EHP Vs Resistance

[vrongbong]

Hello, capsuleers. I’m relatively ‘new’ to ratting and would like some advice on fitting my ship. Should I flat out go for ehp or resistance? Let’s say I’m fighting some Guristas, which mainly deal kinetic damage (correct me if I’m wrong). Should I fit my ship for kinetic resistance or EHP? Should I focus on increasing the HP of my shield or armor? Thanks, in advance.

[ISD_Sakimura]

First you must understand that EHP is a calculated amount of damage you can take based on your; Raw HP and Shield, Armor and Hull resistances.

Against Guristas, you are correct in that they deal Kinetic damage mainly, but dont forget that you should also have some Themal resists. NPC Damage Types

You have to choose what sort of tank you want to focus on, this is influenced by the ship you choose to fly; Active Shield or Armor, Passive Shield, Armor Buffer. You could also option Hull tank but that has no lasting chance of success in any PvE situation, only ever useful in PvP. Generally speaking for most PvE content you want to go with an active tank.

What sort of ship do you plan on flying? could give additional advice if I know this

[Hidden_Markov]

You want some resists.

They reduce damage. Which can outweigh the diminishing returns as you tack one more HP buffer mod (as ISD said EHP is a total). I would be assuming you are looking at passive tank like shield extended caldari.

Also if your ratting ship will be a bs, gurista missiles will always hit and hit hard.

Big sig radius, slower (unless you will be running a mach) means gurista’s always hit and hit well. And you can’t play optimal/fallloff games with them. A turret based rat and going for kite/snipe…you can take way less damage just by keeping range. gurista BS’ reach out and touch you all over the grid.

Also if you mean 0.0 ratting and you have a bad day…it may get worse. you on loss mails with a no resist tank will fall under sh… fit. Expect to be messed with on that lol.

[vrongbong]

I am just practicing my combat skills on SiSi. So I’m using the Vedmak.

[mkint]

Neither. You want to use a 3rd party fitting tool and figure out EHPvsTargetRepped/S.

Summary:

• don’t worry about total ehp
• active tank PVE
• resist for your opponent
• don’t mix tanks, don’t mix tanks, don’t mix tanks
• learning by over-tanking will let you build the confidence to win without tanking

EHP as calculated by the game uses total HP, and it assumes you are being attacked by something that deals all 4 damage types equally. So to max out your EHP with fitting screen you’d have to resist against EM and EXPL, even though Gurista don’t deal any of that. You’d also have to put resists on all 3, shield armor hull, which will just get you killed.

EHP is also just buffer tanked. Buffer tank will NOT stop you from dying. It will just make you die slightly slower. In short engagements, dying slower can be the difference between dying and not dying, in long engagements those couple extra seconds won’t make a difference, dead is dead.

For standard PVE choose from Active Shield, Passive Shield, or Active Armor. Which you choose will depend on the ship you are flying and its inherent strengths. Don’t mix tanks. I think all the current 3rd party fitting tools will let you customize damage types. Guristas I believe deal 55%kin/45%therm. All fitting tools will show you your ehp repped per second. That’s the only number you need to care about for standard PVE. Don’t mix tanks. Don’t mix tanks. Don’t mix tanks. If you’re shield tanking, don’t fit even a single module for the sake of your armor… if your shield fails your armor won’t help you, and fitting armor mods will mean you’d be sacrificing that slot and maybe capacitor to mods that would have saved you. If you’re armor tanking, you kinda want your shields to fail so all those armor mods can actually do their jobs, in addition to the fact that you sacrificed resources that could have saved you for something that definitely didn’t.

You say you’re ratting, but there are a few things people can mean by that, but mostly they mean going through the asteroid belts to kill rats. I generally advise against that. Partly because there are only a few people in the game that it pays very well for, partly because it’s slit-your-wrists boring. Sometimes people mean doing anoms. I’d generally suggest learning how to tank in lvl 3 and 4 missions. Start with a brick tank… as much reps/s as you can get out of the ship, usually above 1000-1200ehp/s against a specific faction. Brick tanks aren’t effective at PVE, but they are very effective at surviving PVE. If you start there, you can start scaling back your tank as you learn how to fly smarter. You can tank any lvl 4 with about 400ehp/s and being less than cap stable, if you redirect those resources to faster completion times.

Keep in mind, there are survival skills that have little to do with your mods fit. Flying technique, target selection, aggro control… I’ve cleared lvl 4 missions with completely untanked ships, and routinely don’t bother to turn on the tank of my normally tanked ship. When you can tune down your tank, you can increase your DPS, and your completion times, both of which improve your income/hour.