Engineers Ships What is better? Shield/Hull tank or resistance balanced?

[imaner76]

Hello CMDRs. I've been re looking at my Corvette, MegaMelter. It's a Shield/Hull tank, around 8,000 shield and 5,000 hull. But DTEA "CMDR mp_astro" has been developing a shield widget that made me look at an old "Resistance build" that at the time I had varied success with. But as things have changed a little with engineering I can now hit a balance.

So the question is do the raw numbers above hold up better in the "real world" than my balanced one?
For ref, balanced build would be 70% ish resistances on all for shields and 30% resistances for all for hull, my totals would be 3,000. That 3,000 is the same for shields, hull and integrity. I'd interested in your experiences.

 

[CMDR Eryn Liamson]

Based on your INARA build your armour looks fine but you've got a -15% resistance vs thermal on your shields. This gives you an effective shield strength vs thermal weapons of around 7000MJ. If you swap out one of the HD boosters for a thermal resist/thermo boost your shield strength would drop to around 7400MJ, but increase thermal resistance to 20%, giving you an effective shield strength vs thermal of 9200MJ.

Higher MJ is better against absolute damage weapons (ie, plasma, ground/asteroid impacts) though, so it does depend on what you're using the ship for.

My personal preference is to keep positive resistances against all damage types.

Nice ship too!

 

[imaner76]

Based on your INARA build your armour looks fine but you've got a -15% resistance vs thermal on your shields. This gives you an effective shield strength vs thermal weapons of around 7000MJ. If you swap out one of the HD boosters for a thermal resist/thermo boost your shield strength would drop to around 7400MJ, but increase thermal resistance to 20%, giving you an effective shield strength vs thermal of 9200MJ.

Higher MJ is better against absolute damage weapons (ie, plasma, ground/asteroid impacts) though, so it does depend on what you're using the ship for.

My personal preference is to keep positive resistances against all damage types.

Nice ship too!

Hi, thanks! The live ship is in flux at the moment so kind of ignore some bits, Normally it's positive on all but not balanced, but normally low on thermal. The balanced build is this one https://s.orbis.zone/4-45 I guess I could just swap a few bits out, re do the shields and match this, then try it! Not much else to do!

 

[Fett_Li]

No offense, but your balanced build is really bad. I'd use two resistance augmented boosters at max. After that, diminishing returns on resistances lead to a waste of utility slots when using resistance augmented boosters (cf. this post of mine: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/this-is-how-resistance-stacking-works.439830/ ). Compare this build to yours: https://s.orbis.zone/4-90 I just swapped out all but two RA boosters for HD. Results: double the absolute MJ and even though resistances are worse, the overall thm/kin/expl HP are higher. Yet still, the resistances are very good at >45% each.

However, with a Prismatic, I'd go for raw MJ all the way, i.e. use reinforced shields and swap out one of the RA boosters for a thermal block one. You'd then end up with this build: https://s.orbis.zone/4-92 Raw MJ are again better and kin+expl HP just went through the roof; thermal resistances are still comparable to the resistance augmented ones with "just" 1k MJ less. In comparison: The sum of all resistance-HP of the reinforced SG build is ~50k MJ whereas the same value on the thermal resistant SG with two resistance augmented boosters you end up with ~40k MJ which is considerably less with the only upside that you have (negligible) 1k MJ thermal HP.

The thing with resistances is: They only benefit you really in bi-weave builds. In this case, your regeneration gets much more efficient because you are "effectively" regenerating more and more MJ the higher your resistances are. Since your Prismatics practically don't regenerate, you don't get this benefit. Then, you only should look at the thm/kin/expl HP which also are influenced by the absolute HP. If you're doing PvE, you might get away with a Bi-Weave and regenerate in between fights in a corvette. If, however, you're doing PvP you really should go for absolute MJ because there are a lot of pilots running plasmas and those will hit your corvette. Forget evading.

 

[imaner76]

No offense, but your balanced build is really bad. I'd use two resistance augmented boosters at max. After that, diminishing returns on resistances lead to a waste of utility slots when using resistance augmented boosters (cf. this post of mine: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/this-is-how-resistance-stacking-works.439830/ ). Compare this build to yours: https://s.orbis.zone/4-90 I just swapped out all but two RA boosters for HD. Results: double the absolute MJ and even though resistances are worse, the overall thm/kin/expl HP are higher. Yet still, the resistances are very good at >45% each.

However, with a Prismatic, I'd go for raw MJ all the way, i.e. use reinforced shields and swap out one of the RA boosters for a thermal block one. You'd then end up with this build: https://s.orbis.zone/4-92 Raw MJ are again better and kin+expl HP just went through the roof; thermal resistances are still comparable to the resistance augmented ones with "just" 1k MJ less. In comparison: The sum of all resistance-HP of the reinforced SG build is ~50k MJ whereas the same value on the thermal resistant SG with two resistance augmented boosters you end up with ~40k MJ which is considerably less with the only upside that you have (negligible) 1k MJ thermal HP.

The thing with resistances is: They only benefit you really in bi-weave builds. In this case, your regeneration gets much more efficient because you are "effectively" regenerating more and more MJ the higher your resistances are. Since your Prismatics practically don't regenerate, you don't get this benefit. Then, you only should look at the thm/kin/expl HP which also are influenced by the absolute HP. If you're doing PvE, you might get away with a Bi-Weave and regenerate in between fights in a corvette. If, however, you're doing PvP you really should go for absolute MJ because there are a lot of pilots running plasmas and those will hit your corvette. Forget evading.

Thanks, this makes my original thought that how I've been running it is best. I think I will remain as the original build and keep the Tank approach. The current live build is as shown in the EG you gave, except some of the boosters have been borrowed by another ship if you follow the live links. I'm nipping back to the bubble this weekend to put it back to normal. Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it.

 

[imaner76]

No offense, but your balanced build is really bad....

PS, none taken. It was great feedback! Here is the original combat focused "tank" MegaMelter https://s.orbis.zone/4-aw if you have any feedback on that I don't mind taking some more "offence"

It does often get swapped about a bit as some combat support roles for the fleet need adaptions, more healing etc. I'm also bad for stealing parts from it for smaller combat roles... But alone or as pure NPC removal muscle I remain as above.