Its all in your head

A break from ships!  This post will be going over capsule fittings, i.e. implants

You should almost always have implants.  Even in nullsec or wh space, put things in your head.  https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/implants/ is a good website for looking up implant set prices.

A good trick for finding implants for a certain slot is  to open up eft, and type "-X0Y"  Replace X with the slot you are looking for, and Y with the strength of the implant, e.g. -705 would come up with all 5% implants for slot 7.  Note that this does not come up with named implants, such as Zor's Hyper Link or Shaquil's Speed Enhancer.

For slots 1-5, you have 3 choices - Learning implants, genolution implants, or pirate implants.  Learning implants get you more skillpoints.  You only need the implants corresponding to the skill you are training.  Genolution and pirate implants function as learning implants with extra abilities.  For implant sets, each implant in the set increases the effect of each other implant in the set.

Genolutions are awesome implants, and come in 2 sets.  CA-1 and CA-2 are cheap, 3 and 4 are very expensive.  You do not need 3 and 4.  1 and 2 give you extra fitting room and extra capacitor.  Adding in 3 and 4 gets you extra shield, armor, speed and agility.  Like pirate implants, each genolution implant boosts the power of the others.

Pirate implants come in lots of different sets, with prices ranging from under 100M, to several billion.  Pirate implants use slot 6 in addition to slots 1-5.  Pirate sets come in 3 levels - High Grade, Mid Grade and Low Grade.  You can mix between different levels.  For a ghetto HG set, you can combine HG 1-5 with a MG omega.  This gives a bonus between HG and MG.

Crystal/Slave/Snake: These are the big name, expensive implants.  Crystals increase the amount of shield you get from shield boosters. Slaves increase armor hp.  Snakes increase your speed.   There is not a lot of subtlety in using them, apart from the fact that the speed boost from snakes is in effect a tank bonus, via mitigation and range control.  Slaves can make it a bit easier to manage an active armor tank, by increasing your buffer. 

Jackal, Spur, Grail, Talon: There are 4 kinds of implants, corresponding to the 4 races. The LG implants give a flat bonus to sensor strength, the HG give a % bonus.  Unlike all other sets, partial LG and partial HG sets do not stack with each other.  The LG sets are particularly cheap, and great to use on frigates.  Since the LG set is additive, not multiplicative, you do not lose a whole lot by having no omega implant.



Talisman: This gives a boost to neut and nos cycle time.  A neut with talisman implants will cost more cap to use, but also neutralize more capacitor.  The MG set is cheap, and is quite effective even on ships with a single neut, like a rifter or thrasher.

Ascendancy: This is a rather new implant set, which gives a large increase to warp speed.  The MG set is pretty cheap.  Like nomads, they are popular with freighter pilots.  They also have uses for combat ships, particularly for battleships, which warp at almost reasonable speeds with a set of these in.

Halo: Halos give a reduction to signature.  They are one of the cheaper implant sets, and are often compared to snake implants.  Snake implants give more tank than halos IF you are moving near full speed.  For many situations, like a close orbit, snakes give no benefit, and halos end up being extremely effective.  MG halos are my default implant set if I dont know what I am going to be flying, or where I will be going.

Virtue: These come in only LG and MG levels.  They give a boost to probing strength.  The main use is in probing down linking t3s, who can be otherwise unprobeable.

Centurion: These come in only LG and MG levels.  There is not much to say about these.  They give a bonus to ewar range, but since ewar already has such ridiculous ranges, nobody uses these implants.  They are also quite rare, coming from a LP store only accessible from a single agent in NPC nullsec.

Harvest: Another LG and MG only set.  You occasionally see highsec miners suicide ganked with a set of these in.  The bonus is only to mining laser range, and is entirely useless except to miners too lazy to move towards the asteroids.

Nomad: Yet another LG and MG only.  Nomads increase ship agility.  The most common use of them is on freighter pilots.  For combat pilots, snakes are almost always better.

Edge: Last, and certainly least, is this MG and LG only set.  It reduces booster side effects.  The set is nearly worthless.

Slot 6: Apart from the pirate omega implants, good choices here include fitting implants (eg- and ee-) (both pg and electronics), navigation (nn-) (acceleration control is worse in comparison, it affects only mwd speed), small gun damage, large missile damage, and active armor cycle time (RS-).  The armor cycle time implant makes your armor reps cycle faster, costing more cap but repairing your armor more quickly.  There is also the EO- implant here, which gives capacitor recharge.  Shaqil's speed enhancer is also in this slot, but is quite expensive at the moment.  It gives a large speed boost, comparable to partial snakes.

Next, we have slots 7-10, which is where you fit hardwiring implants, and mindlinks (in slot 10).  Mindlinks modify the warfare leadership skills.  Hardwirings give bonuses to different attributes, and are named as follows: ImplantName XX-S0%.  Implantname is the long name, like "Medium Hybrid Turret".  XX is the first letter of each word in the skill the implant modifiers, like EM- for evasive maneuvering.  S is the implant slot, like 6.  0 is a dummy letter, it just spaces the slot # from the implant amount.  So a full implant name might be Shield Management SM-703.  This is a 3% shield management implant, in slot 7.  There are also a few named implants, which I list at the bottom.

Slot 7: Good choices here include: Gun Tracking (MR-), Agility (EM-), Shield HP (SM-), Medium missiles, Gun Falloff (TA-).  There are also a few RR implants that reduce capacitor use, which can be useful in marginally cap stable fits.

Slot 8: The best implant for this slot is the Zor's custom navigation hyper link.  (Make sure its the hyperlink, not the useless normal link).  This gives another speed boost.  Other choices for this slot include medium gun damage, hull hp (MC-), Capacitor (EM-) and missile application (GP-)

Slot 9: Slot 9 has all gun damage (SS-), all gun rate of fire (GF-), armor repair amount (RP-). Gun optimal (ST-), missile application (TN-) and small missile damage implants.

Slot 10: Here you find the leadership mindlinks, large gun implants, Armor hp (HG-), all missile rate of fire (RF-), as well as a collection of mining implants.  An extremely niche fitting implant is also found here; the weapon upgrades (WU-) can save a tiny bit of CPU, making an otherwise impossible ship fitting work.

I have listed mostly combat implants up above.  Slots 6,7,8 also have probing implants (AP-, AQ-, AR-)

Unusual implants:

Slot 6: The numon family heirloom is like a 7% version of the RS implants.
Slot 6: Shaqil's Speed enhancer gives an 8% speed boost.
Slot 7: Michi's excavation augmentor gives a boost to mining yield.
Slot 7: Zor's Custom navigation link (NOT HYPERLINK) is here for completion, its gives a rather useless +10% to afterburner duration (that is, the afterburner cycles more slowly)
Slot 9: Pashan's turret customization mindlink is like a 7% version of the GF- implant
Slot 10: Pashan's turret handling mindlink is like a 7% version of the LE- implant.
Slot 10: The imperial navy modified noble implant gives 3% armor hp and 3% repair amount.
Slot 10: Whelan Machorin's Ballistic smartlink is identical to the 5% rapid fire implant.