Tanking: Difference between revisions

Shield Tanking: Focuses on maximizing your 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. It should be remembered that shields on T1 hulls are naturally weak to EM damage.

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 neuting.

Shield modules generally fit on mid slots. This leaves low slots for damage modules, fitting modules or piloting modules. As a result shield ships generally have higher damage output than their armored cousins. But on the other hand using mid slots for tank limits the ship fit into more or less pure damage dealing as the tank competes with tackling, EWAR, and propulsion modules.

Shield extenders and shield rigs have penalty to the ship's signature radius. This makes it easier to hit shield ships. Shields generally also have less buffer than armor ships. This is most notable when fighting against ships larger than your own.

Shields heal themselves over time at a natural recharge rate. Armor and Hull damage taken is going to sit there until it is repaired. This passive regeneration is taken to extreme on passive shield fits described below.

In short the advantages of shields are:

*As a first line of defense, leaves you with Armor and Hull as a fallback if shields go down.

*Recharge on their own – no need to dock for repairs.

And the disadvantages of shields are:

=== Passive Shield Tanking ===

Unlike Armor hit points, shields will recharge themselves after taking damage. The Passive Shield tank is designed to maximize this natural recharge rate without the use of active Shield Booster modules. The shields of a ship have two stats that are relevant to passive recharge: Shield capacity and shield recharge time. The shield capacity is simply the maximum HP for the shields while the recharge time tells how long it takes for the shields to recharge.

The concept behind the Passive Shield Tank is deceptively simple: find a ship with a relatively high natural recharge rate (Shield HP / Recharge time = Average recharge rate), then add as many additional shield hit points to your ship as possible using shield extenders. Because the recharge time for a given ship is a fixed amount no matter how many points of shields you have, adding multiple shield extenders not only adds a lot of buffer, it indirectly increases the recharge rate because more Hit Points are being recharged in the same amount of time. Now add passive modules that increase the recharge rate even further, such as Shield Rechargers, Shield Power Relays and Power Diagnostic Systems; and you have a monster sized Buffer tank that regenerates very quickly without using any capacitor making your defense invulnerable to weapons that drain the capacitor. Shield Flux Coils also increase recharge rate, but should be avoided because they also lower your shield hit points, which is self defeating for the same reason adding Shield Extenders improves your recharge rate.

As the name implies, a fully passive tank does not require any modules that need to be “turned on” to function, and therefore does not require capacitor. The drawback to Passive Shield tanking is the number of modules required to pull it off, which leaves very little room to fit other useful modules such as damage improvement and tackling equipment, which makes this fitting of limited use outside of mission running and bait ships.

While this fitting is more about raw hit points than it is damage resistance adding resit modules will greatly increase the effectiveness of passive recharge. Shield resistance amplifiers can be added to provide a little damage reduction. Some people use Multispectrum Shield Hardeners and Shield Hardeners to improve damage resistance, but these are active modules that require capacitor, thus making your Passive Shield tank not quite passive any more. This can be problematic because the Shield Power Relays you depend on to increase your shield recharge rate also totally gimp your capacitor recharge rate. For this reason careful balancing is necessary to make the Passive Shield Tank effective. When done correctly, however, Passive Shield tanking can be used to handle tough missions with a single ship.

It is generally advised '''NOT''' to mix modules that increase shield recharge rate with modules that repair shield damage.

Active Shield Tanking is most commonly used in higher-level PvE, but also has a place in solo or small-gang PvP. Active Shield Tanking is based on using a Shield Booster to recover your shield HP faster than an enemy fleet's damage can deplete it. The high Capacitor costs of Shield Boosters mean that active shield tanking is most commonly done on Battleships or Tech 2 and Tech 3 Cruisers, as their larger CPUs, Powergrids, and Capacitors give more room to achieve stability, while their [[T2 Resists]] amplify the effectiveness of their shield boosters. Active shield tanking is generally not preferred in larger-group activities, as an active shield tank can be easily overwhelmed if the pilot is outnumbered too heavily.

It is valuable to understand the mechanics of shield recharge rate. All ships have shields, and all shields have a recharge rate. Therefore, this concept applies to every ship, shuttle, and pod in Eve, and thus to every pilot who undocks.  

NOTE: The math behind the shield recharge rate calculation is the same as that used for a ship's [[capacitor recharge rate]].

In a ship's information screen, on the attributes tab, under the shield heading, is listed the total shield amount of the hull, and the shield recharge time. The recharge time expresses how long it will take to go from 0% shields to roughly 98% shields when the ship is sitting idle in space and no one is repairing the shields or damaging them. That last ~2% of your shields will take much longer.

But shields do not recharge at a constant rate. Imagine a ship with a 440 shield and a shield recharge time of 440 seconds. To find out how many shield points you regain per second you might divide: 440 shields / 440 seconds = 1.0 shields per second.  

That is close but not quite correct. The ''average'' shield recharge rate is going to be 1.0 shields per second but sometimes it will be higher, and sometimes it will be lower.  

 

Shield recharge rates above ~98% shield is extremely low. For ships with small shield capacity it is essentially non-existent. The shield recharge rate also drops sharply below 25% capacity. Once shields have been damaged beyond 25% the passive tank "breaks" and the ship dies shortly.

As the shield takes damage, its level goes '''''down'''''. In response, the rate at which it rebuilds itself goes '''''up'''''. The increase in shield recharge rate continues until it peaks at 25% of shield capacity. At this threshold, the default ship Health Alert noise will sound to warn the pilot that the shield is at its recharging limit. If it continues to take more damage than it can hold, the regeneration will drop off quickly. This means if constant damage is applied, the shield will regenerate less as it becomes empty, thus making it easier to shoot the armor below it.

The fact that these attributes are both set has some interesting consequences. Notably for this calculation, recharge time is ''not'' dependent on anything else, including maximum shield capacity--as you might have intuitively expected. This has the effect that if two ships have the same "recharge time" attribute, and one has more capacity, then the one with the larger capacity will get more raw HP/s regeneration, and appear to 'repair faster' despite reaching its maximum level in the same time. In simple terms, recharge is calculated ''by percentage'' first, which is then translated into HP/s of regeneration. So maximum capacity indirectly affects the amount of HP/sec regenerated, having the effect that Extender modules increase regeneration, and flux coils become much less useful compared to Rechargers or Power Relays.

 

In many cases the technical construction of the ship dictates the use of Shields (or Armor) as its primary defense. Any ship receiving a bonus to shield capabilites would likely use shields. And because most shield modules use medium power slots, a ship with more mid than low slots will tend to use shields. Though the purpose of the ship can never be ignored. As a shield ships use mainly mid slots for defence they can fit much higher damage output and are often faster.