EVE New Citizens Q&A

It is usually better to use half your slots to apply damage or electronic warfare (jamming, scramming, webbing) and the other half to tanking. In addition, active solutions to tanking burn cap, wasting capacitor on two tanking methods just lowers your DPS and makes you a victim more than a threat.

Firstly, tank modules of a particular tank type synergize with each other. If you add an armor plate and a resist module, the resist module will make the hitpoints added by the plate worth more, for example, in addition to the bonus from your base hitpoints. Likewise, if you have a armor resist mod and an armor repairer, the resists make each point of damage repaired worth more effective hitpoints.

By dual tanking, you're spending the same amount of fitting resources and slots and yet forego that synergy. Shield resist mods aren't going to make your armor plating more effective, and armor resist mods aren't going to make your shield extenders more effective.

Secondly, you're limited as much by powergrid/CPU as by slots when you're tanking.. If you use up your mid slots for shield tanking AND your low slots for armor tanking, you'll have to use weak tank modules or run out of PG and CPU. Instead, you can focus on one type of tank and use more expensive tanking modules, which will give you almost as much tank and free up a ton of slots for other useful things.

Technically, dual tanking can give you the biggest tank. However, you'll eat up so many fitting resources and sacrifice so much else (No ewar, no damage mods...) that the minor benefit you get from it is not worth it. Dual tanking is rarely used for bait ships (where nothing is important beyond your ability to hold a target still and stay alive) but pretty much never elsewhere.

So, to summarize: You can, but you sacrifice a lot for little benefit so a dual-tanked ship is almost never better than a ship with a dedicated tank.

I'd like to add to the previous that if you have a dual active tank you will have exhausted your capacitor trying to keep the shields online and when you go on armour you don't have the cap to run the repairers anyway. In essence you just added an useless mod that could have been used on something that helps you maneuver or damage better and maybe avoid going to armour in the first place.

Do you mind giving an example? Because to my shame I just realized I've been fitting some very light tanks.

OK. Lets build a fail tank.

Go get a Rifter.

Put a shield repper and an Invul in the mids, to go with the MWD.

Then put a Damage control, a EANM and a armour repper in the lows.

Go shoot at something. Oh darn, its shooting back. Turn on the Invul and the Shield Repper.

Oh darn, they are chewing through our shield. Owwww.

OK, shield is gone, now its time for armour. OK, turn on the armour repper.

What do you mean we burned all the cap running the shield repper, and it only failed because we ran out of cap ? What do you mean the armour repper needs cap and we're out of cap ... owww owww owww, we're in structure.

****, Im in a pod.

Dual tanking refers to having modules fitted for both armour and shield tanking. (eg plates, shield extender, EANM and invuln field)

2 armour reps would be called dual reps.

There are a couple issues. First, (in general) Shield Tanking increases your Signature, while Armor Tanking reduces your speed. So now you are giving your opponent's double the fun with your disadvantages.

Secondly, you run into slot problems. On Shield Tank ships (typically Caldari and Mimatar), you tank in Mids and Gank in Lows (Ballistic Control Systems, Gyrostabilizers). On Armor Tanks ships (typically Amarr and Gallente), you tank/utility in lows and gank in Mids (Tracking Computer, Target Painter, Web, SeBo, Promp, Jammer etc.). When you Armor AND Shield Tank, you give up gank.

Without enough gank in PVE, you are dramatically inefficient. Without enough gank in PVP, you will still lose, but will inflict less damage.

The modules that increase damage are lowslot modules (Heat Sinks, Gyrostabilizers, Magnetic Field Stabilizers, ballistic control units ). It's one of the reasons shield ships typically a shield tanked version of a ship will have higher DPS than an armor tanked version of the same ships, because the tank is in the medslots the lows are free to be full of damage mods.

But at the same time because a shield tank uses up medslots shield ships typically lack the ability to fit things like ECCM or Sensor Boosters to counter electronic warfare as well as propulsion jamming systems or tracking computers.

An shield tanked ship is usually fast, with a high damage output but with a large signature radius and few utility slots.

An armor tanked ship is usually slow with a lower damage output but with a small signature radius and many utility slots.

By dual tankiing you combine the disadvantages of both without getting the advantage of the other, the armor modules make your normally fast shield tanked ship slow and take up all the slots you should be putting damage mods in, or your shield modules increase the signature radius of your small signature ship and consume all of its utility slots.

You will get a ton of EHP, but the consequence will be that your ship can't do anything effectively.

Heavy armor (active): repairers, resist modules (low), capacitor booster/battery (mid, PvP) or cap rechargers (mid, PvE)
Heavy shield (passive): resist modules and extenders (mid), shield charge time reducers (low)

would be the go-to examples, probably. I mean, it's possible to build a heavy tank with passive armor (buffer) or active shield (boosters), but not on ships that have the slots to build a dual tank, which is what we're talking about, really.

That said, there's nothing _wrong_ with a lighter tank, just if you're building a lighter tank you should balance it with damage rather than slightly more tank in less effective configurations.

EDIT: As with all advice on these forums, your mileage may vary. Don't let me talk you out of doing something if it's working for you, it's just advice.

That's for the really great responses guys, it definitely helped me. Open up some territory I didn't even know was there.
So out of interest, due to the nature of tanking, would shield tanked ships be better at hitting stationary objects?