Angry FC voice on comms: Don’t wait until you get redboxed to switch on your DCM. Switch it on when you get yellowboxed and call for reps !
The specific case I had in mind was that of Eagles lost in fleet combat…those of others and also on one occasion my own, and the sense that they were being lost way too fast given the Assault Damage Control and logi. I mean…destroyed within a few seconds.
The Eagle gets both an active and a passive benefit from an Assault Damage Control module. Its about 92K EHP passive and 380K EHP active ( for 12 seconds or so ). Clearly it doesn’t help to have 30 enemy ships firing at you all at the same time.
I think, and many of the above replies seem to confirm, that the Assault Damage Control was being activated too late. That would mean the benefit of the module is only on the remaining shield or armour…so the later you activate the module the less active benefit you get.
I think the tendency is to not activate it early because there is a long wait ( 2 minutes, if I recall correctly ) before it can be used again…so it gets seen as a ‘last resort’ sort of thing. Which it can now be seen is a fatal error !
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To be more precise, the module only works to reduce the damage you take for the duration of the module.
Any damage you take before or after the extra resistances are active will deal much more damage.
You are right to conclude that people who lose a ship with ADC in a fleet battle likely used their ADC too late, but it is also possible that they spent the cooldown at the wrong time and did not have it ready when the bulk of damage was incoming.
You could see incoming damage during a fleet fight as one of those bell-shaped graphs. Some people shoot early, some arrive late and are slow to switch to the next.
You want your ADC to be active during peak incoming damage.
Yes…a better way of asking the question is whether the active benefit of any such module scales up or down linearly with the amount of damage already taken. Thus, for example, would shield half damaged lead to only half the module benefit. The benefit would itself still be the exact same percentage increase in HP…but the actual HP benefit would not be that of a 100% undamaged unit.
It’s actually not as intuitive as it might seem and I would not be surprised if a lot of pilots don’t realise all this.
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Thinking of percentages of EHP overcomplicates it.
Just turn on the ADC when you expect a lot of incoming damage in the next few seconds to negate a part of the damage.
You can also think of EHP and compare your 40k EHP without module to 200k EHP with module and see that 25k incoming damage is 62.5% of your EHP without ADC but only 12.5% of your EHP with ADC… or even go further with the calculation with separate damage types and resistances per shield, armor and hull… but why would you?
Just turn the ADC on when you are about to get hit by a lot of damage, right before a fleet has you redboxed and preferably before you lost a significant amount of your ship’s hitpoints, but logi should be able to catch you if you have turned on your ADC.
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The benefit isn’t related to your current HP. This is why they use the term “effective” HP as opposed to bonus or extra or something like that. It’s a damage resistance module, it reduces the severity of incoming damage. As Gerard says, if heavy damage is incoming, activating your ADC will reduce it substantially. It won’t give you more HP. Reducing incoming damage is “effectively” similar to having more HP but it’s not actually the same.
It acts on fresh, incoming damage only - damage already taken is a non-factor. If you only have 10 HP left, then reducing an incoming shot from 800 to 200 won’t help you. You’re still dead. But if you have a couple thousand HP left, then reducing all incoming damage by 75% gives you time to do something.
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But that’s just it…it has to be. If your Eagle shield is half damaged then effectively it is down from 13.5K HP to 6.75K HP. If you have 95% resistance then it is on the remaining 6.75K HP…and not on the equivalent amount of HP for a full shield.
It’s true, the benefit is related to your current HP, in one specific case:
If your remaining HP, even protected by the extra resistances from the ADC, is not enough to survive the incoming damage then it could be better to turn on the ADC even quicker.
With your numbers of 13.5k HP or 6.75k HP with 95% resistances means you have 270k or 130k effective hitpoints for the duration of the ADC.
- If the incoming damage is not enough to kill you through ADC in either scenario, for example 100k damage, it doesn’t matter whether you activate it at 13.5k HP or at 6.75k HP. At the end of the 100k damage, reduced to 5k with the 95% resistances, you’re 5k HP lower than you started. Either 13.5-5 = 8.5k or 6.75-5 = 1.75k. It didn’t matter whether you started at 13.5k or 6.75k, the ADC reduced the same amount of damage.
- If the incoming damage is high enough to start killing you through ADC, for example 150k, you would die during your ADC in the second case and survive until the end of the ADC in the first case (and probably die right after it runs out).
- And if the incoming damage is way too high to survive with ADC, for example 300k, you would die either way.
Usually the temporary effect of the ADC is strong enough that you’re in scenario 1, and that your starting HP doesn’t matter.
Your current hitpoints matter, but very little because of the huge boost of the ADC.
What matters more than ‘at which amount of hitpoints should you turn on the ADC’ is that you turn on the ADC when the incoming damage is at it’s peak, as long as you still have enough hitpoints left at that moment.
It only lasts about 10 seconds, to make most use of it you want it to be turned on when you receive most damage.
You should re-read the previous replies until you understand them. Learning how something as common as HP and ‘damage resistance’ works is quite important to successful combat.
You’re confusing the “effective HP” the ADC could give you if it was active for your entire HP pool of incoming damage, with the actual effect of the module. The effect of the module is to reduce the magnitude of incoming damage. It’s not an HP module - it just has an affect that, under some circumstances, behaves similarly to having more HP. But ‘effective HP’ is not actually HP.
An ADC doesn’t give you HP. It doesn’t extend or modify your HP. It has the same effect whether you have 10,000 HP or 10. The benefit is reduction of incoming damage. The actual end result of that benefit is variable, depending on the balance of incoming damage vs. your current HP.
If you are at full HP and there is no incoming damage when you activate it, you get no benefit. If you are at 10 HP and there is more than say 300 HP of incoming damage, you essentially get no benefit. Because you’re dead anyway.
Forget HP and effective HP, you’re a bit hung up on the wrong end of the concept for ADCs. EHP calculations just give you a general idea of what sort of effect it has under ‘ideal’ circumstances, mostly for the purpose of comparing two similar modules. It’s not a prediction of a reliable end result.
Think of ADC as “for 10 seconds I can remove 95% of all incoming damage”. At what point in time do you most want to remove 95% of all incoming damage for 10 seconds? Generally, the answer is “When the incoming damage in the next 10 seconds might cost the loss of my ship”.
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Definitely. I do think in 1v1/2 or small gang fights you may want to activate the ADC when you’re in the HP layer that doesn’t normally have the high resistances. For instance, when you still have shield HP in an Enyo- you’ll get more out of that shield HP since you probably already have high resistances in the armor layer.
The opposite would be true for something like a Hawk, you may want to save it for when you’re bleeding armor and you want to try to reload a MASB or something. In a big fleet fight though you probably just want to make sure you at least get to use it while taking damage.
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No…I’m not confusing anything. You are stating self-contradictory things.
You are effectively arguing with yourself…as I’ve never said the modules ‘add more HP’. The entire argument has been whether the benefit of the modules scales linearly with whatever remaining undamaged HP one has left in all situations. In which case, contrary to a claim you made above, the benefit IS related to your current HP.
Or to put it another way, the ‘effective HP’ ( EHP ) that you get after shield damage, for example, is not the equivalent additional EHP that you would have got from zero damage.
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To answer that:
No, it doesn’t, unless you had such little HP left that you die during ADC.
You likely still live after those 10 seconds, which means your starting HP had no impact on how much damage your ADC had blocked.
Only in the rare case that you die during ADC activation it would have mattered for the effectiveness of the ADC to have more HP at the start.
Well…that is the real issue. The ADC provides a certain level of passive tank anyway ( 92K EHP in the case of the Eagle ). But if you let that get damaged and then apply active ADC you are only getting resistance on what remaining passive tank you have left. So I can’t see any situation in which you’d be better off waiting to activate the ADC.
But it must do. I mean that is the whole argument people have been making. The ADC offers a resistance benefit…so it can only resist on what tank you have left.
Thus if your shields are down to 50% and you active ADC, you are getting 95% resistance on half the original HP. That is what I mean by it scaling linearly. The benefit you get is always the same percentage of whatever you have left.
Whether you die during ADC is an entirely separate issue.
No, it only resists on what dmage you take for the duration of the ADC.
It doesn’t matter how much HP you have left after the ADC ran out for the effectiveness of the ADC.
The only reason your starting HP matters is that if you had too little HP left, your ADC may not run the full 10 seconds as result of your ship’s explosion.
Gee I’m so confused now. I’ve been trying to understand what Altara is trying to say and what others been trying to make understood so I, too, can learn about Damage Control module.
I feel so stupid right now 
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That’s what’s being talked about…the resistance during ADC. So where does the ‘no’ come from ?
We’re not talking about after the ADC runs out.
But that’s precisely WHY one needs to apply the ADC as soon as possible. I thought that had been established several hundred posts ago.
I will join Yuzima in being confused. Though really I think I understood the matter loads of posts ago and others are now confusing it.
ADC gives temporary resistances for a short time only.
You have to take this limited duration into account, otherwise you come to misleading conclusions like “one needs to apply the ADC as soon as possible”.
You need to apply it when you expect a lot of incoming damage in the following X seconds, where X is the duration of your ADC.
If you turn it on as soon as you receive any damage at all, the resistances may be gone by the time the bulk of the damage is coming, which is much less efficient use of the ADC.
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Thanks. I understand now. I feel intelligent again 
Extenders are literal, physical HP added to the ships base HP, which might also be greater due to skills and/or other mods or rigs on the ship that add physical HP.
Multispectrum Hardeners only increase incoming damage type resistance, which is theoretical HP.
A volley might take 1,000 DMG, but add the resists and say that same volley only causes 650 DMG.
They are 2 separate ideas.