EVE New Citizens Q&A

I've quickly learned that the first answer to nearly every EVE question is: "It depends."

I understand the difference between shields and armor (and structure). I understand how each of them is regained/repaired. I know that it's better to go "all in" on one rather than to try and do both.

What I'm not getting is how to determine which one I should be pumping up and why.

1) Is one preferred over the other for PvP? PvE? Why?

2) Do the different races get different bonuses for one or the other?

3) Do different factions lean toward one or the other for mission rewards?

4) What are the exceptions to the rules?

Hi,

mkint already gave you some quite useful information. The basic choice is usually made by counting the number of midslots and lowslots available on the ship, along with any hull bonuses related to tank.


No. It depends on the ship itself for PvE, and the fleet's doctrine for PvP and incursions.


Amarr and Gallente favor armor, Caldari favor shield, Minmatar favor shield a bit but allows both depending on the ship.


No. Mission reward is strictly based on the success of the mission. Some people favor shield for missions because the ship is faster to align and the low slots are used to increase damage and damage projection. Even so, armor mission ships are not rare.


I've noted two exceptions only :

1- Ships that have more slots of one kind but want to use it for something other than tank. For example, the caldari scorpion is an ECM ship with a lot of midslots, but it's often seen armor tanked to use those many midslots for ECM. Oppositely, the machariel is an ship that is stronger with armor (because of many low slots), but it is often seen fitted for shield to go with shield incursions, because the low slots are used to increase damage and damage projection.

2- The other types of tank : signature/speed ('ceptors in particular), range tanking (e-war ships and snipers), hull tanking (orca, freighters). But even signature tanking and range tanking goes hand in hand with a more conventionnal tank.

For missions, you mostly use racial tank = shield for caldari and minmatar, armor for amarr and gallente.
Different npcs deal different damage, which can influence tank selection. If you fight sanshas (= anti-amarr npcs), they deal EM/therm and armor tank works better because you have good base EM resists. While angels (= anti-minmatar npcs) mostly deal exp/kin and here shield tank works better. This fits racial tanks nicely.

For solo PVP, I believe most fits use armor tank, because midslots are more valuable, though shield tank on kiters is viable.
For fleet PVP it depends on the fleet, both are used.
For PVP you need to omni-tank, generally. Kin and therm resists are usually more important than EM and explosive.

Amarr favor buffer , gallente active armor.
Nothing strict about this it's just how some of the bonuses are handed out.
I have perfectly serviceable active armor Amarr boats and brick tanked Gallente so there's plenty you can do.

I'm going to add some more details, starting with "signature radius".

Every ship (and other shootable objects in the game) has an invisible bubble surrounding it. This is the ship's "signature". Any shot which hits the signature, hits the ship (or other object), causing it to take damage. The bigger the ship's signature, the easier it is to hit. You can see a ship's signature radius in it's "show info" stats.

Now let's look at "buffer tanks". This involves stacking as many hp's onto the ship's tank as possible For a shield tanked ship, this means fitting shield extenders which increase the number of hp's the ship's shield has. For armour tanked ships, fit armour plates.

Shield tanks don't add any weight/mass to the ship, which means there is no reduction to the ship's maneuverability/agility. Armour plates do add weight/mass to a ship, which does reduce the ship's maneuverability/agility. So far, it sounds like shields are better than armour, but adding more buffer to a shield tank does have a disadvantage, it increases the ship's signature, making the ship a bigger target that's easier to shoot at. Armour buffer has minimal effect on the ship's signature.

There are more ways to tank than just stacking hp's to increase the tank's buffer. You can fit resistance modules which reduce how much damage you take every time you are shot at. There are separate modules for shield and armour resistance, and also shield and armour "rigs" which increase your damage resistance. Very few ships have equal resistance to all types of damage (the Gnosis does and there might be a couple of others). The vast majority of ships will be more resistant to one or two types of damage, and have lower resistance to the other types of damage. it is not possible to get your damage resistance to 100% for any type of damage, the game is programmed to not allow that to happen. Your ship will always take damage, but with high damage resistance, for every 100 points of damage fired at you, that damage will be significantly reduced when it hits you. Increasing your damage resistance has minimal effect on your signature radius.

With a buffer tank, you rely on your tank having a lot of hp's for NPC rats or other players to have to chew through before they make your ship explode. With a resistance tank, it's the same general idea, whoever is shooting at you has to throw a lot of damage at you to grind down your tank. Both options give you more time to either blow them up, run away, or call for help, before your ship dies. Some people could argue that fitting for damage resistance IS a type of buffer tank, but I wanted to draw a distinction between adding raw hp's to a tank and fitting for damage resistance. It is possible to do both at the same time, you could fit a shield extender module and a couple of shield resistance modules at the same time, and the equivalent is also possible with armour plate and armour resistance modules.

While I'm on the topic of damage resistance, we can divide resistance modules into two main groups. Active modules which need to be turned on and use power from your capacitor, and passive modules which are running all the time and do not need power from the capacitor. The active modules will give you more damage resistance than the passive modules, at the cost of draining your capacitor, and the need to remember to turn them on when you are being shot at. The passive modules, you fit them and they are always running, there is no extra drain on your capacitor, but they give you less damage resistance than the active modules. There are separate active and passive damage resistance modules for shields and armour.

Another point to consider. Shields will regenerate over time. You don't have to fit any special modules for this, it's programmed into the game. If your shield takes damage and you win the fight or escape from it, you can just sit in space and your shield will slowly repair itself. Armour never repairs itself. you must fit and use an armour repair module, have another player use a remote armour repair module on you, dock in an NPC station and pay for repairs, or tether to a player owned citadel (most player owned citadels will automatically start repairing your ship for free a little while after you tether to them, no docking needed. This is something the citadel owner needs to turn on or off). There are modules that you can fit to your ship that increase your shield's passive regeneration, meaning your shield will repair itself faster. One disadvantage of using modules that increase your shield's passive regen is that those same modules also reduce your capacitor's rate of regeneration.

Here is a link to some fits for a Gallente Myrmidon battlecruiser. it has several fits that use passive shield regen modules in the low slots. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Myrmidon/Fittings

Note that the passive shield fittings shown there use Minmatar artillery weapons instead of hybrid weapons more normally used on Gallente ships. Minmatar projectile turrets (autocannon and artillery) do not need any power from the capacitor to work, hybrid turrets do. When you reduce your capacitor's ability to recharge itself, paying attention to how many modules you have which need power from the capacitor is important. Also note that while Gallente ships are normally armour tanked, it is possible to fit a viable shield tank onto many of them. the same is true for every other race, Just because Caldari ships are normally shield tanked, doesn't mean you can't armour tank them.

1) Is one preferred over the other for PvP? PvE? Why?
If you're solo, whatever you want. If you're in a fleet, the fleet composition (what ships to bring) is at the discretion of the FC (fleet commander), and he/she typically has to arrange for repairs for the fleet, in the form of a logistics wing, so he'll likely decide shield logistics or armor logistics, and then the entire fleet has to match that decision.

2) Do the different races get different bonuses for one or the other?
Races have trends, but sometimes individual ships in a race's lineup are exceptions. The shields vs. armor decision depends on the slots on the ship: many mid slots = shields, many low slots = armor. Equal numbers, or lack of either = your choice. To fit a shield tank into mid slots, you may have to take out important modules like warp scrambler, afterburner/mwd, jammers / electronic warfare, etc. To fit an armor tank into low slots you may have to take out important modules like damage enhancers (gyrostabilizers, for example), cargo expanders, or various powergrid, cpu, or capacitor enhancers.

3) Do different factions lean toward one or the other for mission rewards?
Missions are given out randomly from a pool of available missions. A faction may have a slight preference for missions that send you against their local enemies (Caldari vs. Guristas pirates, for example), but you'll still see plenty of missions against (neutral) mercenaries, rogue drones, the other pirate cartels, and sometimes even against "spies", "slavers", or "terrorists" from the other empires.

4) What are the exceptions to the rules?[/quote]
Minmatar have more ships than the other races that offer equal numbers of low and med slots. Rather than "versatility" or "options", though, this typically results in Minmatar pilots being forced to train both shields and armor, and both missiles and drones, to take full advantage of their ship lineup. So, because the armor and shield skills also give you raw hitpoints and a little bit of resilience, it may be worth training both, even if only one of them is your preferred defense.

Maxim 68: Negotiating from a position of strength does not mean you shouldn’t also negotiate from a position near the exits.

Let it be simple for now. A frigate can be a really complicated tank (relying on speed, range, sig, maneuvering, target selection) or it can be really simple (a shield booster.) For now fit your shield booster or armor repair to your frigate, then learn how to fly it so well that it can survive pretty much anything. Then step it up to a destroyer where the same fittings work but you have to be better at the tactics, and some new tactics become available (a la Maxim 34: If you’re leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun.) A cruiser needs a stronger tank to begin with because of the inherent drawbacks of being big and slow, so people learning often try to rely on the fitting more than the flying, which I think is a mistake. Even the same tactics used in a frigate can benefit a battleship, if you do it right.

And remember maxim 54: The best way to win a one-on-one fight is to be the third to arrive.

I can't speak for Hakawai on this but I will tell you how I read this and why I agree with him on it:

To me it was more of a qualifier just letting you know that some of the answers are going to be a bit simplistic and that while most of the advice given is true most of the time, if you follow any of it like gospel truth there are times where it will be poor advice. I would not so much focus on what the "right" questions are as I would just play around with it and get a feel for how it works.

In other words you need experience and focus more on gaining the experience than expecting to get answers that are always true because in Eve everything is situational. There really are very few things in Eve that are true all of the time. So it's not so much knowing the right questions as it is knowing the context and when to apply which answers.

We all started off where you are now. So don't feel like it's just you.

There are no simple answers in Eve but don't feel bad because most other games have some type of ideal method of doing everything, like best in slot gear and best spell rotation, or theoretical maximum DPS numbers etc... None of that exists here. But you should not feel bad about thinking the other way on this at first because that is more typical.

As far as feeling like a burden there is no limited or structured anything in this game. No queable PvP of fixed numbers of characters of the same level with similar gear score or arena ratings or whatever. You and a buddy could get into a fight with another pilot thinking that you have him out numbered only to have 5 of his friends jump into the fight and then you call in 10 corp mates from 3 systems over etc... The way that this works out is that Eve is typically a "the more the merrier" situation.

Also the learning curve on this game is steep and all of us have older players than us to thank for helping us out when we were new and are eager to pay it forward. In Eve all anyone really cares about is if you are fun to play with or not. It is really that simple.

Couple things here:
You need experience the only way that you are going to get it is through trying different stuff out. So go ahead and blindly copy the fits. Try it out and then dock and change something. Then try the adapted fit out and then dock again and try something else out. This is the only way that I can think of to actually learn it. So don't think that you need to know before you can try. Just try and eventually you will know.

Range tanking is something that can be combined with other types of tanking. It's not an all or nothing situation and as a newbie it's probably your best bet until you learn a bit more. You will need to fit a prop mod to control range and then maybe some mods to extend the range of your weapons and / or targeting system. You will definitely want to play around with range very early on.

I did not read it that way. I think most of us get that you are just trying to learn.

And again mistakes a.k.a. trial and error are the only way that you are going to learn. Don't try to avoid the mistakes just learn from them.

Cant remember which way round it is but

one gives more hp per cap point than the other but cycles slower
active tank:
- one reps at the end of the cycle
- one reps at the start of the cycle

the only other difference is base resistances
both can be setup to permatank most pve content


edit
basic guidelines

if a ship has more midslots than lowslots - shield tank it
if a ship has more base shield hp than armour hp - shield tank it

other general generalisations
Caldari use shield tanks
Amarr & Gallente use armour tanks
Minmattar use duct tape

the above is not set in stone .. you can do what the hell u like with a ship
eg .. a shield tanked Dominix is a thing (and it does quite well)

for pvp
resistances are better than regen
max hp is better than regen

in pvp you can be the recipient of large amounts of damage over a very short timeframe (aka primary)
high resistances mitigate much of that damage
high hp gives a chance to survive it
reps are typically done remotely

Real men hull tank