EVE New Citizens Q&A

To active armor hardeners:
3% bonus per skill level to Armor xxxxx resistance when the modules are not active
To passive armor hardeners:
5% bonus per skill level to Armor xxxxxxx resistance



As the title says - I'm sure most people just train it to 4 but does V bring anything extra to the table
for the month of training required for all 4??

Hold off getting them to 5 until you want to fly a capital ship, or until you've basically trained everything you need, and are now just filling in the 'gaps' in your "All Level 5" character sheet.

Hello Amber Green Thorn,

I found it pretty useful to have those skills at level V. That said I would recommend training them to that level only if you have completed training the more urgent skills. As new or beginning character some other skills might be much more important, so you might want to postpone training up the armor compensation skills to level V a little bit.

Point is that only capital class ships have enough armour HP to have a significant EHP boost from ***** armour compensation V, I did with compensation III for years until I finally trained for capital ships.

Here is some additional information for people following this thread.

There are 4 Armor Compensation skills and 4 Shield Compensation skills, one of each for each resistance type. However, the 4 Armor Compensation skills are generally a lot more useful than the shield ones. Due to the following:

1. In PvE it is more common to Active Tank your ship, thus these skills will not be utilised.
2. In PvP it is more common to Passive and/or Buffer tank your ship, this means passive resistance mods (exactly what these skills effect) and/or increased Shield/Armor HP. The exception is that Active hardeners are often used too, but rarely Cap intensive active modules such as Shield Boosters or Armor Repairers (due to the likely use of Energy Neutralizers against you).

Now in PvP you can't predict what the incoming damage is going to be, thus most people go for multi-resistance mods. For Shield Tanking this means an Invulnerability field. This is a low cap active mod and it gains no benefit from the Shield Compensation skills (forget the useless offline benefit). For Armor tanking this means an EANM (Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane), this is a passive mod and gains from the Armor Compensation skills.

It is the widespread use of this one mod (the EANM) which makes the Armor Compensation skills important. It is one of the trade off's between Armor and Shield tanking. There is no 'Passive' multi-resistance shield mod and there is no 'Active' multi-resistance armor mod. The Invulnerability field does have higher base resistance values, but it has to be re-activated every jump and can be neuted out. The EANM has lower base resistances but you never have to worry about it being offline or running out of cap and with the training of the Armor compensation skills you can bring it's resistance levels up higher, not quite as high as an Invulnerability shield, but a lot closer.

All ships have built in resistances but on the shield side the EM resistance is usually poor, while on the armor side the Explosive resistance is usually poor. Players will often seek to fill those holes for their particular tank. These are usually filled with a rig or an active hardener. Neither active hardeners (effectively) or rigs are affected by the compensation skills. However, it is almost feasible to choose a passive single resistance mod in either case, thus there 'may' be some milage in raising the EM Shield Compensation or Explosive Armor Compensation skills as a priority over the others and of course in the Armor case raising the Explosive resistance of the EANM is a good benefit.

Personnally, I have raised my Shield Compensation skills to 3 and my Armor Compensation skills to 4. For the Shield ones it was a complete waste of time for the type of PvP I generally engage in - which is small gang, BC and below warfare (usually shield buffer tanked with an Invulnerability Field and Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer rig). For the Armor Compensation skills, occassionally we get into Armor tanked Battleships, particularly for POS bashes/defences and those skills are utilised there via the ever faithful EANM.

Again thank you all very much for your posts. IV it is then till cap ships.