Jarod Leercap
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Posted - 2009.03.30 23:54:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Rogue Lilly
WHICH FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE INCAPABLE OF READING MY ORIGINAL POST. Is that the ships designed to shield tank are usally the lower tier of your options and if you ask anyone why that ship sucks they will answer "because it's the first cruiser not the second" or so on.
I think there are two main points others here are trying to get at.
(1) What are you trying to do? If what you're trying to tackle, than it can be advantageous to armor tank rather than shield tank because the tackling modules take up the slots you need for shield tanking. If you're trying to do lots of damage, then shield tanking may be better because damage mods require the low slots you need to armor tank. If you're trying to do both, then you probably need to accept that your tank is going to be weaker than you might otherwise prefer.
(2) Do you want a better tank or a better ship? Armor tanking may in cases lead to a hardier ship. But that doesn't buy anything if the ship is out-ranged by its opponents and isn't fast enough to close the gap.
I'd say the biggest unanswered questions I'm left with from your post is whether you're trying to active tank or passive tank. In general, I'd say that armor is better for active tanking and shields are better for passive tanking. Armor is probably better at hybrid tanking...but that tends to be most applicable to missions.
Below the battleship level, there are a lot of benefits to passive shield tanking for Minmatar, especially for PVP.
(1) It provides good buffer without slowing down the ship. This is extremely important, since speed is one of the things Minmatar ships have going for them.
(2) It requires far less cap use than active tanking, and the Minmatar boats frequently have smaller caps than those of other factions. This is offset by the low or zero cap draw of their weapon systems, but a smaller cap is still a smaller cap.
(3) It has lower fitting requirements than passive armor tanking. The largest shield extenders take only 150 grid, as opposed to 250 grid for the armor plating that gives the same amount of HP.
(4) More available grid means it's a lot easier to fit a neutralizer, which will do great things for you in a fight. Neutralizers do evil things to active tanks and to those who need cap to fire their guns.
(5) While you will generally have fewer mid-slots available than low slots, there are modules that improve shield regen and take low slots. There isn't anything you can put in a mid slot to improve a passive armor tank.
There are only two benefits passive armor tanks offer over passive shield tanks:
(1) They require no cap. A larger shield tank should be running an Invul, and Invul's require about half the cap that an active repair unit would. Thus, if it's zero cap to zero cap, the passive armor tank may have its boosted resists while the shield shield tank will have lost most of its resists. However, the shield tank will still have the regen that the armor tank is lacking, and many of the ships best given to armor tanking have primary weapons systems that require cap to fire.
(2) In some cases, passive armor tanks will have more slots available to tank with. This is offset by some of the low slot modules that improve shield regen, but it makes a difference in some cases.
(3) There is a hole at the battleship level. The best shield extenders match the HP gain of 800mm plate. There is no shield extending counterpart to 1600mm plate.
If I were to make some complaints, though, they'd be these:
(1) Something should be done to improve active shield tanking. Perhaps a low-slot boost amp (even if weaker)?
(2) Until active shield tanking is improved, ships with bonuses to it will have a potentially low-utility bonus. The Tier 2 Minmatar BC comes to mind.
(3) It'd be nice to have a shield extender sized to match 1600mm plate.
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