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EVE Online: Shield Tanking vs. Armor Tanking
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com EVE Online Correpondent Joanie Spalletta writes this informative guide comparing Armor and Shield tanking in CCP's EVE Online.
To keep your ship alive in EVE, you must have a tank. You can do this two different ways. You can shield tank, or you can armor tank. To decide which one is right for you, take a look at your character’s skills. The two categories you’re going to want to look at are Engineering and Mechanics. If you have more skill points in Engineering, shield tanking is probably best for you. If you have more skill points in Mechanics, go with armor tanking.
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Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I'm sorry, but the article is frankly horrible. It is shallow at best, incomplete in places and incorrect at worst.
First off, the kind of tank that goes on your ship is decided by the *ship*. You skill for the tank you want to use as part of skilling for the ship.
Resistance bonusses, bonusses to repair/shield boost amount and especially number of med (-> shield) resp. lowslots (-> armor) as well as special circumstances decide if the ship will be armor or shield tanked.
There are two ways to tank in general: active and passive.
Active tanking is defined by the use of shield boosters resp. armor repairers.
Passive tanking means to install shield extenders or armor plates alongsides resistance mods to create a buffer tank the enemy has to chew through. A special case of passive shield tanking is regen tanking, meaning you shorten the shield regeneration time such that you get a useful regeneration out of your shields, thus tanking incoming damage not only by buffering but also over time.
Active tanking (both shield and armor) and passive shield regen tanking is prevalent mainly in PvE situations and acceptable in small gangs, where incoming DPS (Damage per second) is relatively low and reppers resp. boosters can cope.
Passive buffer tanking is how you fit a large gang or fleet ship. There is no way (with very few exceptions of faction/faction fit ship) a subcapital ship can tank the damage output of even 3 enemy DD (damage dealers) (which is easily in the neighborhood of 800+ DPS per enemy DD BS or 500+ DPS per enemy DD HAC) so you want to have a chance to warp out, meaning you need a buffer to give you the time needed. Passive buffer tanking is useless in PvE situations where DPS is low but the exposure length is great.
Regardless of active/passive tanking, there's certain pro's and cons to shield resp armor tanking.
Shield tanking usually means faster ships, faster response from boosters (at the beginning of the cycle, not at the end like armor reppers). Shield tanks allow for full use of lowslots for damage modules. On the negative side, shield tanking means trading medslots between E-War capabilities, point, web, MWD/AB, ECCM and cap booster.
Armor tanking means trading lowslots between damage modules and tank as well as much longer response times on the armor repper module but allows for free medslots to install MWD/AB, cap booster, point, web, ECCM etc. Also, the shield is a welcome buffer that shows you when you start taking damage and should get out.
Due to the fact that all fleet ships can be acceptably armor tanked but some very popular fleet ships (namely amarr ships) can't be shield tanked (and still function in a fleet), the need for MWD, cap booster and sensor boosters in a 0.0 fleet mean that most 0.0 fleets are armor tanked (meaning they need only 1 kind of logistics).
Special note should be taken of remote rep (aka spider tank) setups. Here, every ship brings along a remote repper (usually only one kind because the entire fleet is tanked one way and usually armor tanked at that). The ship carries a little buffer and much resistances locally but no local repper of it's own. The idea is to survive just long enough for your fleetmates to lock you up and remotely repair you. Unlike local reppers, this kind of setup scales very well with increased gang sizes and is very viable in fleets of nearly any size - but also very difficult to pull off, especially in larger fleets.
Also, one should never mix shield and armor tanks. The reson is that overall, the ship will either tank worse than a single kind of tank or will be useless for anything else (or both).
Example ships by tanking type:
Shield active tank: Raven (because it's the mission runners ship of choice, PvE means active tanking and the Raven is a better shield than armor tanker)
Shield buffer tank: Fleet Rokh (because the Rokh is a great fleet sniper but a horrible armor tank. It's pretty much the only shield tanked battleship in nullsec fleets)
Shield regen tank: Nighthawk, Drake (because the natural shield regen rate on battlecruiser hulls makes for a great basis for a shield regen tank. The nighthawk especially has *one of* the best damage over time tanks out there if shield regen tanked)
Armor active tank: Hyperion (that rep bonus makes for a decent active tanking platform, especially for lowsec gatecampers)
Armor buffer tank: Abaddon (because the high base armor and the ships resistance bonusses make a great basis and the ridiculous power drain of the cap-unbonusses lasers means active tanking needs two capboosters)
Real pilots hull tank.
+1 Arc
I'm in complete agreement.
With all due respect to the article writer, if you don't know what you're talking about, you really shouldn't have written an article like this.
The fourth sentence will be painful to read for anyone that has spent any amount of time in EVE. The simple truth is (as theArcangel stated) that the ship is the deciding factor on what tank you use.
Where's the rating system for articles? lol
I don't want to insult the writer but this article is terrible. It's like it actually goes out of its way to be incorrect. A cursory search on google turns up much better results. And so everyone knows I'm not just being critical, I'll pick the article to pieces and point out where it goes wrong. I could pick apart the article's poor grammar and abuse of phrases like "shield strength" where they mean "shield hitpoints" but that wouldn't help anyone that had read it. Instead, I'll stick to correcting the most glaringly obvious errors and providing additional information. By the way, my name is Nyphur, I wrote the comprehensive Tanking guide in EON issue 2, I created the Tanking spreadsheet in 2005 and have run eve-tanking.com for years. I'm sort of an expert.
Paragraph 1 - "To decide which one is right for you, take a look at your character’s skills. ... If you have more skill points in Engineering, shield tanking is probably best for you. If you have more skill points in Mechanics, go with armor tanking."
That's a horrible approach to take, deciding which you should do based on what skills you already have trained. The decision on whether to armour or shield tank should be based on the ship you're flying. Caldari and Minmatar ships tend to be good at shield tanking while Amarr and Gallente ships are almost always better armour tanked. The big decider is number of slots available for the tank. Shield modules use mid slots and armour modules use low slots. Ships with more mid slots than low slots are much better at shield tanking while those with more lows than mids tend to be better at shield tanking. For example, since caldari ships have more shield hitpoints and more mid slots than low slots, they are better off shield tanked. But try shield tanking an amarr ship like an Armageddon with its 4 mid slots and it'll be much less effective than an armour tank on the same ship (with 8 low slots).
Paragraph 2 - "So, the four most important skills to have for shield tanking are: EM Shield Compensation, Kinetic Shield Compensation, Explosive Shield Compensation, and Thermic Shield Compensation. These skills boost your resistances to each type of damage."
This is just plain wrong. The shield compensation skills don't increase your resistances at all. They increase the resistance bonus given by PASSIVE shield resistance amplifiers - the ones that don't require capacitor (such as Kinetic Deflection Amplifier I) but tend to have lower resistances than active hardeners (like Ballistic Deflection Field I). They also increase the resistance bonus given by active shield hardeners but only while they're offline. That is of no practical use since when offline an active shield hardener only gives 1% resistance instead of its nomral 50%. The shield compensation skills are practically useless unless you're developing a completely passive tanked ship that doesn't have enough capacitor to run active hardeners. That is a very rare case.
Paragraph 6 - "You have to find a balance between how much your resistances are and how fast your shield recharges."
This is completely nonsense, you don't have to find some kind of balance between recharge rate and resistances. There are two types of shield tank - active and passive. An active shield tank involves using hardeners to increase the shield's resistance and a shield booster to repair any damage done. A passive shield tank involves increasing the shield's resistance as before but this time the shield booster is removed and modules that increase the shield's recharge rate are used. Some hardeners or resistance amplifiers and some shield Extenders in the mid slots and shield power relays in the low slots are your best choices here.
Shield recharges based on the same equation as your capacitor recharges, so it generates more hitpoints as the percentage of your shield HP you have left decreases. This peaks at about 32%, when your shield is regenerating fastest. As it drops further, the recharge rate sharply dercreases so if your shield gets below 25% while passive tanking, your tank has failed and you should get out of there as quickly as possible.
Paragraph 8-9 - "The most important skills to have for armor tanking are: EM Armor Compensation, Explosive Armor Compensation, Kinetic Armor Compensation, Thermic Armor Compensation, Hull Upgrades, and Repair Systems."
The first four are pretty self explanatory. They give damage resistance to each type of damage, just like in shield tanking. "
Ignoring the blunder on paragraph 7 where the writer said armour tanking was different and then went on to explain how it's exactly the same, this paragraph is again wrong. As explained above, the compensation skills don't directly increase resistances. They increase the resistance bonus given by passive hardeners (useful only when using passive hardeners) and by active ones when offline (essentially useless). For armour tanking, these skills are actually not worthless because armour has a nice module called the Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I. This is a PASSIVE armour hardener that gives a bonus to all four armour resistances. The tech 2 version gives a 20% bonus and with all compensation skills at level 5, that bonus is increased by 1/4 to 25%. Not the biggest bonus, which is why people tend to train these to 3 or 4. The most important skills for armour tanking would be Hull Upgrades and Repair systems. Also note that a Hull Upgrades is needed to use armour modules like armour plates, resistance membranes and active hardeners. At level 5 you get access to tech 2 armour modules that have a significant boost over the tech 1 versions.
Paragraph x - "Other important modules to use for armor tanking are: Capacitor batteries, capacitor boosters, capacitor power relays, capacitor rechargers, and power diagnostic units."
Never use a power diagnostic unit with an armour tanked ship. They give a bonus to capacitor amount, capacitor recharge rate, powergrid, shield amount and shield recharge rate but they take up a valuable low slot. If you need capacitor badly enough to throw away a low slot that could be used for a hardener, use a capacitor power relay. Power diagnostic systems are primarily a shield-tanking module used by active shield tankers. Since capacitor power relays give a nerf to your shield boost amount, shield tankers can't really afford to use them in their low slots to generate more capacitor for their tank. Instead, they use power diagnostic systems because that increases their capacitor recharge rate AND gives them some shield hitpoints.
Paragraph y - "Capacitor batteries and capacitor boosters both give a bonus to your ship’s capacitor capacity."
They most certainly do not. Capacitor boosters are mid-slot modules you load with charges and activate to give your capacitor a quick boost. They provide no bonus to capacitor capacity, only allow you to "inject" charges into your capacitor. For example, a medium capacitor booster I can be loaded with 1 cap 800 charge or 2 cap 400 charges. When activated, the 800 charge instantly increases your current capacitor armount by 800 (and similarly the 400 charge would increase it by 400). These charges are quite big and are a limited resource, spares must be kept in your cargo hold.
The article should also have mentioned that Damage Control modules are not stacking penalised, so even if you have three hardeners buffing up a specific resistance type, it's still completely 100% effective. For more information on the "stacking penalty", do a quick google search. It's also the only low slot module that will increase shield resistances, making it a must-have for all shield tankers. The only thing good about this guide is that presumably the writer wasn't paid for it. Here are a few better resources:
http://www.eve-online.com/guide/en/g61_4.asp
http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Tanking
http://www.allabouteveonline.net/Player%20Guides/A%20COMPREHENSIVE%20NEW%20PLAYER%20GUIDE%20TO%20TANKING.pdf
If I could give out my tanking guide from EON issue 2, I would. There's more to tanking in EVE than is covered in these articles and I think my EON guide was pretty comprehensive. Maybe some day I'll write up a new comprehensive guide for my website. I hope this reply has at least helped anyone that was confused by the original article.
EDIT: Looks like I was beaten to the punch while writing this post
. Hope people find it useful.
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I'm just noting here. That if I have skills trained in engineering I be better of with shield tanking and so picking a ship that are fit to shield tank. As opposed to "only" look at the ship and then decide. That could mean that I pick a ship with armor tanking and doing so have to train other skills for that.
That is also a way to read that part in the article.
Let the skills decide shield/armor tanking then pick that ship that are made for shield/armor tanking respectively. What to look for in the ships are in the article after you have looked at what skills one have.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
It still doesn't make much practical sense. The time it takes to train for a certain ship is huge compared to the time it takes to train the important shield/armour tanking skills to 4.
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I just thought it was amusing that an article focused on tanking included a picture of an Intercepter.
I don't think it's a bad article, it's just a badly titled and badly focused one. While remaining informative it misses the thing it needed to explain the most.
It's like people here said, you plan your skills for the ship you have or for the ship you want to fly.
What? No mention about speed tanking?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
It wasn't informative. It was blatantly incorrect on many MANY counts, abused phrases like "shield strength" instead of using "shield hitpoints" and didn't cover basic stuff that people would know after playing EVE for a week. It's like they went in-game, collected information from the various skill descriptions and somehow managed to make it WORSE. You can find out more info than was in this article yourself by opening the market to the skills tab. Any one of a dozen sites that pop up on a quick google (some I linked in a post above) explain all of these concepts correctly and simply.
This article does more harm than good for people looking for information. If anyone has read this article and thinks it's at least partly informative, I STRONGLY urge them to forget the whole thing and just read the links I posted. Not only are they much more informative, but they're actually correct and not just guess-work from someone who clearly hasn't played EVE for very long.
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WOW... just.... wow...
I don't even know where to begin on how bad this article is. Please, if you're going to post articles to be used to help people learn to play the game do some research first.
1) You don't pick what type of tanking you're going to do based on your current skills... You pick it based on what types of ships you plan to fly. Minmatar and Caldari tend to be best at Shield tanking (though there are a few armor tanking minnie ships). Amarr and Gallente are typically armor tankers (though there are a few amarr ships which do well with a buffer shield tank rather than an armor tank)
2) Armor & Shield compensation skills do not directly affect your resistances. They, as mentioned by another poster, increase the resistance bonus given to you by passive resistance modules. If you use active resistance modules (hardeners) like the Invuln field and other dmg specific hardeners then the compensation skills are utterly useless. The *armor* compensation skills are of more use to armor tankers because they tend to use EANM's and other passive hardeners a lot more than shield tankers typically do. In either case they're one of the lowest priority tanking skills (armor or shield) that a player should worry about learning. They give marginal benefit for time invested and should only be trained to top out an already solid character build.
3) You should NEVER worry about a balance between shield hp and shield recharge (and same for armor) For PVE you should max out your recharge rate and worry less about total hitpoints. For PVP there's a fairly complex formula but it boils down to finding out what will help you last longest in a fight... more hp or more recharge... generally more hp wins on that equation but there are a few exceptions to that rule.
I hope anyone reading this and planning to play EVE pays attention to the responses to this article because if they try to follow its advice they will have nothing but problems in EVE.
In future please take the time to research articles before writing them.
"A ship-of-war is the best ambassador." - Oliver Cromwell
A total misleading article.
Type of ships and the quantitiy of med / low slots -> modules -> skills required.
Best way to learn which ship is best for shield or armor tanking is by playing around the Eve Fitting Tool aka EFT.
IMO as a learning newbie, this article failed badly under the EvE standard.
All canceled. Waiting on Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning.
i stooped reading after this
by that logic i have to tank a raven on armour because i got more skills on Mechanicsdear joanie spalletta if you want to make a article about eve-online pm several eve players and ask them to point out some things so you can make a accurate research ( or play eve 3-4 months )
kthxbye
BestSigEver :P
I have to agree. With several years of play under my belt, it isn't the skills that make the difference, it's the ship. The ship will tell you how it needs to tank, based on it's available slots and its beginning resistances. The four shield and armor skills for compensation are useless to active tankers. I run a tough tank, but have these at lvl 1 or 2! They just aren't useful for an active tank.
It looks like anyone in this thread would be happy to write informative and in-depth articles. Ask away! We're all quite knowledgeable.
Armor vs Shield...........
Hmmm, now this is an interesting topic in of itself. As to the differences in either, I am going to have to say that no matter what you want, where you want to go and such, the first thing that you want to look at is where you want to be (carebear or pirate, transporter or mission runner, ect) and then work towards your plan for your ship. From there you can then look at the different types.
Both types of tanking have their pro's and con's as was stated previously in this post and is truly impossible to say which is better only because certian ways of tanking work for pvp and won't for pve and the other way around. Please if you want a good way of looking at everything just remember the basic word for all of eve PLAN, PLAN, PLAN.
I'm in complete agreement.
With all due respect to the article writer, if you don't know what you're talking about, you really shouldn't have written an article like this.
The fourth sentence will be painful to read for anyone that has spent any amount of time in EVE. The simple truth is (as theArcangel stated) that the ship is the deciding factor on what tank you use.
Where's the rating system for articles? lol
Agreed, please get your facts right before you try to distort them. This article is way WAY off.
I would suggest before posting additional articles about Eve that the MMORPG.com staff consult people who actually play Eve and have some idea of what they're talking about.
Aside from all the inaccuracies already mentioned, omission of speed and buffer tanking tactics and concepts makes this article almost completely useless for pvp. I would say remote reps too but that's a bit advanced.
Read Shield Tanking vs. Armor Tanking
before reading thru all the comments in this thread, i have to "wtf" at the first sentence... you don't decide you're going to shield or armor tank based upon you skills.
you decide way before that point, what type of ships you're going to fly, which race, multi race, etc... THEN, based upon the line of ships you're flying, THAT dictates what skills you need to fly.
if my skills lean towards shield tanking initially, but the ships i'll be wanting to fly give armor tanking bonuses; then, i'd have to be an idiot to train for shield tanking, or try to shield tank on that ship.
SOMEONE needs to be doing some fact checking on these articles. more and more they're making mmorpg.com look like a noob joke.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
I read the first sentence and went WTF too ...
U realy dont decide via SP on what you will do ,shield ,armor or speed tanking,you decide it along with what ship you fly,for exemple im not going to armor tank a raven.
And what do you do if you fly minmatar ships,you only limit yourself to flying less then half since minmatar ships are mixed,some need to armor tank,some need to shield tank and some need to speed tank.
Id rather take advice from a newbie then this guide,sorry.
Tanking is for sissies.
Get up in their face and pew pew everything before they can kill you.
Disposable Catalysts FTW?
The OP deserves a bit of credit for trying, but like Arcangel says, the article is terribly lacking. It's commonly known that tanking is divided between active and buffer tanking, which in turn is divided in shields and armour based on the combination of your ship and skills. Not to mention that you don't always need a tank at all, because ewar, raw speed or raw dps can keep you alive instead.
1) Skip the original article.
2) Read theArcangel's post.
3) Profit!
I re-read it twice before replying with my thoughts, also read all the comments above.
The article wouldn't be that bad if it didn't have completely wrong information (Compensation Skills for example, but everyone else covered that above). If this was read by someone considering starting, or someone who has only been playing a short time, or (lol) someone who buys a character - it would be relatively informative and supply enough basic information on tanking to be worthwhile.
For those of us that have been playing EvE for some time - of course it's a slap in the face. I won't go into detail as that has already been done above.
Letter to the Editor: Come on! Anyone who has been around MMORPG.com for any amount of time knows posting an article about EvE is going to get views and going to be critiqued much more so than an article based on a different game. Sorry, but I feel you - the editor - have almost as much responsibility for the enraged fanbois above as the writer.
gl hf o7
Lets just chalk this one up to a Holiday hangover or perhaps just a hangover..
I don't recall Jon Wood, being or claiming to omnipotent, and anyting other than human..
That said, in the greatest respect, He is an EVE Noob, fresh off the EVE learning cliff, and I beleive you were pushed off by, hopefully, someone in a starter corp... If your in a player corp please let me know whom they are, I would like to war dec, and get few kills under my belt..
I'll join ya.
Yeah..as to on-topic, I second the idea of the article-writer consulting us before posting!
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