Tanking: Difference between revisions

The buffer tank is based around the principle of having high damage resistance and as many hit points as possible, thus increasing the Effective HitPoints (EHP) of the ship. The concept behind this is simple, add enough EHP to your ship to outlast your opponent through the use of active and/or passive resistance modules, which complement the HP increasing modules that add raw hit points.

This type of fitting uses a minimal amount of capacitor to run hardeners making it easily sustainable, but can be made fully passive by using only passive resistance modules instead. The primary drawback to Buffer Tanking is that you have no way to repair yourself, so when you run out of hit points you are toast.

Most common in fleet PvP, but also group PvE with logistic support (like incursions, wormhole anomalies / signatures and a few others). In PvP, a fleet will overwhelm an active tank in fairly short order, whereas a buffer tank will give you more survival time. Although, some ships with faction gear and active tank bonuses can field some extremely resistant active tanks that can take on more than you might think.  

The effective hitpoints are product of raw HP and resist. In general if you are expecting to have Logistical support (friends to rep your armor) then you want to buffer tank more towards resistance, because the higher your resistances the more effective logistic reps are. While if you don't expect logistical support, you only care about the Effective Hit Points, so whatever combination gives you more effective hit points is the best option.

Active tanking is most commonly used for solo activities such as mission/complex running, ratting, and solo PvP. Active tanking differs from buffer tanking in that it uses armor repair or shield booster modules to actively repair damage done to the ship. You should be careful to include enough resistance and buffer to keep your repair modules from being overwhelmed by incoming damage; frequently this means packing resistance modules (either passive or active) that compensate for the specific types of damage you expect to be receiving.

This type of fitting takes a lot of capacitor to sustain your cap-hungry repair modules so it should ideally include modules such as cap rechargers, capacitor batteries or capcitor rigs to balance out and maintain capacitor stability.

Active Tanking uses energy from the ship's capacitor to run a local repair module. Active tanks are stronger against higher bursts of damage but tend to drain the pilot's capacitor over time resulting in the tank 'breaking' during long engagements and are vulnerable to [[Capacitor Warfare]] that drains the ships capacitor dry.

Capacitor stability is important because it allows you to leave your tank modules turned on without ever worrying about running out of capacitor. So long as incoming damage is less than what your repair modules can handle your ship should be able to sustain that level of damage indefinitely. This is commonly referred to as perma-tanking. If incoming damage exceeds your repair capacity you will gradually run out of Hit Points and die. This is commonly referred to as breaking the tank.

For PvP purposes, a cap booster can be used to temporarily supplement capacitor output to allow for short bursts of heavy tanking. The primary drawback to this approach is that unlike the capacitor stable fitting described above, when you run out of charges to run your capacitor booster, you quickly run out of capacitor, your tank will fail and you will die horribly. Cap boosters, will also offer some safety against [[Capacitor warfare|neuting]] allowing you to keep on cycling modules even when your capacitor disappears in few seconds.

Similarly, weapon systems that drain your ship's capacitor will effectively disable your active tanking modules. As above, your tank will fail and you will die horribly. In this case, the capacitor booster can be used on an otherwise capacitor stable fitting to provide emergency power to prevent being drained and destroyed.

=== Ancillary Repair Modules ===

Ancillary Armor Repairers (AAR) and Ancillary Shield Boosters (ASB) are another way to field strong active tank for a short duration. These modules can be loaded with Nanite Repair Paste (armor) and Cap Boosters (shield). While these modules have charges, ancillary armor repairers repair far more hitpoints than any other repair module, and ancillary shield boosters consume 0 capacitor to cycle. However, once their charges run out (in general after 8 cycles for an armor repairer or 9 cycles for a shield booster), the armor repairer becomes very weak and inefficient, and the shield booster becomes prohibitively capacitor-intensive. Ancillary repair modules have a 60 second reload time to reload their charges. Only one ancillary armor repairer, or capital ancillary shield booster, can be fitted to a ship. Because of the combination of reload time and charge consumption, ancillary repair modules are almost never used in PvE, however they are very popular in solo PvP.

===Resists===

Resists on a ship will reduce the damage taken. It is a number that tells you by how large a percentage the incoming damage is reduced. For example 30% thermal resistance on shields means that all incoming thermal damage is reduced by 30%.

The T1 ships have almost identical base resist values but many of the T2 ships have so called "[[T2 Resists]]" that drastically vary between races. For example Minmatar ships with T2 resists have massive EM and thermal resists even on shields but have low resists against explosive and kinetic.

But the base resists of a ship are almost always modified by modules fitted on the ship. Resistance percentages are calculated in a way that many people find confusing. A module may list itself as having a 30% bonus to resistances -- but the only time you'll actually see a 30% increase in resistance when using it is if your current resistance is 0%.  

The way the calculations work is that the percentage is applied to the remaining damage after resists. If things didn't work this way, you'd easily get resistances above 100%, and shooting you would cause armor to grow on your ship.  

Resistances are easier to figure out if you think in damage vulnerability rather than damage resistance. A ship with 60% EM resist is then 40% EM damage received. Adding a 30% resist module multiplies the damage taken by 0.7 so you now take 0.7*0.4 = 0.28 = 28% of the raw damage.

Because of [[stacking penalties]], and the way resistances multiply together, it is not possible to be 100% resistant to a damage type<ref name="100%resist">It is possible to have over 100% resist by overheating a deadspace hardener on a [[Deep Space Transport]] in a red giant wormhole system. This will result in '''immediate destruction''' of the ship if any damage is taken so don't do it.</ref>. The final resist with multiple modules and stacking penalties can be calculated with formula<br>

 

====Negative resists====

Certain effects will apply negative resists to a ship. These include [[incursion]] effects, [[Abyssal Deadspace]] effects and [[Capital_Ship_Modules#Phenomena_Generator|phenomena generators]]. The way these are applied may seem confusing but they are simpler than they seem. The idea is exactly same as with normal resists explained above where the percentage change is applied to vulnerability (100% - resist) instead of resist.

Example: You fly your ship with 70% resist into a situation where you receive 50% resist penalty. Your new resist is 55%, how can this make any sense? <br>

The resist penalties will never cause the ship to have below 0% resist. If the penalty is big enough that the new resist would be negative the new resist will simply be 0%.