Tanking
Original text by Rells, updated by Azual
Contents
Introduction
To "tank" is a general term for surviving an attempt to put damage on your ship. There are many kinds of tanks and techniques for tankign damage in Eve, however, the techniques usually used in mission running, ratting and other player versus environment (PvE) activities work poorly for the purposes of PvP. This is what causes so many people with larger ships in missions to get so badly destroyed by pirates. In order to learn how to overcome these difficulties, we first need to learn the basic principles of tanking.
In general there are three types of tanking in Eve -- specifically active tanking, passive tanking and avoiding damage. Each type of tanking demands different techniques and has different weaknesses. Each type of tanking uses different mixes of repairing damage, resisting damage and avoiding damage. There are also some combinations of repair and resist but they are generally treated independently of each other. Whatever kind of tanking you choose to employ or techniques you prefer to focus on, the Eve fitting tool will be invaluable in testing the setup of your ship.
Tanking Techniques
Active Tanking
When repairing damage, the focus of the ship is on capacitor management and the ability to repair the damage. Typically the pilot will put on one or more shield or armor repairers and load up on capacitor gear such as rechargers, power relays and injectors. The goal of this technique is to maximize the amount of damage that can be repaired over a specified period of time. To accomplish this, EFT can be used to simulate the capacitor usage of a ship over time in a fight. Once the setup of the ship is input into the tool, modules can be turned on and off to simulate the usage of the cap. Since most fights last under 5 minutes, in fact most last under 2 minutes, attempting to attain infinite capacitor simulation for your tank is actually wasteful. Once you have a simulation of 5 minutes, you should experiment with turning off a gun or two (assuming you are not using projectiles or missiles) and see if you can regain capacitor by reducing your damage output. Experimenting with turning off different items to regain capacitor will give you options in the rare situations where the fight goes longer than planned. The actual amount of damage you will be able to repair will be the bottom number in the defense portion of the EFT ship layout. The top number is the the amount of tank you could count on and never run out of capacitor.
When it comes to modules the types of repairers needed depend on the kind of tanking your ship will be doing. The size of the repairers is also a decision that will require some tradeoffs. The larger the repairer, the more capacitor it uses but the more it repairs. When it comes to capacitor, the pilot has many choices. Power diagnostic units will increase the total capacitor potential of the ship as well as shields, shield recharge and power grid. Cap power relays are a great module for increasing the recharge rate of the ship but they will reduce the amount of shield boost, therefore they are only really applicable for armor tanking ships. Capacitor rechargers are an alternative to cap power relays but at the cost of a valuable mid slot. Finally, capacitor injectors are an alternative that allows the user to recharge their capacitor from charges called cap boosters. The larger the booster, the more capacitor is recharged; the downside is that when you run out of cap booster charges, your entire capacitor recharge collapses. In addition to the modules, there are rigs that can be installed in a ship to increase amount of armor, shields and repair rates.
Passive Tanking
Resisting damage is another technique in the arsenal of tanking. This technique focuses on increasing the resistances of the ships to block damage from registering. When resisting damage the damage incoming is attenuated according to the resistance. If the opponent does 100 points of raw damage, to your ship and you have 50% resist to that damage then you will only take 50 points of damage. This kind of tanking is very familiar to most mission runners but there are some distinct differences between PVP and PVE resistance tanking. In PVE, you generally know what kind of damage you will be taking by the kind of opponent you will be fighting. In PVP, you don't know what damage you will be facing because of the diversity of weapons and ammunition types used. For that reason, the PVP pilot tries to lift resistances to all damage types as high as they can. Often there will be a little more focus on thermal damage as that is the most common type of damage of all weapons, but the pilot should be cautious of emphasizing thermal resist too strongly. Instead, the savvy pilot will try to plug the resistance holes of their ship to maximize their survivability.
To raise resistances, the pilot might choose passive modules or active modules. Active modules will provide more resistance but at the cost of capacitor usage and the additional overhead of having to be turned on to be effective. There have been many ships destroyed because their pilots forgot to turn on their active hardeners. In addition, if the ship runs out of capacitor due to usage, nosferatus or neutralizers the entire tank collapses. . Passive hardeners do not have to be turned on and don't require capacitor to run. However, they incur a penalty of reduced resistance boost. One other important aspect of resistance tanking is that resistance modules have stacking penalties. Each additional resistance module only affects the remaining unresisted percentage. For example, if you have 50% resistance to EM damage and add another module that gives a 50% bonus to EM resistance, you will actually only get 25% more resistance for a total of 75% resistance because the additional module allows you to resist 50% of the remaining unresisted amount. This dynamic is important when calculating your resistance amounts. Finally, damage control modules not only affect all types of resistances on both shield and armor but also add a 50% resistance to your structure, which otherwise has no resistance at all.
The EFT tool can also help with resistance tanking. The tool will calculate what your effective hit points (HP) is versus various kinds of damage profiles. The effective HP is the total amount of raw damage that will have to be done to your ship in order to destroy it. Effective HP can be increased by adding more plates or shield extenders, thus increasing the total HP, or by boosting your resistances. Keep in mind that the effective HP of a ship depends on the kind of damage that is being done to the ship. You can change the damage profile by right clicking on the defencevalue and choosing to edit damage profiles. The resulting dialog will allow you to enter percentages or values such as in a particular type of ammo. For example if a particular type of ammo does 5 kinetic and 10 thermal damage you can enter 5 and 10 in the appropriate field, choose the damage profile and get your effective HP versus that kind of damage. However, you should also consider the effective tanked HP. This is exactly like the effective HP of your ship but includes only the effective HP of what you are actually tanking (shield armor or structure). Unfortunately EFT doesn't compute this at this time but its not so hard to compute by hand using the resistance values given.
Avoidance Tanking
The final technique in tanking is avoiding damage. This actually covers a variety of techniques and goes by many names including 'speed tanking', 'sig tanking', 'ewar tanking', 'kiting' or 'getting under their guns'. The key principle they have in common it putting yourself in a situation where it's difficult for your opponent to deal their full damage against you.
On speed tanking, it's important to note that simply going fast doesn't reduce the damage you take - especially if that speed is due to a microwarpdrive which drastically increases your signature radius. What it does do is allow you to get quickly into a position where damage is reduced, either by increasing the range from your target or by quickly closing to a range where (once your mwd is turned off) your target will be unable to track you effectively. True 'speed tanking' in a form that actually reduces damage also requires you to keep a low signature radius, which means using an afterburner.
Shield, Armour or Structure Tanking
Both armour and shield tanks are popular in PVP these days. When passive tanking, armour tanking typically provides greater effective HP (the combination of raw HP and resists) at the expense speed and agility, and limit the low slots you have available to enhance your damage output, speed, or range. Shield tanking on the other hand provides somewhat lower EHP and causes an increase to signature radius and limits the mid slots you have available for tackle and propulsion mods, but leaves your low slots free.
For active tanks, an armour tank typically provides more repair per unit of cap, however each individual repair module is less effective. It is not uncommon for active armour tankers to rely on two or more armour repairers where a shield tanker would only require a single booster. The repair modules themselves don't confer any penalties, however the associated rigs share the penalties of the passive tanking modules.
Most ships can either be used with a shield or armour tank, although many will favour one over the other. The key factors are bonuses (if they exist) and slot layout - since a propulsion module and often at least one tackle or ewar mod are usually necessary, fitting a shield tank on a ship with few mid slots can be especially difficult. This is even more true when it comes to active tanks, since you'll usually be adding a cap booster to the mix!
Structure tanking is rare and generally not effective. Active hull repairers have far too little effect for a reasonable active tank, however passive hull tanking can be both interesting and unexpected.
Passive vs. Active Tanking
Passive tanking emphasizes maximizing effective HP and simply having too much HP to chew through in order to destroy the ship. Although armor and shield tankers can passive tank, passive tanking is most commonly done by shield tankers because the passive regeneration of shield HP will give a recharge to damage shields even if that recharge is slow. In fact some ships such as the drake and broadsword can be set up with enormous recharge rates by using shield power relays and rigs.
Active tanking requires that the ship actively repair the damage and be able to repair the damage faster than it comes in. In active armor tanking, the armor is repaired on the end of the pulse of the repairer while shields repair on the beginning of the reactivation delay of the pulse. In addition, optimal shield tanking requires that the shield tanker pulse his repairer so that the shield stays at the optimal recharge rate of the shields, which is about 45% of shield strength. However, in PvP when there are multiple targets, shield tankers will often repair damage as soon as it comes in because the damage is just too intense to micromanage the tanking. The strategies depend on the damage being taken versus tanking ability.
Whether shield or armor tanking, managing capacitor energy is paramount. The pilot should have already experimented on how they can leave their tank on and lower their capacitor usage to continue to run their tank without capping out, another name for running out of capacitor energy. In a fleet it is often better to reduce damage output to maintain tank if under fire -- leave it to your comrades to kill the targets while you try to soak up damage and prevent the opponents from turning guns on others.
Choosing a Tanking Strategy
Each ship will have different bonuses which will determine the tanking strategy of the ship. Very few ships can effectively armor and shield tank. Caldari ships are usually predisposed to shied tanking while Amarr ships are predisposed to armor tanking. When choosing a tanking strategy make sure that you take advantage of the bonuses of your ship and maximize your skills in the areas important to your tanking as well as your ship skill level. For example, if flying a Moa, the pilot will get a 5% bonus to shield resistances per level. This means that you would do well to have the highest possible cruiser level in order to get the best tanking out of the ship.
