Ships & Modules

It does more raw damage than any of the other close range ammo.

It does not.



Phased Plasma has the same base damage as EMP. That later decreases with Titanium Sabot, which is mainly kinetic & Depleted Uranium.

EMP, phased plasma and fusion do the exact same damage so it's purely a damage type choice. Also do NOT take the "base shield/armour" stats into account because they're not stats, they're simply assumptions based on generic shield/armour resists.

"Most people" will not plug their resists hole, the majority will Omni tank and add extenders/trimarks and leave it at that so as choices go it makes the most sense to go for the type that makes the most sense for that type of ship & general fitting. Good players, well known fits or specific fleet doctrines might be different.

Also there is a more basic and logical reason which might sound silly but you'd be surprised how often it will be the case: if you load a fit in EFT or similar it'll start off with EMP, so that's what people will use... Yes, it's that silly.

because autocannons have a nice tracking, many minmatar ships have tracking bonuses - that gives you a good weapon against small targets...
many small targets like frigs dont have em resists (best example - bombers)

Blasters still have better tracking (specially since more gallente ships have trackign bonuses than minmatar ones).


AC have ZERO value since the blasters buff. AC only outdamage blasters in very very narrow situations that are effectively impossible to sustain in combat, specially since minmatar have been losing the speedy trend ( gallente ships are so much more agile and lighter that due to superior acceleration they can outmaneuver minmatar ships.

Killmails/lossmails will tell a different story.

On the contrary, it is extraordinarily rare for shield tanked ships to actually fit EM Ward Fields. Single resist shield hardeners are stupidly rare in general, because they're usually not worth it. Most shield tanked ships that even bother to "plug" the EM resist hole do so with a shield rig, which still leaves EM as the lowest resist.

In the current metagame, EM is the lowest resist on basically everything. Unlike shield tankers, Gallente and Amarr T2 armor tankers WILL plug their exp/therm resist holes with a hardener. T2 Minmatar ships with full T2 resists and the 75% base EM resist (as opposed to say Sabres which have partial T2 resists) also basically don't exist in the current metagame. Even armor tanked battleships usually opt for a plate/plate/exp/kin/therm/DCU/damagemod low slot setup, which leaves EM as the lowest resist on these as well.

The only ships that don't have EM as the lowest resist right now are armor tanked T1 frigates and cruisers. Considering that brawling is basically dead as a strategy in Eve, how many of those do you think there still are? The only people that fly them are newbies without enough SP to fly anything else, and worrying about these people isn't exactly your first priority when designing fittings.

Finally, there's the Tengu and the Ishtar. These two ships are so absurdly overpowered that literally every other subcap in Eve not specialized for tackling, logistics, or ewar is complete and utter **** in comparison. The one weakness they have in common is 0 base EM resist.

If you take any t1 ship and put an EM shield rig on it, the lowest resist is thermal. Full stop. That's not a debatable point, that's a fact. The vast majority of shield ships will use an EM rig. Why wouldn't you? And you would use EM wards for T2 caldari ships because your natural resists are 0 and only using a rig gets you to 30 or so percent + DCU II resists. An EM ward can get your resists to 55+. Especially when it comes to reps, you need resists. Buffer is only there to give the first cycle a chance to land. After that the effectiveness of reps depends on our resists.

I can't confirm 100 percent but i'm almost completely sure that even armor battleships or armor t2 ships, even with therm/kinetic/explosive active hardeners, that doesn't leave EM as the lowest...but still explosive...not by much but still.

Tengu and shield isthars yes, you'll want to hit with EM...but I'd also like to say that if you do the resists profile on a Tengu, if you're using an EM ward as you should if tanking in a Tengu, your lowest resist is still explosive by a very small margin.

You don't use single-resist hardeners on shield tanked ships because they take 44 CPU, use cap, and the faction variants that use less CPU are extremely expensive. Also, using a single resist hardener only provides 55% resist and takes the slot of an invulnerability field, which provides 30% resist all.

On an armor tank, that 55% single-resist hardener isn't taking the place of a 30% resist all mod, but it instead takes the slot of an EANM, which only provides 25% resist all IF you have your four compensation skills to V, and less if you don't. First, the loss to your overall tank by fitting hardeners over EANMs is much lower than doing the equivalent on a shield tank. Second, unlike shield tanking, it's replacing a mod you can't overload with one that you can. Finally, faction armor hardeners take only 16 CPU and are quite cheap, unlike faction shield hardeners.

Apoc with exp/kin/therm hardeners and an IFFA has resists of 57.5/75.1/71.3/69.4. EM is very much the lowest. It's even worse for the Megathron, with 53.8/72.9/72.9/62.5. Now consider that they can overload their hardeners against 3 out of the 4 resists, but not EM.

T2 armor tanked ships clearly have EM as the lowest resist if they fit an explosive (Gallente) or thermal (Amarr) hardener. Base EM armor resist is 50%, hardeners give 55%, and Tech 2 resists give 75% to one resist and 50% to another. Having 50/55/75% resist on top of the base resists to the three non-EM resists clearly must beat out a flat 50% base EM resist.

But you aren't picking 1 hardener vs omni hardener because very likely you're going to be using both. You can't just take one module vs the other, you have to look at the picture as a whole. And yeah of course you're going to fit an invuln over an EM ward on a T1 ship...especially since you'll have a EM rig anyway. But on a T2 caldari ship for example when all your other resists are huge big already, you'll want an EM ward to get your resists up as high as the others. Getting your thermal resists from their high 70s to your mid 80s isn't nearly as valuable to get your EM resists from zero to 55.

As for the armor ships, you'll be having ENAMs anyway, not just the hardeners.