Curious what type of armor people are rolling with now after the updates. Since the massive nerf to evasion, I'm of the thinking that 20% more health from reinforced armor is now a solidly better choice than 9% evasion from lightweight armor. Especially when taking into account how much unavoidable damage there is going on now that mines and drones are in play. Deflection armor still seems utterly worthless since it's negated by armor-ignore weapons.

Thoughts?

For a scout, lightweight armor is still the best choice. Deflection armor is ignored by a lot of important weapos, so it's bad. Reinforced armor boosts your hull by a percentage, and 20% of not a lot is not a lot. Also, reinforced armor is not going to let you take a second mine and live (and while it might do something against gunships, so will evasion).

For a strike or gunship, it's a little more debatable, though I personally favor evasion. I'm far from master of either of those ships, though.

Bombers go with lol massive hp.

When I'm in a duel with another GS, which is quite common in TDM, I'd need a whole lot more than +20% health to survive the second hit. A better chance of not getting hit is worth far more to me when I know that second shot is going to kill me either way.

The extra health could possibly be advantageous when getting chased by another ship, but that's only matters for as long as there is engine power to run. Doesn't mean much once that runs out.

Scouts and Gunships tend to exist in a binary live/die world; scouts either avoid getting hit or die, while gunships either get the first shot off or die, or have enough engine power to run away or die. Having a little extra HP in those situations doesn't tend to help much, since once you find yourself in the enemy's sights, you're going to die anyway. For that reason, extra evasion is useful since it gives you slightly better odds of staying on the "live" side of things.

Strikes and Bombers on the other hand, often die to attrition, where lots of little damage adds up over time, and in those situations, extra HP can actually prolong your life by more than 2 seconds.

Basically if you can go from not surviving a 'one shot' weapon to surviving it, options other than evasion are good.

In general though, evasion outperforms all other options, even after the nerf. The reason is that it can save you when you would have otherwise died.

If you're at 200 heath and evade a 500 damage shot, you're still alive.

If you're at 200 health and take a 500 damage shot reduced to 400 damage you die.

If you're at 240 health and take a 500 damage shot you die.

The thing about evasion is that it makes the biggest difference when making a difference really matters.

If the ship can equip armor that gives evasion, then that is the armor the ship should have equipped in most cases.

Before the nerf, distortion field which is a cooldown that comes with light armor was unbalanced enough to be broken, and passive evasion was clearly better than shields by a noticeable margin when it came to combat effectiveness. Now evasion is in theory perhaps a little worse than shields at preventing damage, but due to the mechanics that increase probability of survival, it comes out pretty much indistinguishable in terms of survival.

Based on the theorycrafting I did pre-2.6, I'd still strongly recommend stacking evasion, with the caveat that complete newbs and excellent pilots will get a little bit more out of it than mediocre pilots (based on how likely you are to evade shots with flying skill. Evasion works a bit better in cases where you're either getting hit by everything or getting hit by very little. It offers more benefits when dealing with the extremes than with the average).

Ok, I'm just going to let my engineering tendencies run amok. More nuance: At this point the defensive options are a lot more balanced than they were pre-2.6. The thing is though, evasion is just always good, period. With the other options, you need to make sure that they work with the rest of the ship build (including crew), and that the ship build is suited to your flying style. Mess those up, and you can basically negate large portions of the benefits that the other defensive options offer. Evasion on the other hand, is more or less idiot proof and always provides the full measure of protection.