EVE Evolved: The art of tanking - Armour tanking, part 2
Armour tanking equipment:
If you've determined that your ship will be best off armour tanking, the next step is decide exactly what you're going to fit to it. The three main concepts we deal with in armour tanking are hitpoints, resistances and repairing, all of which there are modules for. Armour plate modules such as the "800mm Rolled Tungsten Plate I" use a significant amount of powergrid and supply a large bonus to armour hitpoints. These are particularly useful in PvP setups where the fight will not last very long and so there won't be much time to repair.
In setups designed to permanently tank all the damage in a mission or asteroid belt, armour plates usually won't be of much use. Instead, these setups will rely on having high resistances and a good armour repairer or two. Armour repairers consume capacitor and repair a certain amount of damage done to the armour each cycle. The hitpoints are added at the end of the repairer's cycle much like a charge-up ability in other MMOs.
Resistance gear:
Active armour hardeners like the "Armor Kinetic Hardener I" must be activated and consume capacitor to increase your armour's resistances to a particular damage type. The higher your resistances are, the lower the percentage of incoming damage you take. Passive armour coatings like the "Energized Thermic Membrane I" don't need to be activated and don't consume capacitor but give lower bonuses to resistance. The "Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane" line of modules increase resistance against all four damage types and are popular in PvP setups where you never know what you're coming up against.
Armour hardeners suffer from a stacking penalty which reduces the effectiveness of multiple hardeners applied to the same resistance. This makes applying more than two hardeners to any one resistance type inefficient and wasteful of a valuable low slot. Another important type of hardener is the "Damage Control", which all ships can only have one of activated at once. In addition to adding some shield and hull resistances, they add up to 15% armour resistance which isn't stacking penalised. That means it's still 100% effective even if you have two or three other hardeners active.
Armour skills:
Armour tanking has relatively few skills and it's advised to get the main ones to level 4 or 5 as soon as you can. The "Hull Upgrades" skill allows use of armour modules and provides a 5% per level increase in armour hitpoints. Having this at level 5 allows use of advanced tech 2 armour modules which provide a significant boost over their tech 1 counterparts for a little extra cost. The "Repair Systems" skill increases the cycle speed of armour repairers by 5% per level, which makes you repair more damage per second but consume a bit more capacitor per second.
Finally, there is a set of compensation skills, such as the "Thermic Armor Compensation" skill, which increase the bonus given by passive armour hardeners like energized membranes by 5% per level. These aren't particularly useful as the bonus is small and only really useful on energized adaptive nano membranes. Training these past level 3 or 4 will provide negligible benefit.
Summary:
Tanking is an important aspect of any combat encounter, whether it's just absorbing damage for long enough to kill someone in PvP or permanantly tanking a tough mission. Essential tools such as EFT can even be used to build a virtual ship and see how strong its tank is. Join me next week when I describe shield tanking and how it differs from armour tanking.
< < Armour tanking, part one of two
Forward to The art of tanking - Shield Tanking > >
Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at massively.com. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at brendan.drain AT weblogsinc DOT com.
