Rigs - are they worth it?

15/02/2007

With Kali came rigs, and with rigs came new possibilities in tanking. The most important rigs for tanking are the capacitor, armour and shield rigs, with capacitor rigs being arguably the single most important type of rig in the game. Aside from passive tanks, your tank depends entirely on your capacitor output. In shield tanks, the normal state of affairs is that your shield tank will be capable of metabolising a lot more energy than you can feasibly generate and so your tank will be limited by your capacitor. Similarly, in armour tanks you can run extra armour repairers if you have additional capacitor to do so. This is why I would place the capacitor rigs as the most important rigs in the game and is why they are the best selling rigs out there.

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There are two capacitor rigs, the Capacitor Control Circuit which provides 15% increased recharge rate (yes, it's as good as a cap recharger) and the Semiconductor Memory Cell, which provides 15% increased capacity. The Semiconductor Memory Cell increases capacitor/second generation by 15%, however the Capacitor Control Circuit increases it by 1/0.85, which is 1.1765. This means the Capacitor Control Circuit actually increases capacitor/second generation by 17.65%, which is better than the semiconductor memory cell. This and the fact that the semiconductor cell costs more in terms of components to build leads me to reccomend the Capacitor Control Circuit for most ships.

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Most, but not all. Capital ships, which are primarilly killed by neutralising their capacitor to cause their tanks to fail, may benefit more from having +15% capacitor than from the additional capacitor/second increase that the 15% recharge rig would bring. Indeed, any ship will gain a certain amount of resistability to nosferatus by using the capacitor amount rig over the capacitor recharge one. This resistability comes in the form of taking a little longer for the effects of nos to debilitate your ship, as the capacitor removed will be a much lower percentage of your total capacitor than if you had gone for the recharge rigs.

The next set of rigs are the armour rigs. I love my armour, I really do. Ignoring the resistance rigs for a moment (I'll come back to those), there is a rig which increases rate of repair 15%, another that increases repair amount by 15% and another that increases armour amount by 15%. The final one decreases remote rep cap use by 20% (but does not affect capital modules). The remote repair rig would be extremely useful on ships such as the onieros which already get a bonus to remote repairer capacitor use. Two of these tech 1 rigs, coupled with the cheap 3% hardwiring implant and the onieros bonus at level 4 logistics, your remote repairers will be using approximately 25% of the normal energy usage. The armour amount rig has very limited usefulness and I have yet to see anyone really find a situation where another rig wouldn't outperform it. The other two rigs, however, are quite useful...

As with the capacitor rigs, the 15% rate of repair rig does not increase DPS tanked by 15% but by 17.65%. However, it comes with the drawback of making your repairer use up 17.65% more capacitor/second. When compared with the repair amount rig, which multiplies DPS tanked by 15%, it is most often not worth spending all that extra capacitor for that extra little extra bit of tanked damage. The decreased cycle time rig has the advantage of making smaller repairers more useful on larger ships but again you're almost surely going to get more benefit out of a capacitor rig or repair amount increase rig. The cycle time rig DOES have the advantage of decreasing burst damage by decreasing the time between repair cycles but this is usually not a major factor on plated ships or ships with a decent amount of HP.

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Finally, we have the shield rigs. Among these are are rigs to increase recharge rate of the shields, decrease powergrid need of shield upgrades, decrease capacitor usage of shield boosters by 10%, decrease booster cycle time and increase shield HP. While there is no booster amount increase rig, the cycle time rig suffers the exact same problems as the armour version and should be avoided. The booster capacitor decrease rig is likely to be useful, however if 2/3 or more of your capacitor generation is being spent on shield boosting, you're better off with a capacitor recharge rig. The real bonuses here are the remaining two rigs - the recharge rate and shield amount rigs. Combined with Tech 2 shield power relays, people are starting to make some passive shield tank setups that can outdo normal active tanks... and that scares me slightly. There are vultures out there... out-tanking The Hardmobile without using capacitor. eep.

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So what about those resistance rigs? They surely aren't useless, are they? That's right, they're useless. CCP released these rather anticipated rigs and Tuxford quite promptly nerfed them by adding a stacking penalty. The rigs only give 30% to one resistance, meaning that to compete with a 15% cap recharge rig or a 15% repair amount rig, that 30% increase in resistance would need to allow you to tank approximately 15% more damage per second. Without a stacking penalty, this would occur whenever you had already high resistances to the damage type the rig resists against, making it extremely useful. WITH stacking penalty, this happens very rarely. If you already have a high resistance, that means either it's naturally high due to T2 resistances or you've got at least one hardener running.

If the latter is the case, this instantly relegates your rig to second place and it gets hit with stacking penalty. 87% effectiveness for being the second module lowers this rig to 26.1%. That's 26.1% resistance to a single damage type out of four, hardly worth a rig slot that could get you a flat 15% to DPS tanked, regardless of resistance. If you have another module affecting that resistance, it's down to 17.1%, not even worth using. Since you can't use the resistance rigs to increase your resistance a fair bit against something you're already resisting against, the only time when this rig would be useful is if you are not resisting against that specific damage type. So say we're running a PvP tank and using rigs to cover the explosive resistance, that would make sense, right? Wrong. Three explosive rigs would be just a tiny bit more effective than a single Tech 2 explosive hardener.

Instead, in those three rig slots, you could have put some modules to do a LOT better than that. 3 rig slots on a tech 1 ship can give you 45% more capacitor and 45% more cap per second (through cap amount rigs), 62.83% more capacitor/second (through cap recharge rigs) or 45% more DPS tanked through repairer amount rigs. Don't bother with resistance rigs, just go ahead and fit something more useful like capacitor rigs or repair amount rigs.

I hope this guide has helped you understand how rigs can integrate into your tanking setup. I only covered Tech 1 rigs here as Tech 2 rigs are expensive to build and the bpcs are quite rare.