Been looking into armor tanking guides and setups, and I noticed a couple suggest Tactical Shield Manipulation as a good armor tanking skill.
I don’t understand why is this a good skill for an armor tank. To my logic, you actually want the damage to leak through shield, since this way you’re maximizing the time that your stronger layer of defense, armor, is getting hits, thereby resisting on average more damage per fight, plus you get two means of replenishing your hp - armor repairer + passive shield regen - instead of only passive shield regen.
Point me out where my logic is wrong? I can only see the reason of maximazing the capacitor effective time, as your armor will start getting hit little later thus saving some cap.
Below about twenty five percent shield the damage it its taking will start to leak through and into the Armour. While you are right, your are only right if the resistance profiles of your shields and armour are both uniform.
The shields resist Explosive and Kinetic damage much better than armour does (and armour is better against EM and Thermal-ish). The damage calculation goes roughly in this order:
Weapon calculates how much damagei t did to you.
The amount applied to the shield is calculated, as well as the proportion that leaks through to the armour if the shields are below their “leakage threshold”…
The resistances are applied.
The residual is taken off the remaining shield and armour.
So, imagine you are being hit by Explosive damage - you want as much of it (all ideally) taken by the shields and not on the weaker resisting armour. So, you want the leakage value as low as possible - train the skill.
The converse argument of “If I am shield tanked I want EM damage taken by the armour” doesn’t work because you don’t have a lot of armour! i.e. you want to stop any damage getting to the armour where it will quickly punch a hole into the hull.
Its that the leakage proportion is decided before any resistances are applied that is the critical logical step making it worthwhile.
That may not be the best explanation - it probably takes a pencil and paper and a lot of had waving to describe it, but it’s to do with the different resistance profiles.
And the same logic applies to both an active armour tank (repairers) and a passive tank (where you just rely on a huge volume of armour - I kill them before they burn through me.
You are right - it does mean you start the repairer slightly later - though if you are flying an armour fitted ship the shields are only stopping a fraction of the damage before they fail.
Never fit both armour and shields - for complicated good reasons you get the worst of both worlds without all the benefits.
Even if you’re Armor tanking, it doesn’t hurt to train up the Shield skills. You aren’t wasting any slots with Shield mods, but you are still gaining the benefits of the fact that every ship has some degree of Shields. And the longer they last, and the better they perform, the more protection you’ll have before you resort to using your Armor tank mods.
Absolutely. And totally recommended - shield skills are also fewer and easier to train than the Armour ones.
But as a good Amarrian i do like have something solid around me rather than a collection of rusty bolts and a wonky shield generator powered by an insane amount of capacitor that I could rightly use to hurt someone with.
well, armor rep have better hp/GJ. Plus better base resists. also they consume low slots which are less important than middle “point /range control” slots
Before it becomes a discussion on the benefits and weaknesses of two of the five forms of defence (speed, size and range are the others) and the balances between them:
Eve is about compromise and trade-offs. What makes it endlessly fascinating is its never as simple as just “A” trades off with “B” and nothing else. Shields are capacitor hungry, increase signature (making you easier to track and hit) and require trade-off with e-war, capacitor regeneration (ha!) and propulsion. Armour is slower to repair, makes you slower, and is a trade-off with speed and damage potential.
Where all these trade-offs and compromises sit with an individual player depends on the their personal preferences and how they enjoy flying in New Eden. So what is right for me isn’t right for others, and vice versa.
But I really, really like the MWD fitted dual armour rep. HAM2 Sacrilege.
very common mistaken assumption that the damage by-passes the shield . the full damage is applied to the shield , and a small % is additionally applied to the armor . bleed-thru damage , is extra damage . you’re losing more HP without the skill .
Your overall premise is to survive encounters with the combatant. How you do this sometimes transcends logic into EVE logic, EHP!!! Effective Hitpoints takes into account all shield, armor and hull resists and HP.
So even if you are armor tanking, you can get more EHP by getting hull and shield skills to lvl 1,2, or 3 before going for long lvl 5 skills can be of benefit.
So as well as;
Tactical Shield Manipulation, Reduces damage bleeding to armor through shields-.
You can also try;
Hull upgrades, more armor HP
Mechanics, more structure HP
Shield Management, 5% increase in shield capacity per level.
Shield Operation, 5% reduction in shield recharge time per level.
And there are a few skills, depending on how you are armor tanking to have better resists, speed, repair rate, or amount. Tanking - EVE University Wiki
!!! When you train Repair Systems you will increase the demand on your cap, because your rep will cycle faster. So train you better cap skills to compensate.
Capacitor Management (3x, 170k ISK): 5% bonus to total capacitor capacity per level
Capacitor Systems Operation (1x, 44k ISK): 5% cap recharge rate reduction per level
The ONLY answer out of 10 that was actually on point.
Now it makes sense to want the ADDITIONAL bleeding damage to kick in as late as possible.
Everyone else, please read questions carefully before you start sharing your wisdom.
Although thanks for the other considerations that are useful for understanding tanking.
Damage that bleeds through the shields isn’t “extra” damage. There’s no such thing as “extra” damage. If your guns do 200 damage, you aren’t going to take 200 to shields AND another 100 to armor. TSM doesn’t invent more damage than the guns delivered to begin with.