My shields generally tended to melt like ice cream in a microwave, and I had to warp out to a station a few times during the course of our little jaunt. At one point, he remarked on how lucky I was that some tackler frigates hadn't targeted me.
Let's take a look at your average NPC tackler frigate, or at least average for ones I've encountered. For you pros, go ahead and skip this paragraph. You don't need it. Generally, a tackler:
- is a Tech II version of a standard frigate design with a fancy-sounding name.
- packs some type of tank that my drones and missiles often have trouble breaking through. There was this one particular interceptor that had such a tough tank all of my combined DPS could barely break it.
- flies faster than I do.
- orbits at close range where my artillery is completely useless.
Now, I don't really have a great strategy for dealing with tacklers on my own. I can't heal damage any faster than my shield's base recharge rate, so when I hear the shield alarm, my general tactic is to simply warp away. But when I'm targeted by a warp scrambler/disrupter, all I can do is switch on the afterburner and try to fly out of range. The problem with this is that my top speed is just 450 m/s; most tacklers are actually faster than me and have no trouble keeping up. I really can't do anything but pray I'll be able to kill them fast enough. And since I have no real ability to fix myself up in the field, the battle basically turns into a "my DPS vs. their combined DPS" slugfest. I can only fight and hope for the best.
An armor-repairing fit would allow me to kite their more damaging ships and actually be able to fix up much of the damage that I had taken. In addition, since there are five low slots on the Rupture compared to only three mid slots, my buffer would probably be larger in addition to having the armor repairer. This would mean eliminating the three gyrostabs and two tracking enhancers in my low slots, but since their effectiveness drastically decreases when I stack modules, I could still keep one of each and have three slots left to armor tank the ship. That's more than I currently have for my shield tank; the afterburner takes up one of my three mid slots.
This will also free up my mid slots for a stasis webifier if I need it. Even though armor plating will slow my ship down, webbing annoying tacklers makes it possible for me to outrun them and engage them with my artillery.
The main problem I have is that I have absolutely no skills in armor repairing. None at all. I'm also not sure how this will affect the PG and CPU of my ship, since I'm already near the maximum that I can handle with my current skills. Training up PG and CPU-increasing skills will help that though, and I have to get the armor-repping skills at some point.
I think I'll give armor a try.
You're really going to want to get those skills trained up. But for the sake of advice, there's actually a really fantastic formula for armour tanks. Especially Minmatar armour tanks.
ReplyDelete1. Start with a plate. That's number one. It's going on first, so build everything else around this. And always use reinforced rolled tungsten. In your bigger ships you want 1600mm, but obviously it'll be some time before you need one that size.
2. Then you have your passives. These are things like Adaptive Nano Membranes and Energized Adaptive Nano Membranes (EANMs as they're commonly referred to). One is good. Two is better. EANMs tend to outperform ANMs if you can spare the grid/CPU.
3. Your active modules come in now. These are your reppers and whatnot. Though you can rarely go wrong with my personal favourite, the suitcase full of duct tape. You can reasonably slap a DCU on most any armour tank and not be laughed at.
Optional: There are some rigs that work passively (adding to your effective HP), or actively (adding, for example, to the effectiveness or cycle time of your reppers).
Note: There ARE armour hardeners out there. They aren't as popular with Winmatars from what I've noticed. Most of you featherheads would rather just rep your ship into oblivion. But that is something you also need to consider:
RESISTANCES! Please, Ilnaurk. Please please please pay attention to your resists and give them love. Your resists will do so much more for your survivability than anything you can do to your HP.
As a side note, don't bother with tech 2 plates. There's very little HP difference between t1 and t2, but the ISK difference is made of weetawdid.
DeleteThanks very much for all of the help! I'm new to armor tanks, so having this information is a godsend.
DeleteI do know that resistances are important. Unfortunately, the only free slots I have for anything are the rig slots, and I'd rather fit something more general than a resistance rig on there, since those will change through every mission.
You'll find you won't be paying too much attention to your resists with an armour tank until you get into the bigger ships. Most of your functionality there is going to come from hardeners.
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