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Passive Tanking and You
You see them all over the space-lanes now. Drakes plying their trade like giant floating flatbed trucks. Since their introduction, the Drake has been the most used of the new Tier 2 battlecruisers, and with good reason. The Drake is a passive tanking beast. In fact with decent skills and easily available equipment, a Drake can be set up to passive tank 900 DPS against equally spaced damage types, almost double that if you can narrow down enemy damage types to 2 (such as the ever-common Thermal/Kinetic combo).
So what is passive tanking? How does it work?
Simply put, passive tanking is when you increase your ship’s natural shield recharge to very high levels, thus allowing you to repair shield damage without a shield booster.
A ship has a base shield recharge rate, modified by your Shield Management skill, and a value for Shield HP, modified by your Shield Operation skill. Dividing the amount of shield HP by the time it takes to recharge provides you with the natural average hp/s recharge. But to get a good indication of your recharge rate, it's important to remember that, just like capacitor, the rate of shield recharge is variable, and peeks at around 33% shield with about 2.4x the average rate.
Fitting a Passive Tank
The great thing about passive tanking is that you can use both your low and mid slots for tanking. Of course this has its downsides, as we will discuss later. The primary mid-slot module for a passive tank is the Large Shield Extender (preferably T2). Due to the way power and HP stats are spread out for shield extenders, there is no decent battleship-sized X-Large shield extender, and therefore passive tanks don't really work for them. However, the Large Shield Extender module sits in a sweet spot for the battlecruiser class. Low enough power requirements to be able to mount multiple extenders without gimping your grid, but giving enough hit points to be worthwhile.
In your low slots the module to use is the Shield Power Relay (again, preferably T2). This module decreases your shield recharge time but increases your capacitor recharge time. Passive tanks have extremely weak capacitors as a consequence of this module.
A sample passive tank on a Drake would be:
3x Large Shield Extender II
3x Shield Hardener II
4x Shield Power Relay II.
3x Core Defence Field Purger I rigs
This may be excessive for your needs, but remember, since there are no stacking penalties on passive tanks, it’s a no-brainer. Just remove as many SPRs or LSEs as you like to get what’s right for you. The Drake with T1 missile launchers is very easy to fit.
Now, this fit is great for PVE, but in PVP it will get you splattered. Why? Because as previously mentioned, passive tanked ships are extremely weak on capacitor. In fact, the setup given above constantly leaks capacitor at a rate of about 3-4 cap/s (which will take about 15 minutes to drain the cap). However, hit the ship with a Nosferatu or two and very shortly the hardeners will power down. So in order to avoid this, in PvP it is best to use passive hardeners. When doing so, the ship requires no capacitor except to warp. It is truly cap-free, and the only way to destroy it is to break the tank.
What about the Shield Recharger module?
Don’t use it. Just don’t. Why? Well, there are 3 reasons. Firstly, Shield Rechargers don’t make effective use of your powergrid. Secondly, the bonus provided by a Shield Recharger II is 15%, or more precisely, 1/(0.85) = 17.5%. The benefit provided by an LSE II on a Drake with good skills is almost 50% for the first one, 30% for the second, and 25% for the third. Seeing as how you won’t be fitting more than 3 LSEs, in all cases the benefit of the LSE II far outweighs the Shield Recharger II. Finally, if you try Passive Tanking a ship that doesn’t have that special LSE sweetspot I mentioned above, you will find that without this sweetspot, no amount of Shield Recharger IIs will make a viable tank.
Who can Passive Tank?
The downside of passive tanking is fairly simple. Only shield-tanking battlecruisers can do this effectively, and the Cyclone has an active tank bonus, so that leaves the Ferox and the Drake. As previously explained by Aries last week, the Ferox is a poor ship in general, so that just leaves the Drake. The Drake does fairly poor DPS in comparison to more suited pvp ships such as the Hurricane, Brutix or Myrmidon. You will probably survive the fight, but you won’t be doing too much to contribute towards it, for the amount of money you’ve spent on the ship.
Using a Passive Tank
So what is Passive Tanking good for? Simply put, tanking massive quantities of PVE damage without having to manage the tank at all. The Drake shines in missions or any other situation where NPC agro can be pulled by one ship, leaving other ships to do the damage. With maxed skills (Battlecruiser 5, Shield Management 5, Shield Operation 5), the Drake can be easily set up to tank an astonishing 1,300 DPS of EM/Thermal, and 1,700 DPS against Kinetic/Thermal. The possibilities of this ship for tanking complexes, without worrying about lag, are mind-boggling.
When flying with a passive tank, remember to adjust your thinking about your tank. There is literally nothing you can do to tank while you are in combat. Watch your shield levels, but realize that, once scrambled, you are a spectator. Remember that ideally, your shield level will equalize somewhere above 33%, and only extra DPS will force it below that. Watch the rate of your shield drop, and make sure you find the equilibrium point. Passive tanking is an all or nothing affair. Against a constant level of DPS, your tank will either hold forever, or it will break, and there’s nothing you can do to influence the outcome. Also remember, when you drop below 33% your tank will get weaker. I have only once ever seen a passive tank recover from below 33%, and it was a hair-raising experience. If this happens to you, remember that you can hit equilibrium below 33% too, but only if you’ve managed to eliminate damage sources after dropping past 33%. In this situation, the more shield you have, the more damage you can tank, so tank restoration can occur.
Beyond the Drake
So what happens with Command ships and Passive tanking? Well, neither the Vulture or the Nighthawk have any better tanking bonus than the Drake, and they have either 5 Med, 5 Low (Nighthawk) or 6 Med, 4 Low (Vulture), so the fitting layout is virtually identical.
The addition of T2 resists for Kinetic and Thermal is welcome, but both ships have lower Shield HP than the Drake, and one less rig slot, so it’s something of a tradeoff.
Regardless, we can compare stats. With maxed stats, T2 modules, and T1 rigs, the following can be achieved:
DPS tanked EM/Thermal Kinetic/Thermal Equal Mix
Drake 1,312 1,687 937
Nighthawk 1,485 2,551 1,272
Vulture 1,620 3,545 1,316
So we can see, the Command ships are a definite improvement on the Drake, especially when their T2 resists come into play.
So in conclusion, passive tanking is a great tool for tanking in almost any lag conditions, but be wary of using it for PvP. Bear in mind that the DPS on Caldari ships is weaker across the board than the other races (the downside for Caldari missiles and range superiority). Also, the above setups use active hardeners. Use of passive hardeners in PvP is highly encouraged, and will lower the overall DPS you can tank.
The Drake, and its high-tech cousins the Vulture and Nighthawk are tanking machines, but they do suffer from a lack of damage-dealing ability, and of course the traditional Caldari problems with tackling in PvP. So if you’re tanking a complex, or looking for an inexpensive ratting ship, the Drake is for you, and if you want to run Level 4 missions while reading a book, consider the Nighthawk. However, for those of you who run 10/10 Serpentis or Guristas complexes for a living, the Vulture shines like no other.
-Vandervecken Smith
