EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello to all,
I try to find out if I can target paint someone who uses heavy ECM. I mean : is target painting affected by the ECM of the "oponent" ship ?

Not directly, there is no change in how much your paint alters their radius or your chance to hit (100%). As the guy above points out, though, if an ECM roll succeeds all your target locks break and you have to re-target once the cycle is up, so indirectly yes, the performance of all targeted modules is altered.

To be more explicit: target painters and ECM use completely unrelated mechanics.

Target painters alter the target ship's signature radius. ECM is chance-based depending on the target ship's sensor strength (and the jamming module's strength, which we'll ignore). Signature radius and sensor strength are two completely different ship stats.


However, they can be sort of indirectly related, in a very roundabout way.

Consider four ships: Ship A, Ship E, Ship T, and Ship P.

T and P are both targeting A.
P is continually using a Target Painter on A.
Ship E comes along, targets T and uses ECM on T. T's lock on A breaks.
P's lock is unaffected, he's still target painting A.
After T becomes un-jammed, he re-locks A. Because P is target-painting A, A's signature radius is inflated, and T targets A faster than he otherwise would.

(in this scenario, E and A could be the same ship)

I suppose you could use this mechanic, and a 2nd friendly ship, to slightly boost your lock uptime IF you weren't being permajammed and IF you had a non-trivial lock time. e.g. BS targeting some unbonused ECM frig.