I am playing Eve Online on my laptop with the lowest settings, and it runs fine. But when I activate a T0 Electrical Filament, as soon as I enter the space, I see that I am suffering a -40 EMP resist penalty.
I look around and I see clear space around me, and I am visually not in any cloud. I cannot figure out how I am supposed to pilot out of the penalty cloud because there are no visual indicators.
So is this common and if not, what settings do I need to enable in the graphics settings to make the cloud appear. If the graphics settings are not the culprit, then how do I tell where to go to get the penalty removed.
There is no “penalty cloud”. The EM resistance penalty is valid for the entire abyssal site. It affects your ship and those of the opponents, so it is best to fit an EM-hardener to counter it while shooting with primariliy EM damage to benefit from it’s effect.
The only “clouds” in there are colored and have different local effects:
blue cloud: increase signature by 300%, so every ship in there is hit like it was 4x as big. Missiles like HAMs or guns with a low base tracking (Lasers) hit exceptional well in there. Small ships can’t profit as much from their low signature radius. You should use them to your advantage if you use HAMs vs a spawn of small drone ships or frigates. You should avoid it when using a low-sig-Afterburner ship yourself. Staying inside there while enemy battleships (Karen, Overseers, Leshaks…) shoot you can be your end very quickly.
orange cloud: your shield booster runs faster while having less boost. So you can tank the same but you need 66% more capacitor to keep the module running. Avoid these clouds when flying an active tanked shield ship. With armor ships or passive tanked shield ships you can ignore these clouds.
white/yellow cloud: 4x speed, -50% inertia. These can easily catapult you out of the arena. Also small enemies are very hard to hit with turrets at all and they take significant less damage from missiles. On the other side they can be used to get some distance from an enemy pulk or to quickly catch up to some far away target (Karen, Blinding Leshaks). In general they should be avoided.