some armor before shooting the main gun?
Something like a crusader will have less issues making things work, but ships with fewer guns will suffer more.
The right side of a Galleon? Where do you fit a piercing weapon there? There are lot of implications.

-It might also make ships too easy to keep alive.  The game depends on piercing weapons being able to deal enough damage that they cannot be out repaired fully.  It is quite possible that adding 312 armor into the equation everywhere might make it very hard to ever get kills (against a well-crewed ship).

I made this point earlier. There is nothing wrong with a slower paced game overall, but the damage output of using the correct gun against the correct component needs to be enough to overcome the repair. Otherwise battles will go on forever.

yes. yes it would 😅
Becuase then playstyles that go straight for the kill would gain dominance over disable

I have to head off, but the overall point I'm trying to make is that balance is complicated, and adding the armor kit will have a lot of effects. Majorly upending the balance is something that probably shouldn't be done at this point in the game's lifecycle. It has the potential to go very wrong.

As an aside, I think you should consider trying out playing in competitive, if that type of thing at all interests you. Or possibly watch the Twitch streams, if that interests you. Most games balance around the competitive scene, and for good reason. That's where the optimal strategies an builds are used, and things that are oppressive there will trickle down to everyone else.
You might have a better sense of how feasible switching sides is on a galleon, or how important it is for a Goldfish to engage from the front and get a good hit on the first volley. it is hard to put in words.

[lucid whale]

I agree with most of that. Dunno about the pendulum part. Players left for a variety of reasons. But this is getting off topic. How can the armor kit be added without having to to rework the majority of guns? I don't buy the argument that it will just work out.

[lucid whale]

If the armor wasn't armor type but the type of health that the respective component has, then I think we could probably move forward from that and it would just be a matter of finding the right numbers. That's a dev question though, to know if this would be possible.
The other thing that would be interesting to know is if we could have pilot tool damage ignore armor and directly damage component health.

[hasty spear]

Piercing damage is already a bit too necessary imo, so I'm against anything that adds more, especially on components it doesn't belong.

[exotic mural]

before this is added to pvp the 'bug' that there is no cooldown when extinguishing fires when overhealed would need to be fixed

I just remembered that was a thing