EVE General Discussion

The basic answer is it prevents damage from bypassing the shields and hitting armor. It is sometimes hard to tell and I am not 100% sure the numbers behind it, but it goes something like this:

When you are low on shield, some shots will "bleed" through and impact the armor. Now I am not sure what the % is for this to occur, but the skill lowers the chances of this happening. I think tac shield manip 5 prevents it all together.

This is not something that you would see unless you are in a large fleet fight with logi. You would see overtime that as your shields got lower from damage, before the logi repped you up, some of your armor would be hit. In theory, overtime, even if logi were the be able to rep you, your ship could eventually be lost due to the bleeding affect (unless you had armor reps/bots obviously).

There use to be a thread that I can't find right now that discussed this issue. To some, taking it to 4 was all that was needed because the "bleed" affect actually can be a positive thing because it lets a little bit of shielding survive. Given you are probably shield tanked, this means you have a higher resistance layer of shield left giving logi more time. Others use the example I gave above to say that overtime, you would die, so you should train it to 5.

My advise is that it is one of those skills that you only train to 5 when you have nothing more important left. If you have it at five, I would leave it. As fro remote Armor Repair, leave it at 5 as well.

Tactical Shield Manipulation (TSM) skill affects a ship stat called Shield Uniformity.

TSM skill reduces the threshold at which point damage can randomly bypass the shield, or "bleed-through", by 5% per level, i.e. at level 4 the threshold is between 0% and 5% shield.

Since you only need TSM level 4 for T2 shield hardener modules, there is little reason to train it to level 5, as it is uncommon to maintain a tank with under 5% shield.

However, capitals have enough shield that 5% shield can be significant, and once upon a time TSM 5 was a prerequisite for Capital Shield Booster.

If you find your ship exploding because of a loss a of hull integrity with shield between 0% to 5%, then by all means train TSM 5.

Trivia: There is also Armor Uniformity, but no skill that affects it.

Some people swear by it ("saved my butt"), others swear by the math that shows it's not that big of a difference between IV and V.

You will have to figure out how often you're in the situation where the skill applies:

- you're flying a shield-tanked ship
- typically with lots of shield and/or very little armor / hull (if shots get through you can explode)
- and you have friends that can rem-boost your shields in combat from 5% back to 50+% (otherwise you're dead anyway)

Great music in this excellent example one of the rare situations where having TSM V helps:

http://youtu.be/eNPxFbqOdiw

bleed thru is additional damage , not deflected damage . your shield takes the full damage , some of the damage that has been applied to your shields , bleeds thru , and is also applied to your armor .

Unless I'm wrong one bonus with not having TSM L 5 is that the shield regenerates slower when at very low levels. If this is correct it means that TSM 5 could actually make the shields regeneration worse then if the skill was left at a lower level.

I will only train it if it's a prerequistie for some module I want to use.