Resistance questions

[Hoax]

I'm realizing that I'm totally a newb to EvE...

I am curious to some things regarding resists, my questions are regarding armor resists but I think this might be helpfull to those of us shield tanking as well.

Currently I use armor hardeners, which are activated modules that give a big boost to one resist.  I've gotten the hint from some ship setup threads that if you use hardeners you do NOT want to use any all resist boosting mods because then you will get diminishing returns on your hardeners.  Fact or fiction?

Furthermore there is a set of mechanic skills that read:
To active armor hardeners: 3% bonus per skill level to Armor <type> resistance when the modules are not active
To passive armor hardeners: 5% bonus per skill level to Armor <type> resistance

It seems like once I get all those to IV I might be able to mount passive resistance modules and loose nothing (30+20=50).  Is this somehow not the case?  Because I haven't seen this mentioned in ship setup threads, which surprises me.

I'm also guessing that the 5% bonus does not work for modules that add to all resistances, otherwise it just seems too powerfull and again something I should have heard of by now.

Help me experienced armor tankers!

[Strazos]

I'm guessing the skills boost the hardener effects by 5% of whatever they are rated at, not adding a flat 5%.

[hal]

Well I'm neither experienced nor an armor tank but its my understanding that if a module gives diminshing returns when its stacked it will say so when you read the description. Now stacked with what? I assume with a module that affects the same stat. Shield setup I use an invunabality module (active +35 to all resists) and a kinetic amplifier(passive). The numbers seem to indicate that all is well but I cant run an active module in ship fitting window so I'm not really sure.

[Merusk]

There's diminishing returns on ALL hardeners, which I assume is why folks on the boards are all about the multiple Invuln II's.   

From my understanding, Hardeners improve the remaining resists by a percentage of the amount remaining.  So, if you have 0% resist and drop-in a 35% mod, you'll get 35%.  But if you had 20% and dropped-in the 35% mod you'd only get a 28% boost.

I could have completly misunderstood the post I read, though. I was reading at work during lunch, which always requires a quick scan rather than a full understanding.

[MahrinSkel]

Merusk is right.  any kind of resistance mod works that way, so that 2 50% hardeners are better than 3 35% passive resisance boosters.  There are skills for the passives that can boost them up to even better than the active hardeners, but they'll take a while to fill out (4 skills, and they are like rank 4 or 5).

--Dave

[Silus Fromme]

From my understanding, Hardeners improve the remaining resists by a percentage of the amount remaining.  So, if you have 0% resist and drop-in a 35% mod, you'll get 35%.  But if you had 20% and dropped-in the 35% mod you'd only get a 28% boost.

This is correct, as far as I understand it.  To give some math:

A ship with 40% thermal shield resist fits and activates a thermal hardener that has a 50% thermal resist, his thermal resistance won't become 90%, but 70%. This is because the hardener is blocking 50% of the damage that would overwise get through (in this case 60% of the damage due to the ships innate 40% thermal resistance). 50% of 60% is 30% which, when added to the existing 40% gives 70%.

Make sense?  Resistances of the same type stack, but stack progressively rather than sequentially so nobody can fit 4 25% hardeners and suddenly become invulnerable to a damage type.


Hoax, I'm not sure what you're asking about resist boosting mods.  Are you talking about stacking active and passive hardeners, or something else?

[MahrinSkel]

Which, BTW, is why the Invulnerability/Adaptive modules are so popular with the veterans now, since one multi-resist mod with high skills is equal to 4 passive resistance boosters with no skills (one for each damage type).  So a typical build is 1 passive resistance booster to the weakest type for the ship (usually EM or Explosive, depending on whther you're armor or shield tanking), then stack on as many multi-resistance modules as they can.

--Dave

[WayAbvPar]

Just to make sure I understand- are you talking about energized or reistance plating, or some other type of module?

[Hoax]

I guess that answers my question, basically if I have 30% base resist and I equip an activated hardener that hardener adds 35% resist (half of the 70% of damage remaining) but say I wanted to boost all my resists by 15% w/ my third low slot I get something like this?

The 15% to all effectively adds 10.5% and when I activate the hardener it will only be giving me 29.75% (down from 35% without the resist all module) not to mention whatever the diminishing return penalty for using multiple modules that effect the same resist type?  I'm going to need the table of how that works now too...

I'm still not sure how exactly those skills that give a 5% bonus to passive hardeners will work though.

Say I've got 30% base resist again.
I drop in a passive 30% resist, effectively that gives me +21% resist (?)
If I had the skill for that damage type at 4 it is either:

Making the passive 30% actually 50% which means I get +35% effective resist same as a 50% active module.
or
The bonus is 5% of the effect which means that I'm getting a boost that is 20% of 30% so the module becomes 36% with an effective resistance bonus of +25.2% so 10 less then using the active hardener.

So basically those skills are either worthless or good, if they do the former I'll definitely train all to IV so that I can use passive modules and hopefully be able to run my entire setup nonstop with next to no cap loss if they do the latter I'm not going to bother and I'll stick with active resist boosting modules.

Definitely should have just looked this up on eve-online...

[Silus Fromme]

You may already have this link, but if not:

http://www.elegance-corp.net/quickfit/

With that you can import your skills as XML from the account manager, then play around with various hardener setups and just see what the numbers come out to.  Sometimes it's a lot easier than trying to do the math.

[Krakrok]

Those skills are pretty crappy. At level one w/ a 14% passive armor resist you get +0.7%. At level 4 you would only get an extra 2.8% added to the 14%. With a 32% passive armor resist you get an extra 6.4% at level 4.

[gimpyone]

So what's better, passive or active?

[5150]

So what's better, passive or active?

I guess that depends on how much cap you have to play with.....

One advantage of passive is that you dont lose your defences if someone hits you with a Nosferatu and drains your cap (Nos appears to be a common component of many-a pvp setup)

Of course if you went active you could always fit a Nos yourself.......

[WayAbvPar]

I prefer passive just so I don't have to remember to turn the fucking thing on. I always forget.