Step one: Get Madrugar then it should explain itself from there.

skill into armour adaption and and get active harderners fit two and fit the igl repper and 180mm nano-fibre plates.

The igl repper?

The cheapest one pg/cpu wise. I thought it was called igl something.

step two: use it as bait and wait

I thought tanks sucked why are you telling this guy to keep skilling into them. I thought most of you would rather get a respec to skill out of them.

In spite of my advice to run Armour Tanks right now, I still run Shield Tanks because of several factors:

1. They look cool.
2. They're fun even if they die way too easily.
3. I have hope that eventually CCP might start to take the idea of DUST seriously and actually fix a few of the really obvious flaws we've been pointing out to them since they broke the game for "LOLRelease 5/14"

Well, yea, but they are trying to do that in 1.5 The only thing they really don't need that many Caldari Pilots claim they need is more speed.

Some people who ask for more speed are saying that as shield tanks, our base speed should be higher because Gallente are armour. I don't agree with that, but the imbalance is real, and the speed reduction was taken too far. Gallente HAVs can fit a couple of armour plates and still outpace the Caldari HAV while having more HP as well as a slight edge in speed. No, they don't need to increase our speed to outpace Gallente, but yes, a small buff in that area would help.

More important is the lack of PG and resultant inability to competently fit anything but Missile Turrets when Railguns are supposed to be one of the primary Caldari technologies. All HAVs are short of the mark on fitting capabilities, but the Caldari more than Gallente. A major part of the problem is the lack of any HAV hulls above Standard, which really needs to be addressed.

Best advice I can give - at least until the upcoming major review of vehicles (about which I'm very concerned and not too hopeful) is to stick with your armour. Sica/Gunnlogi are much worse options overall than Soma/Madrugar given the current state of the game.

Keep running with what you have, because as fragile as you still are, you're still in a better position than some of us.

I usually run Caldari, but I have a friend who does Gallente HAVs, and his Soma can outrun my Sica while also taking more hits than I do, even though the weapons being used are anti-armour and I'm a shield tank.

Dispite all the tears on the forums, tanks arnt really in a bad place right now, with the proto modules they gonna be sweet

Hit and run tactics is what its about, just because its a tank, dosent mean it can "tank" a ton

for the 300k sp it cost, you might as well unlock maddy if you have got the main amour skills up to 3, core skills carry over for all vehicals, so naturally they not wasted by updating, i imagine the amarr tanks will use shield and amour like the dropsuits, so you might as well go the full monty for survivability

but generally, i play tank just like dropsuit, if under heavy fire, gtfo, missiles, while not everyones cuppa tea, are fecking awesome for taking out av, the range along with the ohk means you can duel a forge gunner \ swarmer at quite a distance

dont sit in or drive around using the zoomed in option to much

situational awareness > av