Passive tanking equipment:
Passive tanks rely on modules that increase your shield hitpoints, resistances and shield recharge rate. Shield extenders like the "Large Shield Extender II" module increase your shield hitpoints but have the side-effect of making your ship's signature radius bigger. This makes your ship easier to hit and makes it take more damage from large missiles. Because of how your shield's recharge rate works, adding more hitpoints increases the number of hitpoints per second regenerated. Shield extenders are particularly useful in passive tanks and are often used in PvP setups to provide a quick hitpoint buffer that can absorb a few shots.
The "Shield Recharger I" module increases your shield's recharge rate by 15% but isn't very useful because it uses a valuable mid slot that could be used for a shield extender or hardener. The low slot version, the "Shield Power Relay I" is much more useful, providing a 20% boost in shield recharge rate but reducing capacitor recharge rate by 35%. Since passive tanking ships don't need much capacitor anyway, this trade-off is definitely worth it. Shield flux coils decrease shield hitpoints and increase shield recharge rate, but are universally never worth using.
The icing on the passive tanking cake comes in the form of expensive rigs. The "Core Defence Field Extender I" rig increases shield hitpoints by 15% each and the "Core Defence Field Purger I" rig increases shield recharge rate by 20% each. Tech 1 ships like the Drake can use three shield rigs, turning what could be a mediocre tank into an impressive one.
Shield tanking skills:
The three most essential skills for both active and passive shield tanking are Shield Operation, Shield Management and Tactical Shield Manipulation. Shield Operation is required to use shield boosters and provides a 5% bonus to shield recharge rate per level. Higher levels of Shield Operation skill unlock the ability to use progressively larger tech 2 shield boosters that repair more hitpoints with each boost. The "Shield Management" skill increases shield hitpoints by 5% per level and is required to use shield boost amplifiers.
Tactical Shield Manipulation is one of the most important skills. In addition to preventing damage leaking through your shield, level 4 of the skill is required to use active shield hardeners and invulnerability fields. Active shield tanks can benefit from the "Shield Compensation", which provides a 2% decrease per level to shield booster capacitor usage. Additional skills that will help with active tanks are "Energy Management" and "Energy Systems Operation" as they will give you more capacitor to use with your shield booster. Passive tanks can benefit from the "Shield Upgrades" skill, which reduces the powergrid need of shield extenders by 5% per level and is required to fit some shield modules.
Like armour, shield has a set of damage compensation skills (such as "Thermic Shield Compensation") that increase the resistance bonus given by passive hardeners. This is of limited usefulness as most people choose to use active hardeners. Unlike the armour-tanking equivalent, the invulnerability field is active and doesn't benefit from these skills, making them a very low priority skill.
Summary:
Shield tanking is a more skill-intensive field than armour tanking but with the right skills and equipment, the results can be quite impressive. If you fly Caldari or Minmatar ships, you're going to need to shield tank at one point and even some Gallente ships can be fit with effective shield tanks. In next week's final part of this introductory guide to tanking, I take a look at alternative strategies for keeping your ship alive such as remote repairing, using electronic warfare and the infamous speed-tank.
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.
