Shield Penetration From Various Sources

farshore

One of the things from the Skill Revamp that didn't really click with me was how Shield Penetration was to work. As I understand it, Shield Penetration allowed attacks to by-pass the shields to a certain degree. Things like Energy Modulation, various Doff procs, and traits let people focus on builds that would try to get around troublesome shield tanks.

But now, I've read that shield penetration is completely different now? It no longer penetrates shields, but instead reduces the resistance of shields to attacks? Does that mean Directed Energy Modulation is a good skill for breaking shield tanks now or is it doing the same thing it's always been doing? Bypassing shields and letting a percent of damage directly hit hulls?

quammen

There are two different skills:
- shield penetration (Suliban Doff, self-modulating fire, nukara trait, DEM, intense focus) does exactly what you descriped, it bypasses shields
- shield weakening (skill tree, endothermic inhibitor beam) does the same thing, armor penetration does. It applies a debuff to shield resistence to your weapons, so you do more damage to shields)

DEM should work like before, circumventing shields. To break shield tanks, you have now two possibilities. Drain their shields via weapon fire, shield drain etc or by attacking their hull by shield pen effects. The latter might be somewhat more potent because you can get high shield pen rather quickly while shield weakening effects aren't that common.