Hull Tanking

Communications Center General Discussion
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Hello and thank you for taking time out of your day to read this and engage with it if you so wish.

I believe, and i suspect others agree, that hull tanking is in a very poor spot. We have Hull repairers in the mids, we have dmg control units, bulkheads and plates! But at the same time, this is it. The Hull Repairer is abysmal. A single module able to raise the resistances of the hull dmg types in the form of the dmg control unit. And finally, there are bulkheads.

Three different forms of raising hull defense whereas armor has hardeners, plates, repairers, resistance coatings, energized armor resistances, layered armor coatings, layered energized armor membranes, and plates.

Shields we have boosters, extenders, flux coils, hardeners, power relays, rechargers, and resistance amplifiers.

I understand hull tanking used to be OP, until it got nerfed into the ground, i think 1 or two things should honestly be done with hull tanking modules. Either remove the repairers entirely or fix them to be of actual use. as it stands, the hull repairer, a capital Hull Repairer I does 1,800HP a cycle with a 1min activation timer.

So! Some numbers.
Capital Hull Repairer I - 1min cycle time - 1800HP / cycle
Capital Armor Repairer I - 30sec cycle time - 9600HP / cycle

Yet Hull Repairer can only be supported by bulkheads and a single dmg control unit.
Whereas the Armor Repairer gets support from a whole grocery list worth of modules including the dmg control unit that assist in Shields/Armor/Hull

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If you are unhappy with your hull repairer, perhaps you might be happier with an armor repairer? Enjoy!

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Hull tanking is still OP.

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Does active hull tanking have to be in a better spot?

Passive hull tanking is very viable on some ships, some ships can reach massive EHP buffer numbers with just bulkheads and a damage control with very few of the downsides that armor and shield tank have.

The only thing hull tanking is lacking is active hull tanking. As you have noticed active hull repair modules and their remote versions are not competitive at all. They seem to exist only for the rare case your nomadic ship is out in space, had hull damage and is not nearby any allies or stations to repair the damage.

I don’t think active hull tanking needs to become stronger.

Let’s think about how EVE combat balance would be if active hull tanking modules had high enough numbers to be viable:

  • every ship has 33.0% base hull resistances for all types of damage
  • every ship has 59.8% hull resistances with T2 damage control for all types of damage
  • every ship would receive the exact same damage and exact same EHP/s remote repairs

In short, with a single low slot item every ship has exactly the same tank stats as all other ships against all damage types. All flavour of tank and/or weapon damage is lost if this type of tanking is viable compared to armor or shield.

Of course CCP could then introduce all sorts of new low or mid slot resistance modules for hull, and change all ship resistance profiles to introduce the different hull weaknesses and strengths that armor and shield already have, but for what?

What would it accomplish?

Additional complexity? You would have a third type of active repairs that compete with the other two, making combat more complex, and for what? I would say EVE combat already is rather complex and don’t see additional complexity as something we need or as something that would improve the game.

Extra flavour? I feel like it does the opposite. Ships in EVE already fit in either shield fits with mid-slot heavy builds or armor fits with low-slot heavy builds, I don’t see how adding hull to that mix can really bring a third kind of tank flavour without competing with one of the other two. In fact it would be very similar to armor in that it doesn’t automatically regenerate and that you have to go through another layer of defences first before you get to the relevant layer.

Fun? I don’t think active hull tanking is going to be fun if the moment a shot is slightly bigger than your repairer can handle, you die. Shield can bleed through to armor, armor can bleed through to hull. Hull just dies.

Passive hull tank is viable.
Active hull tank has been designed to be crap. And should be crap, imo.

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I don’t do hull tanking but if I did I’d do it on a Brutix. Maybe.

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Your thread is a bit confusing to me. I don’t quite understand what you’re asking, but instead, I see a discussion about differences in ship tanking modes.

Overall, I need to point something out: in all your examples, you seem to be confusing active tanking with passive tanking. That’s my first impression. The Hull Repairer module is part of active tanking mechanics. Active hull tanking isn’t really needed because it’s essentially the same as active armor tanking — and would be just as vulnerable to alpha damage. The main point of hull tanking is to absorb excess damage between repair cycles of armor repairers.

Bulkheads are part of buffer tanking. In 95–97% of cases, you won’t use bulkheads or armor plates to boost active tanking, because unresisted incoming damage will easily overwhelm your repair cycles in EHP.

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You can get a hull tanked Brutix Navy Issue to over 250K EHP. And the best part is…an enemy sees your shield and armour going down and they hang around ( and get fired at ) because they think they have you…not realising that 95% of your tank remains undamaged.

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