Skill Discussions

When damage "penetrates" your shields, does it do armor damage instead of shield damage, or is the damage applied to both layers (doubling that damage)?

If I have the skill trained to 4, does that mean I have a 5% chance of armor damage when my shields are below 25%, or does it mean there is a random chance of armor damage when my shields are below 5%?

I trained the skill to 4 ages ago when I was a young player. Now I am going back and getting a lot of my defensive skills to 5. I am not sure this is worth spending 14 days to get to 5. At level 4 I have never noticed armor damage while my shields are still up. Taking a little armor damage early when your shields are about to fail doesn't sound that bad. What have others done? Is this one worth getting to 5? Keep in mind I am not close to all 5s on any ship, I am still trying to prioritize.

There have been a lot of discussion about this. Some statements are known fact, some are supposition. Some are (what's the term..) situational. For instance, specific passive fits have a HUGE recharge rate.

The general idea is: You have a peak recharge rate for your shields, that is somewhere in that last 20% range. The concept is, that if you let some bleed through occur, you will stay in peak recharge for a longer amount of time. Bleed is random based and is hard to test. If you are at level IV, no bleed occurs until your shields are 95% gone. Level V stops bleed until you're 100% shield-less.
The damage doesn't double or change, as it is determined from the ship that's shooting you, but resists affect how it impacts your ship.


My own personal opinion:
If you are shield tanked, and you have your resists at 80+% (or better), then you want to tank incoming damage with your best resists, for as long as possible. Bleed through will almost certainly hit less resist in armor and do more damage as a consequence.
If you primarily armor tank, you WANT bleed through to hit your best resists, AND still have peak recharge working for you.

I mean, this topic has been done to extreme levels before, and this is only my 'short version' opinion. I trained my characters accordingly.

Short answer: Train the skill to IV and stop there. You probably have 50 skills that would be better to top off.

the real question is when to train it to 5.

I think there's a particular capital mod or something that requires it at 5, is this true? The difference in native shield recharge at 0% and 5% shields is pretty much nonexistent, so training it to 5 is worthless in all situations (except if theres some mod that requires it to 5).

Looking at EvEMON, there are no skills nor items enabled by training it to V.

So don't do it unless you have absolutely nothing else to train anymore.

Edit: sniped by Tau. I am a slow typer.

Only situation where having it higher would be beneficial is where you are repeatedly getting alphad through 95%+ of your shield, and are then having it shield repped to full before the next cycle. In that case, every last scrap of shield that is removed by the alpha is extra EHP not lost to over rep when the reps do land. In all other circumstances, level 4 is better then 5. I've actually been in a fleet where that happened with an armor tank, and the skill didn't apply, but its very rare.

I have to disagree somewhat with this. Or at least provide a real time example.
If your ship is at the point where bleed through is definitely happening, it means incoming DPS is greater than passive recharge already. Peak passive recharge is NOT SAVING you.

So lets say your taking volleys of 1000 DPS. (Explosive damage for talk sake.)
If your shield fitted resist is 90% and your armor resist is 50%, your going to take 5 times the damage if it bleeds into armor.
100 vs 500 damage. 10 more volleys in shield will take down 1000 hit points, but 10 volleys in armor will take down 5000 hp.

Resists ARE EHP.

Yes, but you explode when you lose your hull, not when your armor is scratched.

Let us use your numbers to get the point across.

Two hypothetical ships with 2000 hps on shield, 2000 hps on armor, 2000 hps on hull. They have 90% resist on shields, and 50% resist on armor. They have both been tackled and are dying. They are down to 100 shield HPs left (5%.) Damage is incoming at 1000 hps per volley, once per second.

Ship A does not get bleed-through. The first volley does 100 shield damage, giving it 0 shields, 2000 armor, and 2000 hull. Because it has 0 shields, it has basically 0 passive shield regen. The second volley does 500 armor damage, leaving it with 0 shield, 1500 armor, 2000 hull. The third volley does 500 armor damage leaving it with 0 shield, 1000 armor, 2000 hull.

Ship B does get bleed-through. The first volley does 500 armor damage, giving it 100 shields, 1500 armor, and 2000 hull. Because it has >0 shields left, it gets to passively regenerate shields. Say it regenerates 10 hps. So it has 110 shields, 1500 armor, 2000 hull. The second volley does not bleed-through (because random.) This leaves it with 10 shields, 1500 armor, 2000 hull. It regenerates 1 hp, giving it 11 shields, 1500 armor, 2000 hull. Third volley comes in and wipes out the remaining shields. 11 damage tanked at 90% resists = 110 EHP. 890 EHP tanked at 50% resists -> 445 hps damage. After the third volley the ship is at 0 shields, 1055 armor, 2000 hull.

Thanks to bleed through, ship B has 110 more EHP than ship A.

But as I said previously, it hardly matters. Both ships are going to die in a fire unless they get very, very lucky. Ship B may or may not survive one more volley than ship A.

The only time I can see TSM 5 helping is if:
- Your shields dropped below 5%
- Incoming shield boost (remote or local) is enough to keep you from hitting 0% shields
- Incoming shield boost is not enough to keep you above 5%
- The battle is going to last long enough that your armor and hull run out from bleedthrough.

But for those to be true, shield boosts will have to match incoming DPS pretty closely and they would have had to not start until you were below 5% shields.

I have the utmost respect for Liang--pillar of the forum community for many years. But this is not an argument. It is simple math.

The bleed-through mechanic usually does nothing. But sometimes it randomly gives a very small amount of extra shield regen to ships that are already at very low shields. It does not matter what your resists are. It doesn't matter if you are shield tanking or armor tanking. It does not matter if you are passive tanking or active tanking. More HPs is good.

Tactical Shield Manipulation stops the bleed-through.

So when one says that Tactical Shield Manipulation is good, they are saying that "none" is more than "some". It is a broken skill, and has been for over 10 years now.


I would like to say one more thing about active tanking between 0 and 5% shield. Are you sure that armor scratch came from bleed-through, rather than your shield hitting 0 just before a boost cycle? The bleed-through event is so rare anyway, the latter situation is more likely.

I always had the skill at V, so I don't get bleed. If I get armor damage, I'm absolutely SURE that my shields hit zero.
What I'm saying though is, when damage hits my Tengu armor, it takes a lot more HP away than when it hits my shields. That HP can't be repped and doesn't self regen. That damage is there to stay. So I want to stay in shield as long as possible, at 90% resists.

Now, if I had the skill at IV, I might still be barely tanking the DPS in my last 4% of shields, and then I'd boost a cycle, BUT: bleed would still be chewing up my armor, at 5 times the damage rate.

In both cases I survive, but in the second case, I end up flying around in hostile space with armor damage. That continued armor damage would eventually cause me to warp out and maybe even fly back to Empire or low sec and repair.

If I just sat there until I died, then I get the math. And again I don't think passive regen will make me live one second longer.
But I'm not talking about dying, I'm talking about living.
In that particular ship, I definitely like the skill better at V.


Edit: A couple of points.
1. I'm not theory crafting or making it up as I go. I'm talking about years of null sec plex's and sites. Hundreds of them at the least.
2. I'm not arguing the math part. Not arguing anything really... I'm just saying the skill has a 'tactical' use, and I know it well.
3. Like any skill, you can't un-train it. I did not train it to V on another character that I fly.