Should fighters have their armor reduced?

[Corsair]

This is a genuine discussion thread so please leave your snarkiness and sarcasm at the door.

I've heard from several people that fighter battles are becoming unwieldy and tedious. With a combination of server lag, high armor and bot/bat values and other such factors, fighter battles can last a LONG time, even longer now that Mini Razors have been nerfed. Since my return, I've had a chance to be in one of these brawls and I must say, after an hour of jousting I was tired. It was fun and frantic at first, but that feeling quickly degrades to frustration as your opponent heals, or their shield comes up or you just have a pass where neither ship scores a hit. Watching a laggy opponent jitter back and forth isn't my idea of fun, either.

Now, that isn't to say that the entire experience was unpleasant; scoring kills is still satisfying, dodging enemies and hitting them is still great fun. But you can only hold on to that fun for a little while before it becomes tedious. Which is why I'm proposing a modification of fighter combat: Reduce their survival chance against fighters but boost it against capital ships. This can be accomplished in several ways:

• Boost fighter weapon damage so it takes fewer hits to score a kill
  
• Reduce armor but increase maneuverability slightly. Enough to make it hard for capital ships to land hits but have low enough armor for fighter battles to be over in a reasonable amount of time.
  
• Increase missile hull damage
  
• Increase mine damage
  
• Increase Mini Razor hull damage
  

Due to the nature of capital ships, these changes will affect them very little: Gunboats would be the most affected in the class, for better or worse. Lowering fighter armor might make their jobs easier but increasing fighter damage would make it harder for them to survive.

But no matter what option is taken, I think that it is important to change how long fighter battles take. I don't want to make PvP as much of a chore as trading.

---