Skill Discussions

Rigs do not equal Active or Passive hardeners for either shields or armor.

They are Rigs. Not hardeners. There's a difference.

What Pyro was saying was that the skills say in their description that they affect passive and active hardeners. There is no reason for them to affect rigs.

Edit: and by your logic, the +armor% skills would affect plates, energized regenerative membranes, and trimarks, and if you can't figure out how that would be bad, well that would explain a lot actually.

Sure; that's easy. Neither rigs nor modules are stacked, but it's a common misconception. What is actually stacked is the effect on the ship. Let's take a, I don't know, Rifter. Said Rifter has a rack of guns up top, a gyro II, and a Burst Aerator II. They gyro has two effects: increased damage mod (+10%) and decreased fire duration (-10.5%). The Burst Aerator has one effect: -15% fire duration. When they're both on the ship, the damage mod increase from the gyro is in a stack of its own and gets full effect. the RoF modifiers are in the same stack, and the lower effect (the -10.5% from the gyro) is stacking penalized.

So it's a misnomer to say that rigs and modules are stacked against one another. Their effects enter into the same stack (providing they have the same effect). Note that this comes up in other unexpected ways -- like sig bloom. Anything that increases the signature of your ship (shield extenders, shield rigs) enters into the same stack. Sig bloom is unusual though in that there are two factors you normally wouldn't consider: enemy target painters -- yes, they're stacked against your equipment -- and MWDs.

And that's how the fundamental stacking system works.

Now, the rig resist system is different. Resist rigs add a fixed amount of resistance (subject to stacking penalties). This is in contrast to the five (six if you count Damage Controls) kinds of resist mods, all of which get slightly different treatment with respect to compensation skills. This is by design, and is part of what keeps shield tanking and armor tanking so different while still allowing flexibility to come up with some unusually effective fits that no one saw coming now and then.

And so no, compensation skills don't do anything for resist rigs. It really does come down to the fact that they aren't modules and aren't balanced using the same factors that modules are (slots, grid, and CPU).

A Tempest and Machariel are different in name only, except for all their other differences... which are just names? So maybe they should have the same properties. Silly names.

You're pretty good at filtering information while reading, aren't you? Because I actually explicitly stated why rigs are different than modules and didn't leave it at the "different in name" thing.

Look, certain skills are designed to work with certain modules for balance reasons. Why doesn't GMP affect torpedoes? Balance. Why doesn't Minmatar Cruiser help you fly a Diemos? Because that's not what Minmatar Cruiser does. Why doesn't Cloaking help you hide your ship no matter what modules you fit? Because that's how it works. Skills have purposes.

The purpose of compensation skills is primarily to support the use of passive armor and shield resistance modules and secondarily to support active resistance modules when they aren't turned on. You want them to serve a tertiary purpose of supporting resistance rigs. There is no reason for this that I can see, and there is most certainly no reason related to the stacking penalty -- which is an entirely different mechanic.

I'm gonna save this so when everyone proves me wrong this can be my comeback....