EFT - Understanding it

[Gottaa]

I installed EFT today, and am trying to understand it, I've put in my current Rifter with everything it has. and I'm cap stable at 79%, with damage control 2, webifier, after burner and all weapons firing, but once I turn on the small armour repairer the cap last 49s. And everyone keeps saying about being cap stable, is that even possible as an armour tanker, or does that assume you only need to turn the repairer on occasionally ?

Also looking at trying to refit my 200mm armour plate, and it shows I'm 5 short on cpu (think it's cpu, the second down from the top right), how can I use EFT to tell me what skills I should get to cater for fitting 200mm armour ?

 

[Darakor]

If you cannot keep the repper running permanently, pulse it. Turn it on and off as needed. But generally speaking, yeah, if you want to survive any length of time, you need to be cap stable for pve. Otherwise a longer fight will leave you dead in the water with no chance to warp out, as this costs cap as well.

The skills that allow you to fit more stuff are Electronics, Mechanics and Engineering. Generally, if you look at the info of an item in EFT, it will show you what skills can be used to affect the item.

 

[Gottaa]

going with shields I can be cap stable with no trouble, but I'm wondering if that's dealing with as much damage.

And looking at my ship with all skills at 5, just with the armor repairer 2 running I only get 1m 33s :/

Hmm armor repairer 1 and it's the same story, civilian repairer and I'm cap stable ... I'm confused

Okay 200mm armor, and civilian armor repairer and I stay cap stable, is that good enough ? the civlian one really doesn't do as much when repairing armor

 

[Requiel]

As well as the basic cap use skills there are a ton of skills that affect the cap use of specific modules that you should look into such as Fuel Conservation for your afterburner, Controlled Bursts for guns, Propulsion Jamming for webs and so on.

You don't need to be cap stable and you won't normally be running everything at the same time - certainly for bigger ships you won't always have the AB running and armour reppers should only be running intermittently too. However you should be able to last long enough for a fight. In PvE you can control the length of your encounters so being absolutely cap stable isn't so important - if you're gettign dry you can always warp out - but you should aim to have as much staying power as possible.

Look into things like Capacitor Control Circuits (rigs), as well as the usual cap modules if things are tight.

 

[Requiel]

Okay 200mm armor, and civilian armor repairer and I stay cap stable, is that good enough ? the civlian one really doesn't do as much when repairing armor

Armour repper I and II use the same amount of cap at the same rate (40GJ every 6 secs, modified by skills), the only difference is the amount repaired and the fitting requirements.

The civilian repper only uses 10GJ every 9 seconds so it's about 1/6th of the cap use of the other variants.

 

[Darakor]

Don't ever use a Civian anything Gottaa. They are really really bad and only slightly better than having nothing at all in the slot...

 

[Zed]

TRy dropping in small capacitor control rigs in your rig slots and see how that effects your cap.

My domi is cap stable with two large armour reppers and active hardeners (X4) running constantly. But i have a mid full of cap recharger ii's and cap rigs.

 

[Gottaa]

fuel conservation helps quite abit, the small capacitor control circuit adds a chunk, but are rather expensive

 

[Gottaa]

Right, Fuel conservation, jury rigging and three of those rigs and if I turn off the webifier I'm cap stable

 

[Gottaa]

Just wondering, is there something more useful I could put in place than the webifier, or is it better to just turn it off when I'm in trouble ? I do use the webifier in combat but never sure how much it helps

 

[Zed]

try a mission without using it see if its harder to complete.

 

[Requiel]

Easier still turn it off and watch your damage notifications. If you suddenly start missing or doing a lot less damage then you need the webber.

With most close range guns (Autocannons, Blasters, Pulse Lasers) and reasonable skills (particularly a few levels of Motion Prediction) you shouldn't need it and missile ships don't need one at all vs NPCs (missiles don't need to track).

 

[Gottaa]

Turned it off and it didn't make a noticable difference, which means I have one mid slot free, any suggestions ?

 

[Requiel]

AB if you don't already have one.

Cap Recharger or Cap Battery if you're finding you run out of cap too quickly.

If you're shield tanking another hardener, booster, extender is a good plan

If you're finding that the bigger ships are hitting you too hard try some electronic warfare like a tracking disruptor to make yourself harder to hit

Sensor Booster if you want to increase your lock range

Tracking computer if you want to increase the range and tracking speed of your guns

 

[Gottaa]

I have AB already, and looking at thing the tracking computer means I can keep everything running and still be cap stable, so will go with that.

One last unrelated thing, looking at Autocannons, what's the real difference betweeen the smaller and larger one's, by that I mean 125mm to the 200mm one, is it simple you'd fit smaller one's just for the smaller power/cpu usage ?

 

[Requiel]

As guns get bigger they do more damage, hit further out, fire more slowly and track worse. They also take more PG and CPU to fit as well as more cap to fire when that's relevant.

Looking at the 125mm, 150mm and 200mm T2 autocannons side by side in Evemon we can see that these are the differences:

 

[Gottaa]

Nice, didn't know until then you can shift click on items to compare like that, that's very useful ! Looking at those though wouldn't you always fit the 200mm one's as you won't get stuff less than 1km close usually anyway ? I guess on the medium/larger guns it is more important.

My thought for when I do go to cruiser is I have long range drones, and my guns will deal with the closer stuff that get's past the drones

 

[Requiel]

It's ctrl-click to select multiple items.

For very small guns like small ACs or small blasters, you're almost always going to be working in falloff anyway. The difference in optimals between the 125s and the 200s is only 240m which isn't a huge amount. The difference between the optimal+falloff for those two however is over a kilometre.

 

[Gottaa]

well usual windows behaviour, shift click does from one point to another, ctrl click to select each item singularly

And the difference is indeed more noticable in medium sized guns, now it's time to decide if I want to sit at a distance and blow things up, or go charging in. It must be said watching Dara's and Aciid's drones go to work on stuff I'm wondering if I can't just rely on drones for everything and just fit salvagers (I'd love to be able to do that, but not very safe I guess then if things go wrong)

 

[Darakor]

That would be pretty suicidal with the amount of drones you can currently control. When you get some more drone skills, you can later control up to 10 drones, I think, but also need to put something into the high slots that allows control of 1 more drone. So you will be able to build a complete drone boat, but I doubt whether you will still be able to salvage anything with it, considering you put 5 of those items into your high slots. Generally, IIRC Gallente ships lend themselves to drone strategies.

However, I would not be that impressed with the drone damage Aciiid's and my drones did, because we were also shooting at the same targets. And my turrets do waaaay more damage than my drones. For me, drones are essentially additional "free" damage as I currently only use drones that I looted from enemies, ie T1 drones.

Later, when I no longer lose quite that many drones, I will move on to T2 drones.