Does anyone have any thoughts on a thermal resist shield with the force block/kinetic experimental effect added?
That gives resistances of 33.8/40/50.
Seems to be the "flattest" combination available, but is that mitigated by lower resistances compared to the resistance mod?
Unless you're going for some niche build that I'm not aware of you want one of two extremes for your generator:
- highest possible capacity - so take prismatic (or A-rated if you can't) reinforced mod and add hi-cap experimental
- fastest possible effective recharge - so take bi-weaves, fast-charge experimental and (because there's no fast charge mod) go for thermal resist instead because resists help effective recharge rate.
Why you would want something middle ground, or imbalanced in terms of resistance is something I can't work out, unless you're specifically fighting an explosives-only opponent or something.
If you're asking "do flatter resistances help more than fast-charge" the answer is no, and here's a simplified model of why not:
First of all, you don't really fit thermal resist to a high-MJ shield because the reinforced mod is better by far. You can undo the low thermal resist with boosters, but your base generator is scaled multiplicatively across all your boosters so if you're going for high-MJ, then the base MJ value of shield+mod is critical for getting the most out of heavy boosters. So, I have to conclude that the thermal-resist + force-block scenario you're asking about is for a resist/regen build using bi-weaves.
So, There are four damage types - thermal, kinetic, explosive and absolute. Let's say you take damage from each source equally;
- 15% faster recharge affects all four damage types, because that 15% is 15% absolute recharge, before resistances and effective recharge rates are calculated. In other words, 15% recharge rate improvement across all damage types.
- 4.8% better kinetic resist is only worth 4.8% if all your incoming damage is kinetic only. with an equal mix of incoming damage it's worth just 1.2%
If 100MJ mixed damage came in and your shield had a 2MW regen rate by default:
- The fast-charge shield would need to recover 100MJ at 2MW*1.15, so 100/2.3 = 43 seconds to repair the damage.
- The force-block shield would only need to recover 98.8MJ (1.2MJ were resisted by the force-block!) so it takes 98.8/2 = 49.4 seconds to repair the damage.
- Even if the damage was 100% kinetic damage, it would need to recover 95.2MJ (4.8MJ were resisted) so it takes 95.2/2 = 47.6 seconds to repair the damage.
In the best-case scenario for force-block, fast charge is still 47.6/43 =9.5% quicker at regenerating shields, and you're only picking resistances to increase your effective regen rates in the first place, otherwise you'd have picked a prismatic with reinforced instead.