EVE New Citizens Q&A

No existing way.

If you want to make a suggestion, post in the Features and Ideas forum.



Since this is the new players forum, a friendly advice: you generally don't want your booster to run until your shields are full. Your shield recharge rate is not linear, it is fastest at around 33% shields. Therefore you want to keep your shield around that number to benefit from the natural recharge most.

(Except for situations when you expect to get attacked and need all the shield buffer you can get.)

Keep in mind that your capacitor has the same non-linear recharge as your shields.

If your capacitor is really high, then you may want to cycle your shield booster more often to use the "extra" energy.

The actual peak is between 25% and 33%, but it is safe to say that if your shield drops to 25% you should warp out, if you can, so don't let it get that low.

On small ships, like a frigate, I tend to burn nearly all the capacitor, as it usually recharges so fast on these hulls. Well, at least with decent skills it does.

This.

In PvE hovering around the maximum recharge rate is a valid tactic.

In PvP however you need all the shields you can get...depending on that last 33% usually end up with a loss.

Nooooooooooo!

Cap stability is so overrated. The ONLY time it is acceptable, is when it doesn't come at the cost of tank or DPS. To achieve this, it typically requires using faction / deadspace modules.

Also, there are few things more wasteful than dedicating multiple slots and rigs for cap stability, when a single cap booster module will replace them all. Buy a bpo and build your own cap charges from reprocessed mission junk; it only requires Industry 1. [In Amarr space, cap charges drop like raindrops, so often you don't have to build your own when missioning in those regions.] Never haul cap charges; build them instead.

this, a thousand times this

Cap stability is a wonderful fallback if you're missioning while drinking, because it's one less thing to pay attention to.
And if you're grinding PVE missions, you're probably drinking. Or just really bored.

And then you get into the difference between sustained tank for "solo PvP" versus buffer tank for "surprise PvP" versus pulse tank for (hi sec) PvE. It's a big, bad complicated world out there :)

For the newbies: there are ever so many "rules of thumb" in the game to help new players learn their way, and all of them get broken when you know what you're doing.

So "never mix tanks" is advice given to newbies which is essentially correct: don't mix shield and armour tank. Don't mix armour and structure tank. Don't do this. Don't do that.

Then someone sets up a bait ship which has mids dedicated to shield buffer, lows dedicated to structure buffer, and rigs dedicated to armour buffer (or some similarly bizarre setup), the idea being that the bait ship is supposed to hold the enemy's interest long enough for the tackle, heavy tackle and DPS to arrive (and, of course, the reps to keep the bait ship alive).

And then you get high-value low-EHP mission boats (Tengu, I'm looking at you) where you mix active shield tank with shield buffer tank: not because the buffer is needed for PvE, but because the buffer is needed to dissuade suicide gankers.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to say: one option if you forget to turn your shield booster off, is to switch to a passive shield tank. This works best on ships that have a shield resistance bonus, slightly less spectacular on ships which have shield HP bonus, and relies on that ship having lots of mid slots.

There's an article about tanking in the Evelopedia which may be of some use: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Tanking