Problem: The debate regarding the skill Tactical Shield Manipulation (henceforth TSM) is probably older than some EVE players. The gist of it is that training it to 5 is detrimental.
If you have an active/buffer shield tank, generally you want to take as much damage to your shield because thats where your resists are and would most likely desire TSM to be at level 5.
Oh the other hand, if you are using a passive shield tank, the recharge peaks when your shield is at about 30%, and going any lower will increase the time it takes for your passive tank to recover after being broken. In other words, having the skill as low as possible is desirable since this is a circumstance where you would rather bleed armor than further delay your shield recovery.
The compromise is then to leave TSM at level 4 as it unlocks T2 hardeners unless the player desires to train Invulnerability Core Operation (requires TSM 5).
Proposed solution: Let the player select its desired level of shield uniformity (the parameter that TSM affects) the same way you would change HP alerts, or let the slider snap to each 5% point between 0% and 25%, limited by TSM skill level, so that training the skill isn’t detrimental.
Make it a menu option when right clicking on your ship, and only allow changes either when docked or when the pilot doesnt have any combat timers.
If I recall correctly, some damage can bleed through shield if you’re below (25-TSMlevel*5)% shield.
This means that once damage is bleeding through even at level 0 your passive shield tank has already been broken (below peak regen of 30%) and that at level 4 the difference with level 5 is almost completely irrelevant.
Your passive shield tanked ship at less than 5% shield has bigger pressing matters than the question whether some damage bleeding through to armour is an issue or not.
If your shield breaks you still have armor and hull worth of breathing room. In a pve environment where the incoming damage is variable (such as between waves) this would matter, which is the case where the difference between TSM 0 (most damage bleeding through, leaving the average recharge rate higher) and 5 (downing shields to where recovering back to 30% would take a long time, ) would be significant.
This is about the time it takes for your passive shield tank to recover. If you get down to hull and finish off the last enemy, having a higher level of TSM would increase the likelihood that you’d need to wait longer for your shield to recover.
Sure, there are cases where it doesn’t matter, but there are also cases where it does (such as an unlucky streak of wrecking shots). I’m talking about the latter.
If your tank isn’t breaking because of sustained damage, but because of a sudden short spike, you won’t have trouble going back to peak shield regeneration so this isn’t an issue then either.
This really is about an effect that sometimes happens when your ship is between 0 and 5% shield, in a non-sustained damage fight that a shield ship is capable of surviving by bleeding just enough into armour/hull that their shield regeneration can keep them alive.
While I agree that it’s strange that having a higher level is having a negative rather than positive effect on the outcome in a situation, this specific situation is so rare and the effect so minimal that I don’t think this is worth bothering.
Anyway, if you don’t like level 5 you can extract it if it isn’t your Rorqual pilot.
You’re losing out on EHP over time for training a skill. It doesn’t matter that it’s only an issue “sometimes”. If that doesn’t sound wrong to you then I’m sorry because I really dont know how else to put it.
The issue is bigger than you say it is anyway, because there are PLENTY of situations where someones passive tank can be broken without the fight being over. Taking a wrecking shot or two to armor instead of shields would allow shields to regenerate instead of from 0% to 0.1%, from 20% to 23% (to emphasize that the issue isnt the difference between lvl4 and 5 but between lvl0 and 5), which in most cases would result in the pilot ending up with more EHP over the course of the fight for not having trained the skill, and in some others would even let the passive tank stabilize.
What you’re suggesting on the other hand is spending 300mil on switching from a benefit to edge cases for buffer tanks to a benefit on edge cases for passive tanks to compensate for TSM being ass-backwards.
All Im proposing is to remove the downside of the only skill with a circumstantial downside.