Overheating 101

From UniWiki

Contents 1 Class Information 1.1 General Information 1.2 Notes for the Teacher 2 Class Contents 2.1 Introduction 2.2 What does it mean to overheat / overload a module? 2.3 Overheat bonuses 2.4 Skills Required 2.5 How to overheat a module 2.6 When to overheat modules 2.7 Heat damage 2.8 Repairing heat damage 2.9 How to reduce heat damage

Class Information

This chapter contains the standard information of this class pertaining to scheduling and class contents. The General Information should be sufficient to create a proper class topic for scheduling on the Eve University forum. Additional information relevant to the teacher is listed under Notes for the Teacher.

General Information

Illustration link for class description on the Eve University forum: i130.photobucket.com/albums/p243/Anacron_Daemon/flamingapple499x333.jpg[1]

A fairly short (maybe) introduction to the art of overheating. Although some of the class is primarily intended at newbies who might have received a (notify) You need thermodynamics skill at level 1.0 to overload this module message and are wondering what that means, it also contains a lot of information about how heat damage works and tips to reduce it, which may be of interest to some seasoned veterans as well!

Topics include:

• What overheating is
• Skills required
• How to do it
• Heat damage
• Repairing heat damage
• Methods on reducing heat damage

Student requirements:

• Mumble registration and access - make sure you have Mumble sorted out and operational well before the class begins. Use the Mumble guide for set-up.
• Access to the Class.E-UNI in-game chat channel
• Additional information: The class will be a lecture with a Q&A afterwards. There is no practical element, so you are free to attend wherever you happen to be docked.
• Duration: around 1 hour.

Notes for the Teacher

Required materials:

• Class.E-UNI chat channel, to receive questions and post relevant links
• This wiki page
• The slideshow for you and students to refer to during class: http://bit.ly/overloading_101
  
• Someone to link a few skills/modules for you

Class Contents

Introduction

I have a presentation that goes with this class, and you can find it at this link: http://bit.ly/overloading_101; It will work in the ingame browser.  Yes, the name of the class is different from the slideshow link, that's because bit.ly doesn't let you release old shortcuts so you can use them again for new versions of a slideshow.

So welcome to Overheating 101! In this class we'll be looking at what overheating is and why you should be doing it. We'll go over what it actually is, how to do it, and what happens when you do it.

Another useful page is this one http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Overloading which someone else wrote a long time ago, and does tell you a lot about overheating.

So, who knows what overheating is?

What does it mean to overheat / overload a module?

(slideshow page 3)

Overheating - or overloading, the terms are interchangeable, but I will be using overheat - is the act of purposefully pushing a fitted active module beyond its normal limits, obtaining better performance for a short period of time. The drawback of this is that the module overheats (hence the name) and becomes damaged. If you overheat it for too long, the module will break and you will not be able to use it again until you dock up and repair it.  A broken module is forcibly offlined, and you will need to repair it before being able to online it again.

The majority of active modules can be overheated, although some cannot. Passive modules cannot be overheated. A module able to be overheated will have, in its information window, details on what the overheat bonus is and the heat damage taken. If you Show Info on, for example, this microwarpdrive (link a MWD) under the Attributes tab you can see the Overload Speed Bonus near the bottom and the Heat Damage taken. We'll go into heat damage later in the class.

In addition, a module able to be overheated will have a small green bar above its icon on your overview.

(slideshow page 4)

In the image on page four of the slideshow you can see the two groups of guns in the top row are active and overheated. The Adaptive Invulnerability Field in the midslots is active, but not overheated. The microwarpdrive in the midslots is primed to overheat, but not active - as soon as it is activated it will be overheated. When something is pre-overheated like this, the green bar flashes on and off quickly so that you can easily recognise it's ready to overheat when you activate it.  The damage control in the lowslots does not have a green bar above its icon and thus cannot be overheated.  In this image, the high-slot neutralizers already have a bit of heat damage from the turrets, even though the turrets have only fired 3 or 4 shots!   I'll go into heat damage later on.

Overheat bonuses

(slideshow page 5)

To see what sort of bonuses you get when overheating, click the Show Info on any module and go to the Attributes tab. The Overload Bonus will be listed, as I explained earlier. Here are some example bonuses:

• Propulsion modules (AB/MWD): +50% speed
• Shield / armour hardeners: +20% damage resistance
• Warp jammers (scram/point): +20% range
• ECM jammers: +20% jam strength
• Armour repairers & shield boosters: -15% duration (i.e. it cycles 15% faster) AND +10% repair/boost amount
• Autocannons, Blasters, Pulse Lasers: +15% damage
  
• Artillery Cannons, Railguns, Beam Lasers and Missile Launchers: -15% duration (ie. +15% rate of fire)

The bonuses are very significant, even for a short period of time. Note that the bonus on long range weapons and missiles does not increase the damage done, merely rate of fire. Overheating these weapon systems will not give you a bigger alpha strike.  Bonuses this large can make a huge difference to solo PvP, or even small gang PvP where one ship is very important.  They are less significant in big fleets, although it does depend partly what role you have and what you are flying.  If your overheated warp disruptor gave you the extra range to stop the target getting away, resulting in a kill, then you can see it was very important.

I haven't included every overheatable module here, if it can be overheated it's always worth checking what the bonus is before you use it. Anyone have some more bonuses?

Skills Required

(slideshow page 6)

There is precisely one skill required to be able overheat stuff, and that is this one: Thermodynamics (link in chat). 

You only need it at level 1, although there are benefits to training it higher than this that I'll cover later.

You'll find it in the Science section of your skills, and it's a rank 3 skill, which means it only takes a couple of hours to get to level 2, and a couple of days to get to level 4 (depending on your remaps and implants, of course).

The prerequisites are Engineering 5, Energy Management 3 and Science 4. This was reduced some expansions ago, making overheating much more accessible for a lot of pilots. None of these will take very long to train, except Engineering 5, which in giving you 5% more power grid to fit your ships with, is extremely useful anyway. 

The skill book is 4.5 million ISK though, so it's not cheap.  But if you intend to go into PvPin a big way it could be the best 4.5 mil you'll ever spend.

How to overheat a module

(no slideshow page)

To overheat a module, you can click the little green bar above the module on the overview - it will have Toggle Overload in the mouseover text. It's admittedly quite a small target, and so there is a shortcut you can use to overheat module, which is Shift + click.  You can also set keybinds to directly overheat modules.  To find these, press Escape -> Shortcuts -> Modules.

If a module is currently active, and you set it to overheat, it won't overheat instantly, but will overheat on the next cycle - the little green bar will flash to indicate that it is about to start overheating. If the module is not currently active, it will not activate; but the little green bar will light up to indicate that when you do activate it, it will overheat.

Stopping overheating works the same way. If the module is currently active, it will stop overheating on the next cycle, but it will remain active - the green bar will flash to indicate it is about to stop overheating. If you deactivate a module then it will also deactivate the overheat. To reiterate - turning the overheat status on or off does not affect whether the module is actually active or not.

If you want to overheat a lot of modules quickly, there are three small circular buttons immediately to the right to the right of the heads-up display - the upper will overheat all the high slots, the middle will overheat all the mid slots, and the lower will obviously overheat all the low slots.  You can also set shortcuts to do this, the same way as before.

 

When to overheat modules

Overheat whenever you can!  With the significant bonuses to range, speed, tank or DPS on offer, it would be silly not to.

Being aware of how overheating affects your modules enables you to judge when to overheat stuff.  For example, tackle modules such as point, web or scram have a bonus to their range, enabling you to catch targets from further away.  If you are a tackler and trying to catch a fleeing target, overheating theses modules will give you some signficant advantages in tackling it.  Once you do have it pointed or webbed, you can perhaps stop overheating it to avoid burning out your modules (I'll talk a lot more about heat damage in a bit).

Overheating weapons will result in a big increase in your DPS.  If you have a damage-dealer role, and you need to kill a target quickly (maybe before their back-up arrives, or before they kill you) then overheat your weapons.

Finally, if you're about to die, overheat everything.  It may just save your ship, and even if it doesn't, your opponent will loot a bunch of damaged or broken modules, costing him more money to fix them!

Heat damage

Managing your heat build-up is probably the most critical part to overheating successfully. Coincidentally it's also the largest part of this class.

Whilst modules are active and overheating, they, and other modules in the same section, will take heat damage. The amount of heat damage taken is a set amount, and can be seen in a module's Show Info.  This is the amount of damage a module has a chance to suffer per overheated cycle.  The structure HP of a module can also be seen, and this is universally 40 HP.  Well, some Titan-only modules like Clone Vat Bays and Jump Portal Generators have 99,999HP (just to ensure you can't burn them out), but apart from them, it's all 40HP.  Once a modules damage exceeds its structure HP, it will be forcibly offlined (also known as burn out).

However, heat damage is not the same every time you overheat. Whether a module takes damage or not each cycle is a random chance, presumably using some kind of algorithm that CCP won't tell us about. Although we can't know exactly how heat damage is applied, we can do some experiments and draw our own conclusions. Something to point out is that because heat damage is random, it's impossible to be certain about anything related to how heat damage is distributed. All these tests were with Thermodynamics at level 1.

(slideshow page 8)

Here's a simple example to start with. This test was done in a Thrasher - a Minmatar destroyer - which conveniently has 7 turret hardpoints, allowing for plenty of modules to demonstrate heat damage. The middle modules is activated and overheating, whilst leaving the rest online and inactive.

Using a turret to demonstrate this means we can use remaining ammo count rather than having to get a stopwatch out to keep a count of time.

(can link thes images directly, larger sizes than the ones in the slideshow - Kivena 19:44, 5 March 2012 (UTC))

 

This montage of images on page 8 of the slideshow shows what happened over a roughly 15 minute period.

Note that in this still image it is sometimes hard to see the heat damage, because the red sections flash grey/red when they take damage. It's obvious in game though.

As you can see from the bottom row, the end result is that once the red sections completely surround the module image, the active turret burns out with 8 rounds remaining.  All of the other turrets also took significant heat damage. The two modules adjacent to the active turret were damaged the most, but the other four took varying amounts of heat damage.

The conclusions are that:

1. every module in the whole rack takes heat damage from a single overheating module,
2. the active module takes the most heat damage, and
3. the closer a module is to an active overheating module, the more damage it takes.
   

Note that heat damage does not spread over other racks (high slot modules cannot damage mid or low slot modules, for example).

Heat damage appears to be applied at the beginning of a module's cycle. In theory therefore, skills that make your modules cycle faster will correspondingly cause them to burn out faster, although the number of cycles should not change. Another interesting feature is that a module that burns out will cycle one last time despite being offlined at the beginning of the cycle due to heat damage. You can accomplish a lot with this final hero cycle!

Residual Heat

Another important component of heat damage is the small dial visible in the middle of the heads-up display, within the semicircular shield, armour and hull indicators. This is split into three sections - low slots, mid slots and high slots, and indicates what I'll call 'residual heat' in the modules. As well as seen in the montage on page 7, you can also see them on the image on page 4.  At the start of the overheating, the dial is at zero. After a while it builds up, until around 50 rounds remaining it's almost full. On mouseover of this dial you can see the actual heat percentage, as I did in one of the rows of the page 7 image.

It goes up faster if you overheat more modules (if you overheat this whole rack of 7 turrets for example, it shoots up extremely fast).

Afterward you have stopped overheating, it gradually diminishes, until eventually the residual heat is all gone. The residual heat takes much longer to dissipate than it does to build up. This residual heat on your ship does last between docking and undocking as well, if you do it fast enough.

This heat acts as a sort of multiplier, as your ship gets hotter stuff gets damaged faster. Technically, I think it gives you a higher chance for your modules to be damaged.

Layout

Note that is the layout on the fitting screen that affects whether modules are 'adjacent', not the layout on your overview.  You can drag modules around all over the place on the overview and it won't make any difference to which ones are adjacent, or which ones count as high or mid or low slot.

(slideshow page 9)

I said before that heat damage is not the same every time you overheat.

On page 8 of the slideshow is a compilation of seven further tests, each overheating a different turret on the Thrasher. It's worth pointing out that heat damage is recorded over a full percentage range, whilst the icons only have 8 coloured divisions. So these screenshots do not record all the possible information.

Remember we are using ammo as our count of time, so if a module has a lower ammo count, then it means it lasted longer.

 

The first new conclusion is that heat damage is random. This immediately makes testing heat damage rather difficult, because you would need to do a statistically significant number of tests to come to any serious conclusion.  Having said that, turrets are the best choice for these tests because they can take a lot of heat damage over a large number of cycles before burning out.  This larger sample size reduces the chance of extreme results that could affect our data.

Remember the three conclusions from my first test:

1. every module in the whole rack takes heat damage from a single overheating module
2. the active module takes the most heat damage
3. the closer a module is to an active overheating module, the more damage it takes.

It's still clear that every module in the rack takes heat damage - although if you only overheated for a short while, it could be that some or all of the modules in the rack might actually get away with no heat damage at all.

The previous conclusion that the active module takes the most heat damage can now be qualified with 'usually'. In one of these tests an adjacent module burnt out on the same cycle as the active module.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that adjacent modules can sometimes even burn out before the active module.

The last conclusion, that modules further away from an active module take less heat damage, is also usually true. In some of these tests a further-away module actually has more heat damage.

(slideshow page 10)

(I just added this slide for a better explanation of heat damage after my last class - Kivena 19:40, 5 March 2012 (UTC))

Active and overheating modules have the highest chance to suffer the heat damage specified in their Show Info.

The closer another module is (in the fitting window) to an active and overheating module, the higher chance it has to suffer the heat damage specified in that module's Show Info.  Note that it's the heat damage value of the active and overheating module that is used.  If a module is not overheated, it's own heat damage value (if it has one, passive modules do not have this value) is not used.

Just like ECM electronic warfare – another chance-based mechanism – heat damage can be very unpredictable, and will not be the same every time you overheat.

(slideshow page 11)

On page 10 of the slideshow you can see the collated results on a bunch of tests using a smaller high-slot rack.  This was a Jaguar - Minmatar Assault Frigate - with three turrets and an energy vampire.  Note that all three of the turrets were overheated until they burnt out, whilst the energy vamp was left inactive.  Not just one turret like before.

For the five tests on the left I had the nosferatu module (inactive) in one of the centre slots of the high-slot rack, and for the five tests on the right I had it in one of the end slots.  What is very noticeable about these tests is how much heat damage the nosferatu module takes.  When it is in the middle, it takes damage from both sides, and frequently burns out.  When on the side, it only has damage from one side, and always survives.  In addition, the turrets on the left last a little bit longer than those on the right.  A very good question at this stage would be "is this difference of only 3 rounds statistically significant?". 

((That one row with the line through on the left is ignored because I forgot to reload to full ammo.))

I did a t-test to decide whether this is statistically significant.  It's a very small sample size though, so don't put too much confidence in the result.  The result was that I am 76% confident that these two values are statistically significant.  In theory, therefore, placing other modules between your overheated turrets or missile launchers like this can give you a little more overheating time - but be careful not to burn out your 'spacer' module!

Xola Zuni did some tests as well and posted the results over at the Rifter Drifter blog, which you can find here: http://www.rifterdrifter.com/2011/05/harder-better-faster-stronger/  His results mirror these pretty well.

(slideshow page 12)

Now, one thing that will definitely make a difference to how long you can overheat is the presence of empty slots or offline modules.  If you remember the test on page 8, where one turret was overheated in a rack of 7, which lasted on average nearly a whole magazine.  Doing the same test with only one turret and 6 empty slots, results in that one turret lasting much, much longer (nearly two full magazines).  The same situation occured when the other 6 turrets were offline (instead of online but inactive).  It seems that in these two cases, the damage that would have been taken by the adjacent modules does not contribute to the 'residual heat' gauge, which consequently rises much more slowly.

Although in the case of the offline modules, they do still take that damage (even though it doesn't contribute to the residual heat) and will still need repairing.

There is no reason to think turrets behave any differently to midslot or lowslot modules.  The one big difference is that turrets have a much much smaller heat damage value compared to other modules, so they can last a lot longer in terms of number of cycles.  Things like propulsion modules, tackle mods and repair mods have a larger heat damage value and therefore will last for far fewer cycles.  This, when combined with the fewer mid-slots or low-slots most ships have (not all), means that (1) it's more difficult to do meaningful tests because randomness plays a much greater part, and (2) you will get lots more "extreme" results.  Stories abound on forums about overheating modules at one end of a rack and having a module on the opposite end burn out first, and similar tales of woe.  Don't take anecdotal evidence on forums as fact when it comes to heat damage.

Incidentally, propulsion modules, especially microwarpdrives, have a much higher heat damage value that other modules.   Overheating these modules will burn out your modules faster than you might expect.

Finally on the subject of randomness, here's Dilbert with the last word (link in chat): http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/w/images/3/3f/Random.jpg  Sod's Law says that that one time you need your microwarpdrive to get the hell out, your overheated shield booster will have caused it to burn out.

(slideshow page 13)

Before we leave heat damage entirely however, worth mentioning is how heat damage works in regards to grouped turrets or missile launchers).  On page 12 of the slideshow you can see an image of two separate tests.  The first one I had a group of six turrets overheating, with another turret inactive. The result was, all the turrets burnt out on the same cycle.  This happened this happened in every test I've done.  Given what we already know about heat damage, the likelihood of this happening by chance must be so astronomically small that we can just ignore it.

In the second test, as well as overheating the group of six turrets, the other, single turret, is also overheated.  In this case, the turrets in the group burn out at different times.  Although once one burns out, the group becomes unusable, and you have to un-group them to be able to continue individually firing any still online.

A group of weapons, without any external factors, will each deal exactly the same heat damage to each other and will therefore burn out together.  This makes sense, as the server counts a grouped turret as a single turret when it comes to calculations such as damage (in order to save on server CPU requirements and hence reduce lag).  Clearly the heat damage is also all counted as one.

But, if you have another overheated module - or another group of modules - that other module will do the normal heat damage distribution to the group.   This causes modules in the group to have slightly different heat damages to each other, and thus some will burn out earlier than others.

Repairing heat damage

(slideshow page 12)

There are two ways to repair heat damage to modules.

The first is simply to dock up at a station with a Repair Shop, and use the station service to repair all your modules.  Higher meta level modules cost more to repair - Tier 1 cost the least, Tier 2 cost more, Faction modules cost the most.  Medium or Large modules also cost more than Small modules.

One rather important word of warning about this - when a module completely burns out during use, it is automatically offlined. When you repair a broken module in a station, it is repaired, but it is not automatically onlined again. If you had broken modules, and docked up, you must open the fitting screen to re-online your module(s) before undocking. Not remembering this and being in a hurry will result in you docking, repairing, undocking, finding all your modules offline and unable to be used, and having to turn around to re-dock and online them again, wasting an extra 60 seconds. I did this a lot whilst testing out overheating for this class...

Using a repair shop in this way is the only way to repair broken modules.

(slideshow page 13)

If your modules are merely damaged, and not broken, you can repair them in space using a substance called Nanite Repair Paste. To use this, you simply need some of it in your cargo hold, and when right-clicking on a damaged module you will see an option to 'Repair Module'.  Note that you don't need any skills at all, not even Thermodynamics, to be able to repair heat damaged modules using this paste.

A module under repair cannot be used, and no other modules - on any rack, high mids or lows - can be overheated whilst one or more modules are being repaired. You can however repair and reload a turret at the same time.

In a very similar fashion to station repair costs, repairing higher meta level items or large/medium will consume more paste.

(slideshow page 14)

There are two skills that improve your repair efficiency:

• Nanite Operation - which reduces the amount of Nanite Repair Paste required by 5% per level, thus causing you to use less paste
• Nanite Interfacing - which increases the amount of damage repaired per second by 20% per level, thus making your repairs faster
  

Neither of these skills are required to use nanite repair paste, they only make it more efficient.

Now, most of you may know you can hide passive modules on your overview, to reduce clutter on your heads up display. Who here hides the passive modules on their overview?

It's important to note that not just active modules can burn out. As I noted earlier, an overheated module damages other modules in the same rack, especially those adjacent to the overheating module.  It's very easy to forget that passive modules can take heat damage, have them burn out, and not know about it.

If you plan to overheat a lot, it may be a good idea to show your passive modules on your heads up display. At the very least, you should be aware that this can happen.  Not realising that that medium shield extender on your interceptor is burnt out when you go into tackle a target, can result in your swift and unexpected demise. And yes, this has happened to me.

How to reduce heat damage

I'll go through a few simple methods of reduce the heat damage you take, and reducing the likelihood of your modules burning out.

The first is to train up the Thermodynamics skill higher. Each level reduces the heat damage taken by 5%, so training it from level one to level four means you can overheat your modules for roughly 15% longer.  In my tests earlier, you'll remember that overheating one module, with Thermodynamics 1, lasted to between 4 and 21 rounds remaining.  With Thermodynamics 4 it lasted one entire magazine, and then burnt out at about 100 to 110 rounds remaining.  So training up this does let you overheat for quite a bit longer.

You could also arrange your modules optimally, with spacer modules in between active/overheated modules to absorb your heat, like the way I fit my Hurricane - with the energy neutralisers in the highs inbetween the turrets, and the shield extender in the mids in between active modules rather than at one end.

((These images not in slideshow - link in chat))

Or similarly like this active armour tank Myrmidon - with the repair modules spread out in the lowslots so they can last longer, and the sensor booster in the mid slots to keep apart the other four midslot modules.  The sensor booster being less critical to success than the other tackle and propulsion modules.

However, as I already explained when I was testing, although this does mean you can overheat for a little longer, you also suffer those spacer modules taking a lot more damage and a much greater chance of those modules burning out. Whether the chance of gaining a little longer overheat is worth burnt out spacer modules is up to you - it probably depends on your modules and your situation. To take a couple of high-slot examples, burning out an energy vampire will worry you a lot less than, say, burning out a probe launcher that might be your only way out of a wormhole.

Another important thing to do is to repair your modules at the first opportunity! Always bring plenty of nanite repair paste, and use it as soon as you can after you take heat damage. Or dock as soon as you can to repair your broken modules.  Leaving heat damage to build up between engagements is a sure-fire way to burn out your modules.

Finally, all four Stragetic Cruisers - T3 cruisers - have ship bonuses that reduce the amount of heat damage taken, and one of their subsystems has a further bonus to heat damage reduction.  If you love overheating stuff, they are perfect for the job and can often sustain overheated modules for a very long time.

And that's it for this class, if you have any questions then do ask, otherwise thank you for coming!

If you want any more, there's a great discussion thread on the topic of overheating and thermodynamics over at FHC (link in chat) - http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?527-TMA-Overheating-and-Thermodynamics which is where these heat damage tests were first posted.