I’m getting my head around most things in Eve, but capacitor management is driving me crazy. I fitted my Vexor with four medium 250 Prototype Gauss Guns, a Small Shield Booster I, a Large Shield Extender II, a Benefactor Shield Recharger, a couple of Mark I Reactor Control I, and a Mark I Compact Shield Flux Coil. With this build, my capacitor depletes in 1 min and one second. I wanted to increase that so I bought a Core Defense Capacitor Safeguard, which had no effect on my deplete time. Not satisfied, I bought a Discharge Elutriation, which increased it to 1 minute 4 seconds. Two rig slots for a measly 3 seconds? Am I missing something here?
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Capacitor_Management_101
Skills, modules, all that jazz to help
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With what I think is your fit and better skills, you can make your capacitor last a lot longer. In fact, with my skills, one of those rigs is enough to make the fit stable.
That being said, it is often worth getting capacitor rigs (capacitor control circuit or semiconductor memory cell) over specific guns/booster cap use decrease. You should look into those.
As a side note, try not to mix active (shield boosting) and passive (shield extender/recharger/flux coil) tanking. It’s much better to do one well than to try to do both.
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The skills in the Engineering skill group (in the market list or in your character sheet) are very important and often recommended that you train them to 4 - 5.
Second thing, you fitted a Small shield booster or Medium shield booster? The Small is frigate-sized and shouldn’t deplete your capacitor. Do you have a MWD installed that could deplete your capacitor that fast?
Anyway, the guns do consume capacitor but not that much. And if you don’t have a heavy-drain item like a MWD, your capacitor should last a bit. The biggest consumer is, of course, the Medium Shield Booster.
And to mitigate that, keep in mind that there are two kinds of shield defenses, and you can’t afford to waste your medium slots by mixing them up:
Active Shield Defense is when you use a Shield Booster to actively repair the shield. Find a good medium shield booster, because you want the maximum amount of shield repaired for the capacitor energy cost that you’re paying. Add a Shield Boost Amplifier to increase this repair amount even more. And add Shield Hardeners to give your shields resistance to damage so that they don’t deplete so fast (“Invulnerability” shield hardeners consume a lot more juice than the resistance-specific ones).
That Large Shield Extender that you put in gives you a lot of shield hit points, but uses up a lot of your power grid, and all it does is it delays the inevitable. Also forces you to use Reactor Controls to fit it, wasting low slots. Don’t do that. The way you’ve fitted that ship, it looks like you have a lot of hit points but very weak repair rate and no resistances, and very weak DPS (cause your guns aren’t enhanced by low-slot damage amplifiers). So if you take it into combat, you can’t kill anything fast enough, and the enemies remain alive and keep pounding you with full damage, which you can’t repair fast enough.
Instead of that, put in an Active Shield Defense, you have 4 slots, the modules are: Medium Shield Booster (best you can find), Shield Hardener (EM), Shield Hardener (Th) (change resistances per each fight to match the enemy damage), and either a Shield Boost Amplifier or a Capacitor Booster with charges for cap regen. That frees up your low slots to use a Damage Control (extra resistances), and Magnetic Field Stabilizers or Drone Damage Augmentors for extra DPS coming out of your weapons.
Passive Shield Defense - here, you just make the shield as big as possible and enhance the natural regeneration rate of the ship - no active shield boosters. This requires both medium and low slots. Shield Extender and Shield Resistance Amplifiers in the med slots, Shield Power Relays in the low slots. This will make your capacitor recharge very slowly, as all power is redirected to shields, so your guns may end up draining your capacitor - even if they don’t, you certainly will be unable to have any other active modules like afterburners or electronic warfare.
Now, if you look at the Vexor, do you see that it has 4 med slots and 5 low slots? That means an armor tank that uses low slots is preferable to a shield tank.
Armor Tank:
Medium Armor Repairer (best you can find)
Damage Control (resistances)
Energized Resistance Membranes (2 resistances)
Drone Damage Amplifier or Magnetic Field Stabilizer x2
This frees up your medium slots so you can put in:
Afterburner for utility
Capacitor Booster (with batteries) or Cap Recharger (for extra capacitor juice)
With a good capacitor booster (and batteries), you can double up and have 2 Medium Armor Repairers, keep one on and toggle the other one as needed during heavy damage.
EDIT: The rigs for cap recharge are “Medium Capacitor Control Circuit”.
EDIT2: The Vexor is a drone ship, you should focus on medium drones and drone damage amplifiers to do damage. Guns can augment said damage, but you need to max your drone skills. Otherwise, for a gun ship, use the Thorax cruiser, rather than the Vexor.
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Good information so far but there are some major pieces missing that are critical to helping figure this out. We need your entire fit to see where the capacitor problems are coming from. Here are some ideas you can look into.
Replace the shield recharger with a shield boost amplifier you will get more tank for the same capacitor use.
Replace the reactor controls (power grid only) with power diagnostic systems they boost capacitor and shield recharge rate.
Replace the defense capacitor safeguard and discharge elutriation with capacitor control circuits.
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Capacitor skills- train them.
They may seem like a waste of time vs training skills that will allow you to fly more powerful ships, or use better modules- but core capacitor and fitting skills apply to every ship you will ever fly.
If you feel like the capacitor on the vexor is uninspiring you are likely to feel that way flying any other ship as well.
Lastly, as people before have mentioned, if you are going to active shield tank, don’t use a shield extender. Instead, increase your shield resistances vs the rats you will be fighting, which greatly amplifies the effective repair rate of your shield booster, so much so that you should only have to cycle it a few times occasionally to keep up with incoming damage.
You generally have to sacrifice something to have a cap-stable active shield boat- trading damage, application, or mobility to do so. Cap stability is a bit of a red herring to chase for missioning, anyhow. Don’t aggro the entire pocket and fly intelligently and you don’t need much more than 3 min of sustained repping.
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Rigs and the likes only affect your cap by 5, 10% of what you have now. Thats only a fraction. You cant be surprised that your cap was only extended by the same order of magnitude.
What you can do is always micro-manage your cap. I.e. dont leave your shield booster on forever.
But really, if youre in a vexor, your railguns should really only be used on enemies that are approaching from afar, and you should deactivate them when they reach 10-15km away from you. So keep that in mind when doing the cap calculations.
Thanks for this! I’m going to try some of your ideas out now…
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