Intermediate Guide to Tanking by Friedrick Psitalon
So which ones do I use?
The first decision to be made is the one between active and passive hardeners. Passive hardeners have the advantage of using no capacitor, but typically, they grant only a 32% bonus; while active hardeners grant 50% in exchange for using capacitor energy. Balanced against this, though, are the “Compensation” skills: Armour and Shield compensation skills grant 5% to passive hardeners per level, per type. (Kinetic Armour/Shield Compensation increases your passive hardener bonus by 5% per level, and so on. Due to how the math works, these bonuses will never allow you to reach the same levels as Active Hardeners, but you can come fairly close with “X” Compensation Level V. The ultimate question involved here is one of capacitor use when choosing Active or Passive hardeners – Passive Shield tanks can almost certainly handle the capacitor use involved in using Active Hardeners. Active shield tanks may or may not; armour tanks usually can. Much depends on what guns you are using, other active modules, etc. Experimentation is key here – you want a tank that can last long enough for you to accomplish whatever your task is, but if the tank would last far longer than your needs require, you probably could be using some modules or capacitor differently.
After you make the decision between passive or active hardeners, you will need to decide precisely which modules to use. Both shields and armour have an active and passive hardener for each type of damage. Armour also has an “all in one” passive hardener (Adaptive Nano Plating) and active hardener (Damage Control.) Shields, on the other hand, have only an active “all in one” hardener – Invulnerability Fields. Damage control units cannot be stacked, but Invulnerability Fields and Adaptive Nano Plating can (subject to stacking penalties.) Which ones you fit are dependent on what kind of fighting you’re doing and what kind of damage you expect to take. Against other players, it can be difficult to predict what you will face, but NPCs always do a specific kind of damage, based on what faction you are facing. (Serpentis, for example, always do kinetic and thermal damage. Rather than fitting two “all in one” fields or hardeners of each type, fitting as many kinetic and thermal hardeners can be very effective in dealing with that faction. With two kinetic and two thermal hardeners, the Serpentis are nearly “defanged.”)
Putting It All Together
Obviously, a pure tank without resistances isn’t going to be as effective as a combination would be, and a pure resistance setup will falter as well. An effective tank will have enough hit points to make properly utilize resistance bonuses, and enough resistance bonuses to make sure your opponent doesn’t just plow through your hit points. Most ships will have a pretty clear indication of which way they are intended to tank – Amarr and Gallente are usually armour tankers (though a few can be shield tanked), while Caldari and Minmatar ships tend to be better as shield tankers. Most ships have more shielding as a base than they do armour or vice versa, and more mid-slots than low-slots, or vice versa. Ships with more base armour or low slots tend to be better armour tankers, and ships with more base shielding and mid-slots tend to do better at shield tanking. None of these is a hard and fast rule, but provides a good rule of thumb. Experience is the best teacher – this article can give you the background, but ultimately, you’ll need to take a few ships out there (hopefully, but not certainly, without being shot down) to determine the combination that works best for you.
Concluding Notes
Hopefully this article has been useful to you. If there’s something missing, incorrect, or badly stated, feel free to let me know – the hope of this article is that more players will pick up EVE that much more swiftly, and as a result, more pilots will be in EVE space to interact with. If you enjoyed the article, please feel free to send an encouraging EVEmail or ISK – the problem with being an experimenting pilot is that you end up sampling a lot of gear, and unlike many of the excellent posters in this forum, I’m far from a grizzled veteran of vast financial sums. ;)