Recharge Shields

Newbean tip of the day:

Active Shield reps happen at the start of the cycle, so it is instant. You get around one shield point for every point of capacitor you put into it, generally. But your shields also repair naturally as well. There is a peak recharge point around 33%, and then it doesn't recharge nearly as strongly. Recharge at 5% is almost nothing and same at 95%. So If you think you can hold your tank, you can delay shield reps so it is closer to that 33% and above. If you overrep, you are wasting cap or cap boosters on an anciliary shield booster. You can also bait tank in pvp, making it seem like your are bleedy armor because dps, but you can instantly over rep. It is a good idea to give yourself as a big of a buffer as possible when new pvp targets come on the field. And kill the high dps stuff first.

There fits that take advange of that passive recharge as well, but they usually fail miserably in pvp. They tend to use purger + shield relays, with extenders to make it huge. But it negative impacts your cap so watch out for that.

Most pvp ships fit what is called buffer fit. You are going for maximum hardening+extensions as you can. They might even have power diagnostics in the lows to further extend it or fit more large extenders. Most of ferox and munnin fleets are setup this way. This gives the logi the maximum time to try to lock you and get reps on you. And because shield reps activate at the start of the cycle, you can usually get saved if you broadcast early in a mainline doctrine ship, like when they yellow box you. (Yellow box means locked up)

V2 of tip of the day:

Greetings, here is your Eve Online Tip of the Day on Shield tanking.

Shields in eve act a little differently than most other mechanics. The regen itself basically has a couple features:

1. It regens over time. This is controlled by two numbers, the size of the shield, and how long it takes to fully recharge. So it can be 500 HP that regens over 400 seconds. Small regen. Or it could be 6,000 HP that regens over 200 seconds, high regen.

2. It's a curved scale. On the ends, it is not great regen, like a fraction of 'peak' recharge. Peak recharge is somewhere around 30%. If you drop below 25%, your 'peak' regen is passed, and you most likely will lose all your shields.

3. After 25% shields left, you will have 'bleed'. This will be damage into your armor, so even if you rep back up, that armor repair won't recover without an active effect on it. There are skills that can reduce this bleed. Yes, you can bleed into structure too.

There are three types of shield tanking in eve.

1. Regen tanking. This takes the size and makes it a big number, and then takes the regen and makes it a smaller number. Shield extenders makes it large, Power relays make it regen faster. These work for PVE ships, or ratting, or speed tanked ships (they go fast and dodge fire)

2. Buffer tanking. This makes the hardening high and the size huge. Everything to make you last as long as possible till remote reps. 95% of all our PVP doctrines work like this in a fleet. Shield reps are better than armor reps because they are applied at the beginning of the cycle, but use 2x as much as cap as armor reps.

3. Shield boosting. these are done in some PVE fits and elite soloer pvps. You can even do double reps. Shield Ancils are amazing when stacked.

If you are flying the vexor ratter, that's passive regen, so you warp out when you start to break 35%.

So that's kind of your 101 on shield tanking. 😄 https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Shield_Tanking_101 has more details.

Thanks to @EVIL-LOKI for the idea. 😄

Graph of how capacitor works: