Tanking: Difference between revisions

The modules fitted to a ship to bolster its defences are often called its '''tank'''. '''Tanking''' means fitting a ship with modules in order to improve its defensive capabilities to resist, absorb, or mitigate incoming damage, thus preventing or delaying the ship's destruction.

Tanking is a core part of most ship combat in EVE Online, important to both PvP and PvE activities—though the two types of combat require broadly different tank approaches. Understanding how your ship and other ships avoid or deal with damage is an important part of successful play for anyone involved in combat, and new players usually learn about tanking gradually as they settle into the game. This page details the main approaches to tanking; if you're new, don't be daunted by the details! You don't have to learn it all at once. [[EVE University]] members should feel encouraged to ask more experienced corpmates questions about tanking in game or in the #fitting-chat channel on the University discord.

Fittings and styles of piloting which avoid damage are sometimes called tanking: pilots might refer, for instance, to "speed tanking" and "signature tanking". It is worth growing to understand these techniques, but this page focuses on dealing with damage which has affected your ship's hitpoints, rather than avoiding damage altogether.

The amount of hitpoints on your ship is represented by the Ship Status Panel. The three rings on the top of the status panel represent, from outermost to the innermost semicircle,

* shield (outermost semicircle)

* armor (middle semicircle)

* and structure (also called "hull"; inner semicircle)

As you incur damage, each ring will fill with red coloring, starting with your shields, then your armor, and finally your structure. When the structure ring is completely red, your hull has been breached, and your ship is destroyed—and you'll find yourself floating in space in a pod.

To avoid finding yourself floating in your pod, you need to be able to tank the damage. This is generally achieved through one of three approaches:

* Increasing the ship's raw HP. This is generally known as "buffer tanking".

* Repairing damage received. This is known as "active tanking".

Discussions of tanking often invoke "EHP". This means "effective hit points", and refers to the effective hit points that your ship has when its resistance to damage is taken to account alongside its raw hit points.

A "buffer tank" tries to have high damage resistances and as many hit points as possible, thus increasing the EHP of the ship. The concept behind this is simple: outlast your opponent through the use of modules which boost your raw hit points, and modules which increase your resistance to damage.

This type of tank uses either no capacitor at all, or a minimal amount of capacitor used to run hardeners. This makes it easily sustainable. It also puts a lower cognitive load on pilots in combat: very little module management is necessary, freeing up a pilot's attention for other matters. 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.

Buffer tanks are most commonly fitted for PvP combat. In fleet PvP, the rate of incoming damage can often exceed any possible active tank, making a buffer tank a more useful option. Since buffers cannot sustain damage over a long period, they are ill-suited to the kind of PvE combat found in [[missions]] and in challenges such as [[Abyssal Deadspace]]. In some forms of group PvE, however, players use buffer tanks and [[Logistics|logistics]] support together: this is common in [[Incursions]] and in [[Wormholes|wormhole]] PvE battles.

In general, if you are expecting to have logistics support, then you want to tilt your buffer tank more towards resistance rather than raw HP, because the higher your resistances, the more effective logistics reps are. While if you don't expect logistical support, you only care about the EHP, so whatever combination of raw HP and resistances gives you more effective hit points is the best option.

An "active tank" uses armor repair or shield booster modules to restore damage done to the ship, "actively". Active tanks use energy from the ship's capacitor to run local armor-repairing or shield-boosting modules. So long as the incoming damage never exceeds your restoration capacity and your capacitor never gives out under the pressure, an active tank can last forever ("perma-tanking"). If either of these two things happens, your tank will collapse ("break") under the pressure.

A shield tank increases shields' ability to withstand and/or repair damage. This is the most common type of defense for ships with larger numbers of mid-slots, where most shield modules are fitted.

The versatility of shield modules is somewhat more limited than that of armor modules. Most notable is the lack of good passive shield hardeners. As a result, even buffer fit shield ships are often vulnurable to suficiently large number of [[Capacitor warfare|energy neutralizers]].

==== Understand Shield Recharge Rates ====