Difference between revisions of "Passive shield tanking"

Revision as of 16:37, 22 March 2009

(Please do not edit this page. Please post edits or anything you want changing or adding to [1])

This guide is written and maintained by Pottsey. The contents are copyrighted to Pottsey and taken from the original guide.

After far too many years without updates I found time to update my original guide. The Original passive tank thread from all those years back can be found at [2] The Current thread is in the link at the top of the page.

I have more sections to post after a few rewrites to fit into Wiki formatting.

What is passive Tanking

So what is Passive shield tanking? Well passive tanking is many things but generally speaking it’s using the ships natural shield regeneration without using shield boosters or amour repairers to stay alive.

Now some people say passive tanks shouldn’t use active hardeners. That’s only true if you want your defence to be cap immune. Active hardners have a passive mode to boost resistance and there is no point in wasting cap and making your defence weaker, so you may as well use active hardners in active mode. So what other advantages are there to passive tanking? The other major advantage of passive tanking is your defence is on 23/7 even if you run out of cap, which means your defence is active the second you get hit unlike active tanking which requires you to turn modules on and off. Say you’re caught off guard by an enemy pilot, well your defence is always on to handle the damage giving you time to respond. Or if you’re hit by a lag spike you don’t need to worry as much as an active tank. It’s used to be not to unheard of for active tank pilots to warp into a mission get hit by a lag spike and franticly try and turn the defence modules on. The modules fail to turn on when needed and they die.

Other advantages are passive tanks tend to have a massive hitpoint pool making it much harder for suicide gankers to kill you. An active tank might have say 5k shields and the gankers will try and kill the active tank in one volley. They do this with say 10k damage before the pilot can activate modules or befor the booster can cycle, even if they do activate modules they die straight away due to sheer damage. Passive tanks can have upwards of 30k shields or more without factoring in resistance. So it’s much harder to suicide gank passive tanks. One of the main advantages for a PvP pilot is the cap immunity which is popular for some PvP pilots. Passive tanks tend to use zero or very little cap in running there defence allowing them to divert what power they have to other things. With an acative tank run out of cap and your defence fails often meaning certain death. With a passive tank best case is nothing happens without cap you defence still runs at 100%. Or if you use active hardners they drop down to passive mode but at last you still have a pretty decent defence.

Passive tanking are often recommend few new pilots learning Eve as they don’t need to concentrate on turning active tank modules on and off. This also means if you crash or have to go AFK you have a high chance of survival (depending on the area of space you live in). Passive tanks are often known for being invincible in PvE especially lvl 3 and lower missions and top end pilots can make them self invincible in lvl 4 missions. Even lag which can be deadly for an active tank is no threat to a good passive tank PvE setup.

Lastly the hitpoint pool can be a life saver which is something a lot of people overlook. If your tank is too weak for the mission use the hitpoint pool to kill enough ships so you can tank the mission. Going from 100% down to 30% should take a while. Enough time for you to either warp out or kill enough so you can tank.

There are drawbacks however. Passive tanks only work on some ships and often have low cap regen. This can be sort of be countered. Although you have less cap regen as you don’t have active tank modules draining massive amounts of cap you can still have cap problems. One way to solve this is to use PDS modules for a weaker tank. Personally I find 1 to 3 PDS modules and the rest SPR’s work best. But it depends on your ship. Missile user’s don’t really need PDS, Gallente pilot with railguns will need 1 to 3 PDS or risk cap problems.

The biggest drawback is what I call overtanking. Passive tanking is very modular you can use as many or few slots as you like. This often leads to overtanking which is very common in passive tank setups; it’s when you use up to many, often all your slots on tanking.

I would estimate more then half of all passive tankers full into a habit of overtanking. Some people like to say passive tanking is bad as you cannot use mid slots for EW or low slots for damage mods. This isn’t true, just because you can use up every slot for tanking doesn’t mean you have to or even should.

Definition of Passive Tanking.

To have a defence method that’s on 23/7 without having activated modules to heal. This mean no active hitpoint regen models like amour repairers or shield boosters. If you have a passive tank setup with activated modules for healing it's a hybrid setup.

There are 3 sub methods of passive tanking although the line between the first two has blurred over the years.

1. Focus on a sustainable DPS tank with resistance and hitpoint regeneration either by boosting hitpoints and/or speeding up shield recharge.
2. Focus on maximising the hitpoint pool which normally consists of a mix of boosting hitpoints and boosting resistance to create a large hitpoint pool as a buffer.
3. Cap immune ships. Can be a mix of 1 and 2 but must not use modules that drain cap. Normally they fit passive hardeners and use a weapon system that does not use cap.

Note: hitpoint/resistance based amour tanks are a passive tank. There are no category 1 passive amour tanks.

Formulas Simple

In short the smaller your shields get the faster they regenerate until you hit 30% then the speed drops. X is your hitpoint regeneration at peak regen which is at 30% shield strength, 20 to 50% shield strength are strong areas, 0 to 15% and 90%+ are very slow. To work out peak regenx

• Peak regen (shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.5=x
• Average region medium to long battle (shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.2=x
• Average region short to medium battle(shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.0=x

1. The multiplier is to represent average regen in shorter and longer fights. You don't sit in the whole fight at peak regen so the multiplier is a rough estimate of your average regen over a fight. If your tank holds don't use the lower numbers stick to 2.5. In PvP I find working out regen with a 2.0 multiplier is far more realistic of what you will see in a fight.

1. Some people use 2.4 to be extra safe. The real number is between 2.4 and 2.5 but closer to 2.5. If the enemy cannot break your tank for a long battle use 2.5 instead of 2.0.

Tankable DPS Simple

To work out tankable DPS using two resistance types look at the Italic line and replace A with Hitpoint regen, B with resistance, C with resistance. Copy and paste Italic line part into windows calculator and press equal’s. Alternatively just load up EFT and set it to two resistance types.

'2*A/((1-0.B)+(1-0.C))=xxx dps' To work out DPS tankable with one resistance type, replace B and C with the same number.

To work out tankable DPS using 4 resistance types. Copy and paste Italic line into windows calculator and press equal’s and use B, C, D, E as your resistance. From March 10th 2009 you can use the new fitting screen from Eve. 4*A/((1-0B)+(1-0.C)+(1-0.D)+(1-0.E))=

Formulas Complicated and Tankable DPS Complicated

For reference: skip to the line Random pilot: if this is your first read though the guide

The correct formula for passive tanking is

• Peak regen (shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.5=x
• Average region medium to long battle (shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.2=x
• Average region short to medium battle(shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.0=x

20 to 50% are strong areas, 0 to 15% and 90%+ are very slow.

Some pilots like to use 2.4 to be safe.

Random pilot: Passive tanking sucks I did shield recharge/hitpoints and all I got are 30 HP/s The above pilot is wrong for many reasons and it used to be a common mistake but thankfully most people now realise the truth. Shields are none lieaner and shield recharge/hitpoints do not give you a meaningfully number, it’s not a true average. The best way to think of it is the lower your shields get the faster they charge up until your hit 30% then the shields get slower again. Its takes a bit of getting used to but it really is a case of the lower you shields get the stronger they get.

If you don’t believe me get a friend to shoot you down to 50% shield (make sure it’s a friend in your corp, we don’t want to upset Concord) now watch your shields charge up they will get slower and slower as they reach 100% you will notice 98% to 100% takes longer then 95% to 98%. In fact if I recall right 50 to 80% is faster then 90 to 100%. The same thing happens on the bottom end of the shields. 0 to 5% take ages and the shield get faster and faster as they approach 30%.

So why not use shield recharge/hitpoints=x? Well its misleading first of all that’s now how you work out average for none linear numbers and secondly it makes passive tanks look much weaker then they really are. For example if I have 8000hitpoints and 300second recharge the above average which is wrong, makes it look like I have 26.6 HP regen with 50% resistance so I could tank 39.9DPS and never die until someone did more then 39.9dps. In fact the shields would be (8000/300)*2.5=66.6 now add-on 50% resistance and you can tank 99.9dps before dieing. A lot of people used to look at the 39.9 dps number and go passive tanking sucks it will never work. Now for PvE and to a lesser extent PvP what matters is the peak regen as if its high enough your shields will never drop below 30% and you don’t die. By working out how much damage the enemy deal you can make your self invincible in missions. As a very general rule 650dps tankable will be enough for all lvl 4 missions, 1000 to 1500 dps tankable will do the bonus areas/gate in lvl 4 missions and let you aggro hole rooms at once.

Back to shields the 2.5 modifier is what we call peak regen this is very important it lets you know how much you can tank without dieing. The above numbers let me know my made up ship has a peak of 66.6 HP/s regen so it can tank 99DPS all day long once I factor in resistance. (How to factor in resistance is explained later on). For PvP average regen is more important then peak, so how do you workout average regen fro a none linier number? Well its long and boring for now just use the below modifiers as estimations based on what type of battle your expecting.

• 2.5 for peak when you know your tanks will hold
• 2.4 for peak when you know your tanks will hold but you want to be extra safe.
• 2.2 for medium to long battle where you tank will break over time
• 2.0 for a short battle where the enemy DPS is far higher then your tankable amount
• 1.5 well if your dealing with this or worse chance’s are your already dead. Once you’re in a situation where you expect average regen to use a number less then at recommend to forget about passive regen setups and use passive tank hitpoint setups or active tanking.

As most of you have worked out by now the correct formula for passive tanking is (shield cap / shield recharge rate)*2.5 only you replace 2.5 with one of the above numbers. Now some people by now will be panicky a little at the site of math but it really is easy. Just take it one step at a time or use a tool like EFT

Copy and paste the following Italic text into a program like notepad.

2.5x(A/b)= Now in notepad replace A with your shield hitpoints. Replace B with your shield recharge. Now highlight the formula and press copy. Load up windows Calculator and press past. The answer is your shield regen at peak. For example let’s say my ship has 6000 hitpoints and a shield recharge of 300seconds. The above formula turns into 2.5*(6000/300)= so I highlight the italic bit copy and paste into windows calculator and get my answer.

Alternatively replace 2.5 with 2.2 or which ever is best for your situation.

Now onto resistance. Keep note of your HP regen your going to need it. The forumaul to work out DPS tankable for two resistance types is 2*A/((1-0.B)+(1-0.C))= xxx dps As before copy and paste the Italic bit into notepad. Replace A with Hitpoint regen, B with resistance, C with resistance. Copy and paste Italic line into windows calculator and press equal’s.

For example using my up ship stats from early on. I have 50% Thermal, 55% kintinc reistance and 66.6HP/s regen. This means 2*A/((1-0.B)+(1-0.C))= becomes 2*66.6/((1-0.55)+(1-0.50))=140.2 So you just copy and past 2*66.6/((1-0.55)+(1-0.50))= into windows Calculator.

Please note B and C can be swapped for any resistance and if your resistance is 57.8888767857 do not add an extra point into the formula. For B you would put 578888767857.

Bold is wrong 2*66.6/((1-0.57.8888767857)+(1-0.50))= Italic is correct 2*66.6/((1-0.578888767857)+(1-0.50))=

To work out tankable DPS using 4 resistance types. Copy and paste Italic line into windows calculator and press equal’s. Using the above rules. 4*A/((1-0B)+(1-0.C)+(1-0.D)+(1-0.E))=

So you’re all ready to try passive tanking? Before you do don’t worry if the first 30% or even 50% of your shields go down semi fast it’s from 30 to 50% when your shields are strongest. Many active tank pilots are used to a constant HP regen and worry if they shields get to 50% or lower. For them if there shields hit 50% there tank will not hold so they have to bail out. For passive tankers it’s the other way around you don’t expect your shield to hold until you get below 50%. As a passive tanker you have to remember the lower your shields get the stronger they get until one of two things happen, either you shields stabilise or your shields drop to 20%. Once the shields get lower then 20% ish its time to warp out as you hit the point of no return, many pilots start to warp out once shields drop to 30%. But for me its 15 to 20% that’s the key as this point shields recharge slows down so much its not worth hanging about any longer unless the last enemy is about to die.

Above is why for many years people thought passive tanks where rubbish. First they did shield recharge/hitpoints then they watched as the first 50% of the shields went fast and they warped out. It’s important to remember your shields are more then x5 stronger if not 10X stronger at 30% then at 99%. After a while you get a feel for how it works and you get used to your shields dropping fast from 50 to 100% The idea is the speed at which the shield drop, slows down more and more then somewhere between 30 and 50% the shields stabilise. Stabilise is the point at which HP regen match’s incoming DPS. Some race cases your shields stabilise at 80% or higher. That means your tank is vastly superior to the enemy damage output. If this is a mission chance’s are your overtanking and should fit damage mods or something else

Peak regen is both a curse and a blessing. Active tanks get a constant HP regen there tank is just as strong at either 10%, 30% or 90%. The passive tank on the other hand tend to be very weak at 10%, but very strong 30%, weak 90%. It was a blessing as before passive tanks become populare or well known you could mislead enemy ships. Pirate’s would get you down to 50% ransom you and not expecting you to keep fighting or for your tank to hold. I used to win tournament like this by confusing enemy ships. Now passive tanking is very common and this trick rarely works.

Quick Facts

• Passive tanks can use active modules. There is no point wasting cap, unless you need to be cap drain immune think about active hardeners.
• It’s a myth battleships cannot passive tank well. Not all of them can but many make good passive tanks.
• Do not overtank. Just because you can use up all your slots doesn’t mean you should. Think about fitting a target painter, damage mods or other useful modules. For level 4 missions I like to aim for a 650dps tank sometimes 350dps if I can get my damage output high enough.
• The first HP regen passive tankers where mostly if not all Gallente please don’t act like it belongs to Caldari and have a go at passive tanking Gallente pilots. Caldari didn’t join in the fun until years after Gallente had been passive tanking. Interesting note: Caldari ships tend to have higher resistance and higher hitpoints, while Gallante ships tend to get higher HP regen with lower resistance. [3]
• If PG or cap is a problem don’t forget about replacing 1 or 2 Shield Power Relays with Power Diagnostic Systems.
• Never, ever, not even if your drunk on Jove wine fit shield flux modules for combat. There is no excuse to use these in combat, they are always bad. (Not as true now with T2 Flux modules but still pretty bad as lowering HP regen means you're more likely to go under the 30% peak point in one hit)
• For PvP consider using PDS and Energy Neutralize's over Nos. 1 Neat module drain 2.5 times more 1 Nos module and you can knock the enemy down to 0% cap unlike Nos.
• Don’t overlook the hitpoint pool with resistance over HP regen. 30k Hitpoints with 50% resistance means without factoring in regen you can tank 60,000 hitpoints worth of damage without taking into account regen. I often use the hitpoint pool to kill rats so by the time I hit 30% shields the rats DPS is less then my tankable DPS.
• The Original passive tank thread from all those years back [4]

So what skills do I need for a passive tank?

Must have skills

• Rank 1 Engineering, at least to level 2 (unless you're getting Tactical Shield Manipulation then lvl 4)
• Rank 1 Science, at level 1. Needed before you can train up certain shield skills.
• Rank 1 Shield Operation, take to level 3 gives 5% shield recharge boost per level
• Rank 3 Shield Management, take to Level 4, gives 5% shield cap per level
• Rank 2 Energy Grid, upgrades at level 2 needed for T1 PDS (Power Diagnostic System, sometimes called PDU) and Shield relays T1.
• Rank 2 Shield upgrades, at least level 2, 5% less power needs for shield extender and recharges.
• Rank 4 Tactical Shield Manipulation, Level 1 for T1 Invulnerability Fields
• Rank 2 Jury Rigging, Level 3 needed to fit T1 shield rigs.
• Rank 3 Shield Rigging, Level 1 to fit T1 Shield rigs

Notes: Its recommend to take Shield Operation & Shield Management to level 4 as soon as possible and make level 5 a priority after you get your other must have skills.

Skills for an Elite pilot

• Rank 1 Engineering, at least to level 4 (level 5 can be useful if you need more powergrid)
• Rank 1 Science at level 1. Needed before you can train up certain shield skills.
• Rank 1 Shield Operation, take to level 5, gives 5% shield recharge boost per level
• Rank 3 Shield Management, take to Level 5, gives 5% shield cap per level
• Rank 2 Energy Grid, upgrades at level 4 needed for T2 PDS and T2Shield relays, level 5 if you have CPU problems.
• Rank 2 Shield upgrades, at lest level 4, For T2 extenders level 5 if you need more power grid.
• Rank 4 Tactical Shield Manipulation, Level 4 for T2 Invulnerability Fields
• Rank 2 Jury Rigging, Level 3 needed to fit shield rigs.
• Rank 3 Shield Rigging, Level 4 to fit T2 Shield rigs or higher to reduce rig drawback.

Jargon

• SPR= Shield Power Relay. The life blood of most passive tanks.
• PDS = Power Diagnostic System alterative to SPR less HP regen but no drawbacks and a number of none tanking boosts.
• Flux = Shield Flux boosts hitpoint regen, lowers hitpoints which in turn lowers hitpoint regen. Very bad.
• Covo(s)= Opening up a private conversation chat channel in game.
• Mods= the modules that you fit to your ship slots. Come in various size’s from small to extra large

Any missing?