Ships & Modules

The reactive hardener resistance bonus doesn't stack with the bonus from EANM or acive hardeners, as far as I know.
But you have to deal with higher incoming damage, but after the reactive hardener is adjusted to the damqge types, its doing well.

I use one for rogue drone missions.

In my experience, even with the cycle time of 10 seconds, the bonuses max out very fast. Two hardeners + reactive is slightly less HP than 4 hardeners, but frees up a low slot. Basically, in a situation where the fight lasts less time than the hardener maxes, you shouldn't have even had to turn your rep on, unless you agro'd an entire room like an idiot

This is incorrect. The reactive hardener is stacking penalized with damage control units only, not active or passive armor hardener modules. It works well for odd-slot tanks, where you don't have the luxury of stacking four specific hardeners. It can also let you avoid swapping hardeners at all, if you stack your omni resists reasonably high and even; the reactive hardener will give you whatever specific types you need on top of your base resists then. The T1 module is a bit weak, but we can expect that the T2 version, when it comes out, will deliver 20% higher resist values, which will make it quite good (you'll need Hull Upgrades V to mount it, based on how the T1 is skilled now). The only downside of it is it can be somewhat cap hungry, and you will probably want to train Armor Resistance Phasing to III or IV to make it adapt quicker.

I have the skill maxed and use it on most of my PVP fits now in place of a resist-hole filling hardener, along with EANM IIs and DCU II. Or on the Proteus in addition to EM+EXP holecovers, faction EANM and DCUII resulting in a proper Boss Tank ready for anything.

Consider a fit with two EANM IIs and a normal hardener. They are all stacked, resulting in only about 57% efficiency from the third mod. The stacked active hardener is still slightly ahead of a 30% adapted RAH (especially if you heat the normal hardener), but the normal hardener is a complete waste of a slot if you are not receiving that damage type at all.

I'm very happy with this trade-off, as like you said- you normally receive at least 2 damage types.

And it's better than third EANM II (base 15% vs triple-stacked 20%)

It seems to handle heating very well (at least @ Thermo V :P) so the adaptation happens surprisingly quickly, and the reduction is easy to notice from the new damage notification stream.

Danger lies in damage types switching in mid-fight, you need to reset it immediately when your opponent switches ammo. This requires extra attention, but again, the new dmg notif stream is very helpful. I have placed it right above target icons so it's very visible all the time.

tl,dr; it's damn nice on ships that have the buffer (or active tank) and suitable low slot layout. There are situations where you would be better off with an active hardener, but I practically never know what I'll meet in space when I warp out of the POS, and very often fight single opponents.

No,

But thats not because it isn't good.. Its because Armor is crap.

The reactive hardener is actually a really good choice as 3rd res mod.

Great for the new proposed prophecy for example.

Abaddon with 25% resists and 25% damage says hi.

Without checking the prices, I'd rather ask whether losing 5-8% is worth 100mil?

huh? Neither explosive hardener nor EANM in T2 variant cost 100 millions

EDIT: My apology I was thinking you are replying to different post. Of coarse that is a valid concern. But the premise of high sec PvE is "never lose a ship".

That is pretty much hat I am hoping for as hard core active armor tanker. I tested it against tengu and drake and this module really shines there. However those are only odd fights where you go against single damage types.

I personally would love to have this module affected by armor compensation skill where each lvl gives 1% to the passive resistance. so when offline it would give 5% resist bonus at lvl 5. When online it will give 5% base resist bonus + 15% shifting bonus (again assuming lvl 5 compensation skills).

T2 variant then can have its shifting bonus upgraded to 20%.

The armor phasing skill is still a weird one. With more skill, the cap per second consumption of the module actually goes up. Which should be obvious because the skill improves cycle time by 10% but cap consumption by 5%.

The base function of the module: 42 cap per cycle, 10 second cycle = 4.2 cap per second
rank 1 skill 42(.95) / 9 second cycle = 4.43 cap per second
rank 5 42(.75) / 5 = 6.3 cap per second

This is cap consumption higher than large pulse turrets. So mission runners, have fun maxing out that cycle time I guess, with the higher cap consumption for the rest of the mission.