I don’t know if this should be a PVE or PVP post but I’m going to put it in PVE since so far it’s always been the rats.
If I have an explosive armor hardener and a reactive armor hardener and I’m fighting rats that don’t use explosive damage, should I turn on my reactive hardener or explosive hardener first? The explosive hardener won’t protect me from the rats at all, but maybe if I activate it first the reactive one is more directed towards my damage holes before it starts reacting to the damage types? Or maybe reactive starts with flat 15% resist across the board before it racts?
Now some might be wondering “wait, why not use an EM hardener if the rats do EM but no explosive damage?” and the answer is this is not a PVE fit but a PVP fit. this is why I have no EM hardener or kinetic hardener. I’m hoping someone thinks I’m lunch and tries to get me. Since the plan is to be jumped, I need to activate the explosive hardener when anything is within 4 AU of me.
Of course, maybe I am lunch since I’m using Heavy Missiles and only 3 levels in it and I’m training into a corp fit so Heavy Missiles 5 is a bit delayed…
But does it matter what order I activate the hardeners?
Depends what you’re fighting too. If it is sleepers, they deal whatever damage type you resist the least. So as your active hardener kicks in it will potentially cause their damage type to shift.
Hm I see. For PVP I generally use explosive hardener, damage control, reactive hardener, multispectrium energized membranes, and plates. I suppose T2 Amarr one should replace explosive with thermal, but I’m not ratting in a HAC. I noted in the fitting window activating the explosive hardener caused my multiple resistances to increase since the reactive hardener didn’t go “all in” in explosive, so that made me wonder if activating the explosive hardener first would cause the reactive hardener to focus elsewhere.
No, it shouldn’t. Reactive hardeners allocated 15% to each damage type initially and shift them as the type of incoming damage is detected or changes. It gradually takes a few percentages off of the types of damage you are not taking and moves them to the type you are taking. Because of that they tend to work better in pve where fights last longer than in pvp where much of the time you will get bursted down in less than a minute.
That’s not strictly speaking true. RAH is useful if you have a significant buffer, an active rep fit or expect logi on field (so basically any PvP fit…). Resistance Phasing is absolutely critical here too - 50% cycle time reduction turns the RAH into a very effective module.
As mentioned, order doesn’t matter as the reactive armour hardener starts with an even distribution and shifts the resist profile a bit towards the damage received every cycle.
A nice trick is to decycle the reactive hardener to ‘reset’ it back to the even distribution in case you fight an enemy with a different damage profile, such as PvP players after you have been fighting PvE pirates. This allows it to get to the right resistance profile faster.