Skill Discussions

Without the skill when your shield is below 25% there is a chance for the damage to bleed through the shield and start affecting your Armour before the shield is depleted. All the skill does is reduce/negate the chance of the bleed through effect occurring.

No Problem.

The description of that skill is one of the worst in the game. It is pretty much completely incorrect in every way possible except for the 0% chance of bleed-through at lvl V, and even then, the description is ridiculously wrong as to why that happens.

In actuality, the mechanic behind the skill is this:
All tiers of hitpoints — shield, armour, and hull — have a hidden stat called “uniformity”. You can see it if you check a good item database (e.g. the full stats for a Thorax) or if you look at the full stat list in EFT and similar programs. For pretty much everything in the game, this stat is 25% for all three HP types. Uniformity determines the threshold below which you risk bleed-through. The actual mechanics behind bleed-through — how it is triggered and how the damage is distributed — are largely unknown.

What Tactical Shield Management does is that is simply reduces the shield uniformity by 5 percentage points per level.

At TSM 0, you have 25% uniformity.
At TSM I, you have 20% unifromity
…
At TSM V, you have 0% uniformity.

So yes, at TSM V, you have 0% chance of bleed-through, not because you have reduced the chance of it happening, but because you've reduced the threshold for when bleed-though can happen to a level where it never will — you simply no longer have any shield left for the bleed-through to skip. As far as anyone has been able to determine, the actual chance that a shot will produce bleed-through never changes at all.


As mentioned, though, this is also not really an entirely desirable effect. If you're a shield tanker, you actually want your shield HP to be as close to 25% as possible, because that maximises the passive regen you get, and that increases the total amount of HP the enemy has to chew through. It is fairly easy to show (and has been shown if you ever want to search for and dig through the threads on the topic) that TSM V reduces your survivability by a fair margin unless your shield HP is immensely higher than your armour HP. The only reason to even train it to IV is that you get T2 active hardeners, and those are nice to have — without them, there's a distinct chance that you wouldn't want to train the skill at all.

TSM reduces the bleed threshold by 5% per level.

i.e. at level 4 the bleed threshold is between 0% and 5%.

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

Mine? No. Other people's? yes

I'm not sure on the mechanics of it. Is the bleed through a fraction of the damage going past Shield into Armor, or Shield damage and then more into Armor?

Armor Damage = Full Damage - Shield Damage ?

or

Total Damage = (Full Damage - Shield Damage) + Shield Damage ?


So say for simplicity the attack does 500dps and 100dps Bleeds through to Armor

Would the Total Damage be 400 Shield and 100 Armor?

or

Would the Total Damage be 500 Shield and 100 Armor?

For example purposes only, it would be 400+100. The damage that bleeds through to armour does not affect your shield — it wouldn't be bleed-through otherwise, now would it?

Of course, in the real world, it will not look like that because, as a shield tanker, you will most likely have higher shield resists on your shield than your armour, so while those might be the raw numbers, what you'll actually see is something like 50 shield + 50 armour damage even though your shields bore the brunt of it.

Thanks everyone for your replies and explanations.

Source?

I'm not sure how you could derive "we want to change TSM" from that post.

Granted they changed the afterburner skill. But that doesn't indicate an impending change to TSM.