To say that in advance: i do like the intention of the suggestion. I very much agree that current defense stacking is overpowered and bad for the game. That being said, i would like to take a look at the suggestion at hand.
The core idea is that the big ships, which have big shields, big hull values and much hull hardness would finally also take some hull damage. So this suggestion would indeed solve one aspect of current defense stacking: shields would loose a lot of their value.
How it actually would turn out would very much depend on the details, which you did not cover at all. Among them:
- Would it be a percentage of the damage to the shields and then be applied directly to the hull? If yes, i would engineer my shields for resists and my hull for capacity.
- Or would the damage be split before application to shields and hull and both kinds of resist, pips and hardness would come into play? In this case, i couldn't give my adjustment right away, it would very much depend on the fine details.
- Would you be able to deal damage to modules while shields are up? Or would it be purely hull damage, like the current Phasing Sequence modification?
I could come up with a lot more questions, but let's stick to the core of the suggestion instead and see what it would do.
I mean, the real pinacle of defense stacking are large ships, closely followed by some mediums with unusually many utility slots. In a PvP environment this suggestion would indeed reduce the combat time. Shields would be less of a dominant factor, as the hull would already be worn down when shields are up. As many details are undetermined, it's hard to tell how things would turn out in the end, but it is quite certain that the current "shoot at each other for almost an hour" scenario would be a thing of the past.
Now let's look at the PvE aspect. Against NPCs it would matter little. Most NPCs loose their shields fast enough. With this suggestion their shields would go down later, but when they go down, their hull already is damaged. Time to kill would be about the same. What the suggestion would actually change is that the players ship would take hull damage even when shields were up. At first glance this would reduce staying time in HAZRes sites and the likes.
Unless people fly big ships, of course. Big ships are often engineered deep into the range of diminishing returns. Not because people still see a lot of gain from that, but because there's nothing better to be done with those internals any more. So even small advantages, deep in diminishing returns range, do more for you than leaving the slots empty. With damage leaking through shields, these almost worthless slots would instead by filled with a cargo rack and a repair limpet controller.
And suddenly for a large ship the impact would not be any more that they'd have to leave the HAZRes zone earlier. They'd merely have a short repair break in between each fight. Medium ships would pay a higher price for this ability and small ships would generally loose out.
With that in mind, we should now take a closer look at ship sizes. All of this doesn't seem as bad, as long as we're looking at large ships. Along comes an Eagle, Courier or something else with rather low hull value. They can't stack shields up like crazy anyway, but they do rely on their shields to keep them alive, when they take some fire. So things get very grim for them rather quickly. And that's before even pondering, if the final implementation would perhaps take hull resists (which small ships often have less, due to not having unlimited internals for HRPs) and hull hardness (which is very low on small ships) into account.
So i sum up:
- From a purely large-vs-large PvP point of view, the suggestion could improve things.
- From a large ship in PvE point of view, it might require some small adjustments and a break in between fights one a while. But that's all.
- Most (but not all) medium ships would be able to adjust to this change. Some of them (e.g. Mamba and FLD) would indeed loose some of their current power.
- From a smaller ships perspective the details would determine if this would be merely really bad of an utter disaster.
Considering that small ships already are on the loosing end, they don't need to be hit any further. So as i said at the start: i do like the intention of the suggestion. I very much agree that current defense stacking is overpowered and bad for the game. Unfortunately i also think that this suggestion would not achieve this goal in a positive way.
I very much still believe that we should rather address the core of the problem: overpowered engineering blueprints and how they stack. That's the big elephant in the room and needs to be taken care of. Only once that's done, we can reasonably look at other adjustments.
