One of the great things about flying Minmatar ships is that you are blessed with a choice of damage types so you can try and pick apart the hole in your opponent’s tank. Of course, the Caldari have this option although because of the damage bonuses they get, its almost always better for them to chose kinetic ammo. Gallente drone ships get a choice too, but there are a lot of differences between the drone types and you only really see explosive (speed) and thermal (damage) drones on the field. With Phased Plasma, EMP, and Fusion all doing the same basic amounts of damage with the same range and tracking characteristics we Minmatar are blessed (or cursed) with real choice when it comes to ammo selection.

Let’s start this discussion of by taking a look at the damage distribution of Minmatar munitions. The plot above shows a breakdown of the damage done by the Republic Fleet variations of the various charges and also the advanced charges. For the sake of this discussion I am not going to look at range or tracking, that’s something for another time and I’m sure I’ll touch on it in the future. The obvious thing to take away from this chart is that there is basically a choice between EMP, thermal, and explosive damage with no strong kinetic option and no charge delivering a pure damage type. For the remainder of this post I am going to ignore the Hail column. This is because its range and tracking penalties make it all but unusable and in almost all practical applications it is out-damaged by the Republic Fleet variants. I will make a post with more detail on this in the future.

In the two charts above I have looked at how these munitions stack up against the raw T1 resist profile for shields and armour. Its pretty obvious that EMP is the best choice against shields and Fusion the best choice against armour. What happens if people patch up their resist hole, though?

With the EM hole patched then Phased Plasma becomes the default choice against shield tankers. Even after just one anti-EM screen reinforcer rig it is better to shoot with Phased Plasma. With two EM rigs and a thermal one things level out a touch but Phased Plasma still edges ahead so it is always a good choice against Caldari ships and other shield tankers who are likely to have patched their hole even with a single rig. That means things like Dramiels and shield Hurricanes for starters.

If we look at armour tankers then once again we see that with the explosive hole plugged, Phased Plasma becomes the best option. Because there is no ammunition choice with strong kinetic damage it doesn’t matter if they look to patch their second hole instead. So, against armour tankers that are likely to have patched their explosive hole (think dual-repair Myrmidons, battleships) then Phased Plasma becomes the best choice unless they have a thermal hardener as well.

In summary, then, Phased Plasma is an excellent ammunition choice against T1 shield tanking ships because it does excellent damage, even if they have made an effort to patch their EM hole. Against armour ships the choice is a bit more complicated and I would still usually opt for Fusion initially and then switch to Phased Plasma if you have a hard time breaking them or suspect an active hardener. For this reason I usually roam with Phased Plasma in my guns as a default load. This way I have a good chance of being able to deliver damage against any target (especially Dramiels and Sabres) that I might come across and need to fight in a hurry. Things get a bit more interesting when we look at T2 tanks, though.

Let’s start with Minmatar ships such as the Vagabond and Jaguar. These ships get a bonus to their EM and thermal resists to counter the Amarrian lasers they are designed to face. Because of this, Fusion is the best choice against a vanilla Minmatar T2 tank. In general advanced Minmatar ships favour a kiting approach and view their tank as just a hitpoint buffer so more often than not the holes are not patched. If they are though it is usually done by adding a kinetic and explosive resistance rig. Even if this is the case, Fusion is still your best ammo choice and you should load it up anyway. The only caveat that I will add here is that obviously these ships are fast and rangey so you might want to look at the extra range that Barrage offers while still having good damage if you are not confident that you will engage in Fusion range.

The Amarr are the natural enemy of Minmatar ships and as such their T2 ships have strong resistances against explosive and kinetic damage. You can clearly see how they counter-act the vast majority of the Minmatar munitions choices but they are still very vulnerable to Phased Plasma. Cruiser-sized and above ships are very likely to patch their biggest resist hole and with a single thermic hardener the advantage switches to EMP and this is a good choice against Zealots, Sacrileges, Guardians, etc.

Gallente T2 ships have very high kinetic and thermal resists making Phased Plasma completely useless against them. Instead Fusion becomes the ammunition of choice although if they opt to plug this hole then EMP takes over. A lot of ships like Ishkurs and Deimoses will plug this basic hole so I tend to always chose EMP against T2 Gallente ships.

Finally we come to Caldari who have a similar set of resists to the Gallente but with a much higher emphasis on thermal. Because of the sheer size of the EMP hole it is a very good bet that there is at least a resistance rig or two if not an active hardener covering that hole. In this case Fusion is your friend and will do surprisingly good damage.

Even more so than against T1 targets, this quickly devolves into an attempt to guess whether your opponent has filled their resistance hole or not. If you have the time then you can check the killboards and see how they fit their ships. This should allow you to pick exactly the right ammunition. What I wanted to show you here is that the choices can be slightly counter intuitive with EMP often being the best choice against Amarr and Gallente armour ships while Fusion gives you good damage against Caldari and Minmatar shield tankers.

This level of choice can be both a blessing and a curse. I was inspired to make this post by my friend Suleiman Schouaa asking what kind of ammo to load before various fights. Because I tend to roam with Phased Plasma loaded and only change when specifically needed the response was just a puzzled silence and in the subsequent fight we lost a bit of damage due to people switching out their ammo for something different. In general, though, I think sticking with Phased Plasma would have been a good choice. We would have been able to put good damage on both the shield tanking ships and their supporting Scimitars without having to switch. If it had been an armour gang then things would still have been good with nice damage against Guardians, Zealots, and other armour ships.

So in conclusion I’ve just bombarded you with a vast array of choices and decisions to make but my take home message would be that in gangs at least flexibility and therefore Phased Plasma is king. If you’re not sure what to load you won’t go far wrong with it and the situations where it is a terrible choice are relatively uncommon. At the end of the day its all a game of rock, paper, scissors but remember that paper is usually a good choice. (Actually I could probably ramble on quite a lot comparing RPS strategy to Eve ammo choice so I better stop now.)

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