Yaknow I'm almost scared to talk to sammyG in game anymore for fear of it becoming the next day's forum topic.

We have questions, these guys have answers

Enjoying the reads guys! Thanks for all the info. Definitely makes you think a lot more in depth about the sacrifice you make by equiping one component vs. the other. The math stuff is way beyond me, but I appreciate everyone who's capable of doing the high-end stuff and then relaying it to the non-math people. My understanding now is that charged plating is pretty darn useless, and every ship except scout has armor. That amount of armor depends on what's equiped / the tiers the armor is upgraded, and the damage reduction is reduced by upgrading select tier components. This definitely is getting more responses than I anticipated!!

99% DR for 6 seconds out of every 60 is not especially gamebreaking, especially as compared to 99% DR for 19 seconds out of every 30.

Depends at least in part on what ships it's on. Impossible to kill bombers are frustrating, especially in domination matches, but they have a really hard time putting pressure on any ship that decides to flee. So that's sort of a locally broken mechanic.

An invincible strike on the other hand could be a globally broken mechanic, if slightly less so than distortion field was for scouts and gunships back in the day. Any defensive cooldown that lets you fire at enemies with complete impunity with respect to return fire has the potential to become a broken offensive cooldown. Strikes have less burst capability than most other ships so a 6 second window isn't going to look blatantly overpowered until you get it into the hands of a very skilled pilot. When you do though. . . .

With 100% armor piercing readily available I guess I wouldn't worry about it. Without it though, I'd keep a very sharp eye on stacked DR in an offensive role as a potential balance problem.