Suit slots modify player’s armor to provide additional protection to a certain damage type, or utility in the form of increased speed or carrying capacity or ability power.

• Unlike weapons, Suit Slots need to be unlocked individually for each class.
• This guide only covers common-pool suit slots. Class-specific suit slots are covered in respective class’ guides.

Adrenaline Pump

Adrenaline Pump passively increases sprint speed by 10%, and it is available only to Light Assault, Infiltrator and Combat Medic. Has no upgrades and costs only 30 certs.

Some people swear by their pumps, but the majority’s opinion is that boost is too small to merit its use over other suit slots. The pump can be of interest to Stalker Infiltrators, so they can cover more ground while cloaked, and become a bit faster at melee attack lunges. 

Watch Wrel’s video review (outdated, pump is now also available to infiltrators and medics).

Advanced Shield Capacitor

Light Assaults have ASC fully certed and equipped by default.

Increase the regeneration speed of personal shields, which normally take 6 seconds to fully regenerate.

• Rank 1: Reduces the time it takes to fully regenerate shields by 2 seconds. 
• Rank 2: By 2.25 sec.
• Rank 3: By 2.5 sec.
• Rank 4: By 2.75 sec.
• Rank 5: By 3 sec.

Pros:

• Versatile, because personal shields protect you from all types of damage, including explosives and headshots.

Cons:

• Does not increase the maximum amount of damage you can take before dying.
• Does not provide any bonuses for the first engagement.
• Often it’s possible to retreat to a safe place to recharge shields, thus making ASC just a time saver, a convenience boost – you spend less time in cover, waiting for shield to regenerate, and more time in action.

Especially useful for:

• Heavy Assaults with Resist Shield, when playing in and out of cover. Resist Shield makes shields 54% more potent, and ASC allows them to recharge faster.
• For Engineers, who get reduced shield recharge delay by default.
• For very successful and experienced infantry players, who have no trouble dominating 1v1 fights, and just wish to be ready for the next engagement sooner.
• For any player that wishes to increase his uptime, and spend less time in cover, and more in the action. 

Advanced Shield Capacitor is useful for battles of medium size or greater – 24+ on both sides, because you will encounter more enemies and get a chance to expose to fire those quickly regenerated shields.

Nanoweave Armor

Heavy Assaults have nanoweave fully certed and equipped by default.

Nanoweave Armor provides 20% resistance to non-headshot damage of most bullet-type weapons. This significantly increases your survivability, which makes Nanoweave the recommended suit slot for infantry combat.

Ranks

1 Cert: Rank 1

Adds resistance to Small Arms, which includes vast majority of infantry primary and secondary weapons, as well as Kobalt, vehicle-mounted anti-infantry machinegun, and Engineer’s Anti-Personnel MANA Turret.

10 Certs: Rank 2

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds resistance to Heavy Machine Guns, which includes some of vehicle-mounted machine guns, such as Basilisk and Drake.

It’s worth noting that when talking about weapons with splash damage, such as Canister, Nanoweave will only reduce their direct damage, but not splash damage component.

50 Certs: Rank 3

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds resistance to Gatling Guns, which includes another portion of vehicle-mounted machine guns, notably Valkyrie’s noseguns, Wyvern and CAS 14-E, as well as Vulcan and Aphelion.

150 Certs: Rank 4

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds resistance to Soft Point Machine Guns, which includes Skyguard, Walker and all of the ESF noseguns, including anti-infantry noseguns. That said, Nanoweave will not reduce their splash damage, only direct hit damage.

1000 Certs: Rank 5

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds resistance to Anti Materiel Rifles, which currently includes only NS-AM7 Archer and its variants. 

Recommendations

Rank 1 is an incredibly efficient investment of certification points. Must have if you have any intention of participating in infantry combat.

Ranks 2 through 4 let you survive an occasional vehicle shot. However, most of those weapons are not dedicated anti-infantry weapons, so you should not come under fire from them too often. And the few weapons that are dedicated anti infantry, draw most of their power from explosive splash damage, which is not resisted by Nanoweave. Get Rank 4 for your main classes, if you can spare the certs. 

Rank 5 is effectively a waste of certs, since Archer is already so ineffective against infantry, especially with body shots. Don’t get it unless you own it already. 

Mechanics

Damage resistance is not applied to headshots. Damage resistance does not stack with Heavy Assults’ Resist Shield ability or with Infiltrators’ Nano-Armor Сloaking. Instead, highest resistance is used. 

Damage resistance is applied to bonus health from overshields created by Heavy Assault’s Nanite Mesh Generator / Adrenaline Shield.

An important thing to understand is that 20% damage reduction translates into 25% increase of your effective health and shields:

Effective Health = Health / (1 - Damage Resistance)
1250 = 1000 / (1 - 0.2)


However, the increase in survivability is even more significant if you look at Bullets-to-Kill values:

Weapon Damage	BTK Increase
200	40%
167	40%
143	33%
125	29%
112	38%

And that’s when talking about weapons within their maximum damage range. Weapon damage degrades. So in ranged combat, the difference will be even greater. 

Having Nanoweave almost guarantees you won’t be oneshotted by pump action shotguns, unless a perfect hit was achieved.

Sometimes, having Nanoweave can be the difference between taking some health damage or taking only shield damage. It is an important subtlety, because if you take health damage, you will need to look for a medic, use a med kit to max out your health, or run with lower total HP, which will of course decrease chances of your survival in the firefight. Using a Regeneration implant solves this problem for the most part, though.

ASC vs Nanoweave

In infantry combat, ASC is weak. Whatever advantage you get by having your shields up faster, only lasts for a few seconds compared to higher effective HP of Nanoweave. Unless you specifically adapt your playstyle to take advantage of that short time period, ASC is a convenience slot, and nothing more.

That said, having fresh shields sooner can help you survive things like grenades, rockets, knives or even a stray headshot – all of which ignores nanoweave.

People tend to love their ASC, it’s extremely addictive. The reason for that is that when you play without ASC, the full 12 seconds it takes to regenerate shields feel like an eternity, and you think “god, wish I had ASC right now”. Without the shields you feel naked, with shields you feel safe, and ASC allows you to get that feeling faster. 

But you have to understand, that unless you take more damage in a time frame between 6 seconds and 12 seconds after you first took damage, ASC was worthless, it didn’t do anything for you, and that feeling of safety is only a placebo.

The main argument against Nanoweave is that it doesn’t reduce damage from headshots, and “every good player goes for headshots only”. But it is by far not always optimal to go for headshots only.

And according to my another sketchy analysis, taking a couple of headshots will not automatically make Nanoweave completely useless:

• If you take just a couple of headshots, nanoweave will most likely help you survive at least one bullet more.
• If you take three headshots or more, chances are nanoweave will not help you, or you will be dead.

Naturally the more headshots you take, the less helpful nanoweave is.

Flak Armor

Engineers have Flak Armor fully certed and equipped by default.

Flak Armor reduces blast damage you take from explosive weaponry, like grenades, rockets, tank shells and AP mines. Similarly to Nanoweave, each new Rank of Flak Armor provides resistance to additional damage types.

Ranks

1 Cert: Rank 1

Adds 50% damage resistance to splash damage from grenades and other common explosions. This includes splash damage from vast majority of sources, including vehicle weapons and rocket launchers. Only exceptions are C4 and Tank Mines.

Reducing the Indirect Damage component is enough to survive a direct hit from many tank cannons, but not all of them.

10 Certs: Rank 2

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds 20% resistance to direct damage from Light Anti-Vehicle Weapons, which includes most of vehicle weapons that are often used against infantry, like ESF Rocket Pods, Fury, Marauder and PPA.

50 Certs: Rank 3

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds 20% resistance to direct damage from Infantry-Based Rockets, which includes all of Heavy Assault’s Rocket Launchers and Light Assault’s Rocklet Rifle.

This lets you survive a direct hit from a Decimator rocket.

150 Certs: Rank 4

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds 20% resistance to air to ground explosives. The list of affected weapons is fairly short and none of them are commonly used against infantry at the moment.

1000 Certs: Rank 5

In addition to previous rank benefit, adds 50% resistance to explosive damage from C4 and Tank Mines.

Recommendations

Rank 1 is an incredibly efficient investment of certification points. Must have if you consistently get annoyed by explosive damage, or when fighting vehicles.

Rank 2 is useful, as it protects against popular secondary vehicle weapons, such as Fury, Marauder and PPA. Keep in mind that Flak Armor will not reduce Canister’s direct damage, and its indirect damage is already reduced by Flak Armor 1.

Rank 3 can be sometimes useful as it will allow you to survive a direct hit with Decimator, which is commonly used in close quarters by veteran Heavy Assaults.

Rank 4 is useless.

Rank 5 is expensive, but useful.

Mechanics

It’s important to realize that weapons with explosive damage usually have two damage components: direct and indirect:

• Direct damage is dealt only when the player is directly hit by the projectile.
• Indirect damage is dealt on direct hits, or when the player is close enough to the location of the direct hit. 

Flak Armor 1 specifically reduces Indirect Damage of most weapons, while Ranks 2 through 4 add additional resistances to weapons’ direct damage. 

Example: 

• The player is being directly hit by a Decimator Rocket.
• It deals 975 Direct Damage and 350 Indirect Damage.
  • Total: 1325. Player is killed.
• Flak Armor 1 reduces the Indirect Damage component by 50%, from 350 to 175.
  • Total: 1150. Player is killed.
• Flak Armor 3 also reduces the Direct Damage component by 20%, from 975 to 780.
  • Total: 955. Player can survive.

Tips and trivia:

Flak Armor is effective when used in tactical squads that move together in a tight pack. Flak Armor protects such squads from grenades, that could otherwise wipe out half a squad. PlanetSide 2 can have huge battles packed into small bases, and large groups of people tend to clump up in choke points. If you’re one of those people, you better have Flak Armor on, because sooner or later you’re bound to get exploded.

That said, bullets are by far the most common cause of death for infantry, so take that as you will. Some people just get annoyed from blowing up on mines and random grenades, and to some people mental sanity is worth more than statistical success.

Flak Armor reduces damage from your own explosives, which can be useful in some situations.

When you hit a target protected by flak armor with explosives, you will be notified by a special icon near your crosshair.

Grenade Bandoleer

Each rank increases your grenade carrying capacity by one.

• Rank 1: Can carry a total of 2 grenades, unlock cost of 100 certs
• Rank 2: Can carry a total of 3 grenades, unlock cost of 150 certs
• Rank 3: Can carry a total of 4 grenades, unlock cost of 500 certs

Grenade bandoleer sits good on skilled, opportunistic player, because he can bypass enemy lines, circle around from behind, and bombard masses of stationary enemy infantry from behind. Single Frag Grenade often wounds, but rarely kills, but if you lob three or four of them close together, you will be sure to get some kills.

Grenade Bandoleer is mostly useful in big battles, like 48+ on both sides, when people tend to clump up in doorways and tight corridors. 

Grenade bandoleer is most often used in conjunction with Revive Grenades by Combat Medics, but it’s fairly useful for all classes. Note that running with 3 or 4 grenades plus other utility consumables can drain your nanites quickly.

Ammunition Belt

Increases the amount of ammo you can carry by one magazine per rank, up to 4 additional magazines. Heavy Assaults only have 2 ranks of Ammo Belt.

Ammo Belt stacks nicely with Extended Mags weapon upgrade, meaning that you’ll get more rounds per Level of the Ammo Belt if you have Extended Mags installed.

Ammo Belt for Engineer is a sort of inside community joke. It’s completely useless, because Engineer can refill his ammo at any point by using his Ammo Pack ability.

It’s not that useful to other classes either. Usually you can find an ammo pack or a terminal to resupply. If you can’t find neither of those, then you have to ask yourself “What the hell am I doing here, alone, in a middle of nowhere?”, and you can always just redeploy. Ammo Printer implant further makes Ammo Belt obsolete. 

Ammo belt has a couple of niche uses:

• For skilled snipers, who don’t really need a defensive suit slot, and can easily run out of ammo once they get in a good position. If they redeploy, they will have to spend a lot of time getting back into a good position, and fight can easily be over by that point. 
• For stalker infiltrators, using their pistols to engage enemies. Many pistols have limited amounts of spare ammo, and stalkers arguably value their implant slots more than suit slot.

Here’s Wrel’s grenade bandoleer and ammo belt video review: