Monday, January 27, 2014

ISIS, Gamer OCD and Passive Shield Hardeners

When that last expansion came out... what was it called? To be honest I cannot remember. Ah Rubicon! That was it. Anyway, Rubicon brought us ISIS which could quickly and easily show you what your level of 'mastery' is for every ship in the game. As a 100m+ SP PvP focused toon, I thought Drackarn would be pretty high in all of them. Nope. Level III in all Caldari ships! Wut?


This is because he only has the shield compensation skills at level 3. Why? Because in PvP you generally do not use passive shield hardeners so the skills are faily useless. However ISIS looks at your skills, see's the level 3's in shield compensation and sets your ship mastery at level III as thats all you have in shields.

However, as we saw on Twitter over the weekend people are training these skills now. Why? Because CCP are clever!

Giving vets something to train has always been a bit of an issue. Introduce new skills and you run the risk of increasing the gulf between newer players and older players. So what can you give the vets to train. Useless existing skills!

Hang on Drack! Why would these vets train useless skills that are..... Oh.... right, ship mastery!

Exactly. They prey on the normal player OCD, "gamer crack" if you will - "achievements". By introducing ISIS they scored two hits. Firstly it was helpful to new players to understand the ship trees and the skills useful to each ship. But also it suddenly gave the vets something to train. Hit all the V's even though some of the skills are useless, like the passive shield compensation skills!

So rather than getting us to train useless skills just so ISIS shows V instead of III, why not make the shield compensations skills useful again? Shocking idea I know!

The skill actually used to give a small bonus to active hardeners when they were offline. So if you had been neuted dry they still gave some benefit with these skills. That was removed a while ago and now they only effect passive hardeners.


Here we have a quick summary of armour and shield hardeners in Eve.


Armour:-

Damage Specific Active Hardners: -55%. 30GJ, 36tf 1mw
No adaptive.

Damage Specific Energised Plating (Passive): -37.5%, 0GJ, 30tf, 1mw
Adaptive Energised Plating (Passive): -20%, 0GJ, 36tf, 1mw

Damage Specific Resistance Plating (Passive): -26.4%, 0GJ, 0tf, 1mw
Adaptive Resistance Plating (Passive): -15.36%, 0GJ, 0tf, 1mw


Shield:-

Damage Specific Active Hardners: -55%, 20gj, 44tf, 1mw
Adaptive Active Hardner: -30%, 32gj, 44tf, 1mw

Damage Specific Passive Amplifier: -37.5%, 0gj, 30tf, 1mw
No adaptive passive.


Both have extra modules that effect the tank plates/extenders, +% HP plates for armour and +% recharge for shields, but these are the actual damage type modifiers we have.

Within the armour we have a third type - resistance plating. Look at those fitting requirements. Tasty eh! No CPU and only 1MW. Whilst not giving you a massive boost to resistances they do give you some for very little in terms of PG and no CPU. Ideal if you are a bit tight on CPU and have a spare slot.


Resistance plating isn't the most common armour tanking module used, but it is used. Energised plating, especially adaptive is used more commonly. Both of these get bonus from the armour compensation skills. Therefore most armour tankers train those skills up. I have a couple of ships that use resistance plating for when I'm out of CPU but have a low slot left.

Should there be a passive adaptive shield hardener?

Mid slot, 25% to all resistances, no capacitor need, no CPU and 1mw powergrid?

3 comments:

  1. Only if armor tankers get a module similar to the shield boost amp :)

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  2. but this hemogonises (is that the right spelling??) the tanking of both armour and shield. If shield got a EANM then you would have to give armour an Invuln field and end up with the same tank systems just over two different stats.

    I personally like that armour =/= shield in terms of tanking. The shield resist comp skills are actually quite useful for pve setups. Yes I'd like to see them used more in pvp but not by making the tanking systems essentially the same.

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