Tanking: Passive vs Active (or mix?)

Besides the obvious, I was wondering what the difference between the two are. Basically I would like to know some information concerning the following:

Cap usage
Rate of damage possible to tank
Which one requires less skills
Which one is more affordable
What kind of modules are preferred for each

Any other information would be appreciated

It depends how you define passive and active, and which ship your using. Active to me means a shield booster, passive means hardners, although you could also mean resistance amps (which require no cap). Note that I'm assuming your shield tanking.

Basically, as i see it, there is a simple scale of advantages to disadvantages:

Booster - huge cap requirement - great ability to tank (when combined with a partial resistance tank)
Hardners only - minimal cap requirement - good tank, great on some ships (drake/nighthawk)
Amps only - no cap requirement - ok tank (good with a lot of extra skills)

If your using a booster, your likely to need a cap booster or a few rechargers/flux coils etc. and you'll be in a lot of trouble if you get neut/nos'ed. Another important consideration is what guns your using, with hybrids/lasers using up all your cap means you stop shooting as well as tanking, with missiles/projectiles it just means you stop tanking, which could make the difference in pvp.
Alternative - on some setups its feasible to have only a booster and no hardners, allowing you more mid slots for EW modules, which is always good, and this is one advantage of using a booster, as you really only need 2 modules (a booster and a cap injector, possibly with a boost amp), but you will burn a lot more cap tanking this way than you would using hardners.

With hardners only, you'll hold out for longer when nossed, need less cap modules, and have less difficulty running ab's/mwd's.

With amps only, your basically immune to nossing, as you wont use cap to tank, although you'll still lose your ab/mwd (and possibly guns), this is relatively pointless for mission running as your tank will suffer slightly, but in pvp you might consider it. However, you will need the (kin/emp/exp/therm) shield compensation skills to make it effective, and thats quite a bit of extra training.

My general approach is to passive tank using hardners, damage controls, and resistance rigs, aiming to get all my resistances past 60%, or closer to 75% on T2 ships (which ussually have a resistance bonus), then consider how much space/cap i have left to fit my AB and a booster, in most cases thats not much, but on some ships you'll find its possible. I have little experience of using amps up till now, as I havent trained the compensation skills yet, someone else might know more.

That is a very big question and the answer is largely dependent on the ship you're looking at, you'll get different answers for each. Some ships are much better suited to passive tanking than others, thats mostly down to the shield recharge time.

The idea of a passive tank is that every shield has a natural recharge time, this is a constant no matter how large your shield is. This in turn means the larger your shield the more is regenerated every second. For example if you had 100 shields which regens in 10 seconds it would be regenerating 10 shield/sec. You then add a shield extender and double your shields to 200, it will still recharge in 10 secs so will be regening 20 shield/sec. Passive tanks are purely the domain of shield tankers, armour has no natural regen and relies on repairers.

You build your passive tank with rigs and modules in 3 ways,
1) increase the shields size with shield extenders and extender rigs
2) decrease the regen time with shield power relays, power diagnostics and purge rigs
3) add shield resistance modules to reduce damage taken

All that is very simplified, the regen rate is not linear. If you were to graph it it would look like a bell curve with the optimal regen point around 33% shields. This means if youre taking damage and your shields drop below that point it's time to start warping as the amount of damage you can take is falling from that point on.

One of the biggest disadvantages of a passive tank is that it needs far more slots to build an effective tank than an active tank. The drake can field an awesome passive tank but to do so it really needs you to use most of the mids, most of the lows and the rig slots. This doesn't leave you a lot of room for damage mods or tackling.

In an ideal world your passive tank won't use any cap which means you're invulnerable to energy warfare. In practice there's a good chance you'll end up using active hardners.

Active tanking means you have a repairer or booster which you activate when you want to regenerate armour / shields, stating the obvious but worth saying At its most basic you exchange cap for hitpoints. The capacitor operates on exactly the same principles as the shields, it regenerates in a non linear way and has an optimal recharge point around 33% or so.

Therefore active tanks are based around keeping as much capacitor available for as long as possible. This can be done in two ways

1) Increasing the regen rate so that it exceeds the rate at which you use it. Modules to achieve this would be
Capacitor rechargers, power diagnostics and rigs such as capacitor control circuits

2) Using charges which add capacitor when you are running low. Modules to achieve this would be Capacitor Boosters


Obviously option 1 uses far more modules than oiption 2. So in general, this is just my opinion and there are bound to be people who disagree or have exceptions Ada's Rokh for example, option 1 is best suited to PVE and option 2 for PVP. I have a few reasons for thinking this:

in PVE you are likely to have infinitely more time taking damage than in PVP so infinite cap means you can stay in a mission all day, if you use boosters youre time is limited to the amount of boosters you can store in your hold and they do take up a lot of space.

In PVP you will have short intense bouts of cap usage and you can keep adding cap as quickly as your cycle time on you cap boosters, you are limited to the amount you can carry though.

PVP requires a wider variety of modules to be really effective or excel so the fewer slots you need to use on your tank the better off you will be.


As far as skills go I'm not sure which needs more or less to be honest. I just have one last thing to say and that is DONT try and mix the type of tanking that you do on a ship. Pick a style that suits you and your ship and run with it. If you try to do a mix of active / passive you'll just end up having a ship thats crap at both.


ok, correction and flame retardant suit on, fire away

skips reading the responses.

My pov.

An active tank will always tank harder for a shorter period of time if you have the right amount of slots for it. But it sucks your cap hard so its only good for 4-5 minutes tops with everything running.
A passive tank will hold a hell of alot better for shields then for armour. As shields recharge and armour doesent.

and when I think passive tank im thinking mods that dont require activation or cap usage and thats how I define the diff between active and passive. Both types can tank like gods on the right ships.

when it comes down to it its all a matter of personal preferance and what you fly.

If you tank armour then you basically have three choices. An active armour tank, a passive hp tank or a speed tank.

If you tank shields you have some differant options but they all play out about the same, an active tank, a passive hp tank, a passive regen tank or a speed tank.

in the end it all comes down to what slots you have and where your ships strengths are. as either costs about the same to set up properly.

But hell im biased Ive been an active armour tanker for 3 years. Ive just recently started playing around with the idea of straight hp tanks after seeing how long arma lasted in the hiilgarian war. and the speed tanks amuse me so Ive been trying them out on my smaller ships alot lately too.

min slots for a solid tank is 5 or 6. at that point you can put something together. but ships with more will tank alot harder. And as your a caldari player Ill leave it to the shield pros to help you out.

Hi dama,

While i prefer to passive shield tank it is only good a few caldari ships those being the nighthawk,Oynx,Rokh,Ferox, and drake. If you try and do it to almost any other caldari ship your asking to get poped. Though with high enough skills in shield tanking skills it is possible to make a passable tank on other caldari ships. For armor tanking passive isn't really existant its more of an hp tank you get as much armor as you can on the ship with crap resistances and hope that your enemy doesn't eat through your armor and into structure before you have them dead.

Since shield's recharge they really do have a passive tank the keys to this are lowering your shield recharge time usually down to 160 seconds or lower and raiseing your shield hp and your resistances. As far as active shield tanking goes i would say that on most caldari ships thats what you will be doing but even then you won't last very long. The truth to this has been discovered by me repeatedly unless you are a hi sp caldari ship pilot with max skills in shield tanking you will die if in engageing 1on1 with any other races ship taht is supposed to be the same tier as the one you are in for the caldari. Its unavoidable i'm afraid unless the other pilot is a complete idiot. To your personal and advantage and mine there actually alot of pilots out there who have no idea how to tank damage worth a piss. Its hard i'm not going to lie to you m8 in order to active shield tank effectivly you must have uber hi resistances you must have tech 2 hardners/faction hardners and you must as a diffenant have a whole metric fuck ton of sp in missles and shield tanking relavant skills. Active shield tanking involves alot of micro manageing of your modules and your cap. You need to have enough cap to run your shield booster flat out of several mintues long enough to kill the thing that your attacking and you can in most caldari ships iwth an active tank. Just linie your low slots with damage mods and you will do enough damage to tear down damn near anything of equal class to you. i use my rig slots for cap recharge in the event that i must active tank something.

Even then a raven vs a mega the raven will die most of the time i'm not going to lie we are outclassed in almost everyway now by every other race in eve in terms of our ships. we have a few that can out tank any other ships of the same class but they won't be able to kill them because they don't have the damage output even with my 6million sp in gunnery and my 4milliion sp in drones i can't kill merc in a gank set in his mega with my rokh.

And we even have ships that out damage any other ships in eve but they can't tank worth anything and they can't deal enough damage to the target before the target kills you. I prefer passive and i tend to stick to those ships that i can put a passive tank on but you need decent skills to make passive tanking a viable option vs most players.

I realize i ran off at the mouth diarreha of the key board and all that so if you want more info and ranting from me just poke me in game about it i hope that answered some of your questions.

adacanavar