Author Topic: Tanking Styles  (Read 1524 times)

Offline Jeremiah

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Tanking Styles
« on: December 05, 2008, 10:41:38 AM »
"Tanking" in Eve means how you defend your ship from damage, pretty much like all MMOs really except there isn't a specialist class for doing this.  Tanking in Eve is done by a finding an optimum mixture of your preferred ship's specification, the skills you train, your expected opponent and your tactics - get this right and even the smallest frigate has the potential to take down much larger ships.  I cant go into all the details but hopefully this will help you understand the discussion on various forums.

STYLES

There are loads of esoteric methods employed but the basics (as far as I can tell) are: Shield Active, Shield Passive, Armor Passive, Armor Active, Speed, EW and for small gangs - Spider.

(a) Shield / Armor, Active / Passive:  Ships have three "layers" which take damage - Shields, Armor, Hull.  So, shield tanking would mean buffing and protecting your shield from damage and you can pretty much guess from that what Armor tanking means.  Some people say "real men Hull tank" but generally if you start taking damage to hull you need to be getting ready to warp your pod to a safe spot before the infinite void of space rips your innards into a thousand sparkling shards.  Active tanking of either sort is where the pilot actively engages in keeping the shields or armor repaired.  Passive is about setting up the ship to have enough capacity or resistance to damage for survival until your opponent decides to quit or turns into salvage.  Spider tanking is a variant of active tanking where groups of ships repair each other in a web.  Shield tanking is a speciality of Caldari missile boats and will tend to die fast once their shield is gone.  Amarr armor tank as do most Gallente - don't expect them to bug out when their shield is dead.

(b) Speed tanking: this has been nerfed recently but is still viable.  Essentially it means orbiting at a fast speed around your opponent.  This requires a fast and agile ship if you want to stay within range to damage your opponent (otherwise you might as well break off), orbital mechanics generally mean the faster you go the further away you are unless you are agile.  High orbiting speed means missiles are less able to harm you and turrets are less able to track you.  Minmatar were the masters of speed tanking though small ships usually need to use this tank against the bigger ships.

(c) EW : this is using various forms of electronic warfare to mess with your opponent's ability to target, hit, track or maybe even find you.  I find this the most satisfying way to win  (any of you who play backgammon will know the satisfaction of playing a back game and watching your opponent's mood change from triumphal gloating to a despairing "wtf?").  Every faction has a special form of EW that they specialise in (but of course you can fly all faction ships if you train for them).  And there is a lot of meta-gaming going on about counters and counter-counters etc.  I personally love flying the Sentinel EAF and I just got into a Curse Recon - its just a shame that the Black-Ops ships were pre-nerfed (a stealthing, jumping Dominix would have been too godly I guess).