Tanking

A guide by Aroc SyllinBeh

1. Introduction:

All the rat factions you see in missions have a primary damage, a secondary damage and sometimes other marginal damage types.

Everyone knows the rat damage types (example: guristas do kinetic and thermal), its in half the character bios. What isn't clearly stated is damage type proportions, and that is the key to good mission tanking.

So here is a breakdown of those proportions:

Gurista/EoM: 0.75 kin/0.25 therm
Angel: 0.7 exp/0.2 kin/0.1 em
Sansha/Blood raider/Amarr empire: 0.5 em/0.5 therm
Serpentis/Caldari state: 0.5 kin/0.5 therm
Gallente federation: 0.5 kin/0.4 therm/0.1 em
Minmatar republic: 0.5 exp/0.2 em/0.2 kin/0.1 therm
Mercenaries: 0.5 therm/0.3 kin/0.1 exp/0.1 em
Rogue drones: 0.7 exp/0.2 kin/0.1 therm

I calculated those from the eve.info mission dps lists, of course they may be flawed, feel free to make your own calcs. And if you choose to trust me, please don't come complaining if you're blown up.

2. Tanks pre-reqs:

This article applies mostly to LVL4 missions as they're the ones needing the most tank.

For a LVL4 battleship setup, I recommend dedicating 1-2 slots to hp regen and 4 slots to resists, the rest is up to you.

Hp regen is done by a Large armor repairer on armor tanks and a Large (or X-Large) shield booster+Shield boost amplifier on shield tanks.

3. Damage types revisited:

So here is the same breakdown as above but translated in hardeners:

This applies to ships with no resists bonus, for these it's specific for each ship.

Gurista/EoM: 3*Kin active/1*Therm active
Angel: armor tanks: 3*Exp active/1*Kin active - shield tanks: 2*Exp active/2*inv field
Sansha/Blood raider/Amarr empire: 2*Em active/2*Therm active
Serpentis/Caldari state/Gallente federation: 2*Kin active/2*Therm active
Minmatar republic: armor tanks: 2*Exp active/1*Kin active/1*DCU - shield tanks: 1*Em active/1*Exp active/2*Inv field
Mercenaries: armor tanks: 2*Kin active/2*Therm active - shield tanks: 2*Therm active/1*Kin active/1*Inv field
Rogue drones: armor tanks: 3*Exp active/1*Kin active - shield tanks: 1*Exp active/1*Kin active/2*Inv field

Your mileage may vary due to slight differences in racial base resists, don't hesitate to check it.

As you armor tankers may have noticed, I prefer damage controls over EANMs, while the later gives better resists it's nice to have a 50-60% hardened hull for that emergency warp out. And, best of all, damage controls are not stacked it seems.

If you can afford it slotwise, you might want to swap a damage mod for a damage control (raising your resist slots to 5) when facing those npc's that are hitting your weakest natural resists (angel, drones, ... for armor tanks, sansha, blood, ... for shield tanks)

4. Examples:

The skills used are the same for compared setups.

Here is the example of an armor tanked Typhoon:

Omni fit:

Large armor repairer II
2*N-type Expl active hardener
N-type Therm active hardener
N-type Kin active hardener

em70/th68/ki60/ex74
tanks 243dps vs Guristas

Specialised fit:

Large armor repairer II
3*N-type Kin active hardener
N-type Therm active hardener

em70/th68/ki85/ex10
tanks 508dps vs Guristas

Here is the example of a shield tanked Maelstrom:

Large shield booster II
Shield boost amplifier II
Photon scattering field II
Heat dissipation field II
2*Inv field II

em72/th78/ki69/ex79
tanks 420dps vs Guristas

Specialised fit:

Large shield booster II
Shield boost amplifier II
3*Ballistic deflection field II
Heat dissipation field II

em0/th64/ki90/ex60
tanks 936dps vs Guristas

Note: The Mael uses a large booster because it has a bonus to shield boost amount, for a raven the same setup tanks about 700dps. A raven with an X-large booster tanks 1312dps.

Now who needs to tank 1312dps? Well, it's useful to survive the bonus rooms (faction loot ftw!) and it also means you may pulse the booster a lot less, saving cap.

5. Conclusion:

While I tried to be precise, you may encounter cases where the enemies don't behave like stated here. For example, empire factions (amarr, gallente, ...) often have sentries/towers with them and those tend to do 'out of racial' damage. Another example of that is the lvl4 angel extravaganza bonus room which have 5 or so thermal cruise towers. So be wary, surprises may happen.

I've made some EFT damage profiles out of the specific rat damage types and proportions listed on eve-info. To use them in eft, just copy/paste the following at the very end of your config.ini file in the EFT dir.

DamageProfile=Gurista,0,570,3504,0
DamageProfile=Angel,480,0,719,3058
DamageProfile=Sansha,1945,1598,0,0
DamageProfile=Serpentis,0,1627,1320,0
DamageProfile=Blood raider,613,570,60,0
DamageProfile=Gallente federation,25,781,1127,0
DamageProfile=Minmatar republic,615,310,815,1633
DamageProfile=Amarr empire,1204,1349,0,0
DamageProfile=Caldari state,0,795,944,0
DamageProfile=EoM,0,618,1718,0
DamageProfile=Mercenaries,90,634,424,108
DamageProfile=Rogue Drones,86,91,281,964

With these damage profiles you'll be able to see how much dps your ship/booster/hards combo tanks against specific NPC's.

From personal experience, I'd say 650dps perma-tanked for a given rat type should be enough. More is needed of course if you plan to aggro mega rooms or do the bonus rooms (1500 should be fine for anything).

Be aware that pulsing a repper/booster tanks less than the amount given by EFT, it is for a perma running tank.

If you liked this article you should be very interested in EFT, go get it there if you don't have it already: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=548883