Ships Trying to understand shield stats

[DjVortex]

These are the stats for five possible combinations of different shield boosters:

Do I understand correctly that the "RAW" value doesn't itself tell how much the shield resists, but is a kind of "base value", and it's the other four stats, SYS/KIN/THM/EXP that actually tell how much it resists each type of damage (with the percentage telling how much the base value os boosted or something)?

From these five options I assume that the first one is by far the worst (unless you need fast shield regeneration) because all the stats are at their lowest.

But the question then is, which one of these is the "best"?

In the fifth one the "SYS" value is the highest, but the other three values are highest in the fourth one. Which one is more important?

 

[forbiddenlake]

Is this a combat ship or something else? For example when exploring, heat damage and impact damage is absolute, not thermal nor kinetic, so you'd care about raw there.

For combat, yes you want to be looking at the effective health of KIN/THM/EXP. For PvE, mostly KIN/THM because you don't usually get missiled until your shields are down.

SYS represents resistance from your pips.

Without having the build: your KIN & EXP resistances look a little high, and your THM looks too low. Resistances start getting diminishing returns at 50%.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Just to make it clear:

• RAW is the raw shield energy (duh). It is the base value off which everything else is calculated from.
• SYS is your effective shields after PIPs. With zero PIPs in SYS your effetive shields are equal to your RAW shields. With two PIPs, your shields are around 1.5 times your raw value, with four PIPs in SYS your shields are around 2.5 times the base value. Also, the shield value shown in SYS is against absolute damage - so the part of weapons that do absolute damage, ramming, crashing into the ground, that kind of stuff. You can play around with the PIPs in EDSY to see how your shields change when you change PIPs.
• KIN, THM and EXP is your shields strength after resistances are applied, based on your absolute shields, i.e. they vary with your PIPs.
• The percentages tell you how resistant the shields are against a certain damage type. The higher the resistance percentage, the higher the shields against that damage type. I am not too sure about the maths behind it, but there are diminishing returns for resistances.

How you design your shields is a bit a question of personal preference, and if you do PvE or PvP. Some say high resistances are the most important, but if your base and thus absolute shields are low, you might have problems against opponents that use weapons with absolute damage, or ramming.

The other way is to go for raw strength and pretty much ignore resistances. Mathematically this can end up with pretty much the same shields as a resistance based shield, but with much higher charge times, as the charge times are determined by the raw shields.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Is this a combat ship or something else? For example when exploring, heat damage and impact damage is absolute, not thermal nor kinetic, so you'd care about raw there.

For combat, yes you want to be looking at the effective health of KIN/THM/EXP. For PvE, mostly KIN/THM because you don't usually get missiled until your shields are down.

SYS represents resistance from your pips.

Without having the build: your KIN & EXP resistances look a little high, and your THM looks too low. Resistances start getting diminishing returns at 50%.

I've been told off for this a few times, but mathematically you can end up with pretty much the same shields as with resistance based shields, with the trade of off recharging being slower. Personally, I don't do stuff like thermal resistant shields any more, I just do reinforced hi-cap, or maybe lo-draw if neccessary, to maximize the raw shields. Usually I end up with the same effective shields, or only slightly lower, than with resistance balanced shields. Just don't have negative resistances.

Of course when you completely minmax resistances, you can get ridiculous values against thermal damage and such; but for the ships I fly with limited space for boosters, I just try to get the best raw shields I can get, and throw one thermal or resistance booster in to get the thermal resistance positive.

That's all for PvE of course. I don't do PvP.

 

[forbiddenlake]

If the effective health is the same then the effective health is the same.

The best effective health tends to be a combination of Heavy Duty, Resistance Augmented, and Thermal Res (on the shield or boosters).

 

[Cmdr Snuffler]

Other cmdrs have given detailed explanations of the Raw, Sys and resistance values, so I won't cover this.
Which one is best?
Well, that's not as easy to answer. Completely depends on what your ship has been built for: Combat, Exploration, CG hauling, Open/Solo.
Other factors also come into play, ie what's the rest of the build, does the shield negatively impact a role this ship was designed for, for example you're building a cold running ship, but your shield requires an overcharged monstered PP.

Are you able to post the full link to your ship builds and give a little bit on info on their purpose?