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A quick comparison for the curious, I hope I've done my math right.
Season 4 brought a much needed rework to Shield Battery Booster, a passive 3.5 second reduction to your shield recharge delay. When combined with either Improved Generator or Boosted Converter, the choice may not be immediately obvious.
First of all, for some ease of access here I've made some assumptions:
1) I'm not factoring manual heat dump, the default delay is 2.5 seconds. Manual Heat Dump multiplies this number by 0.65x, and scaled with heat stored starting at 50% your heat capacity. So a 50% heat capacity = 0.5x overheat duration. Graphing out the possibilities is a logistical nightmare, I'm too lazy for that.
2) That you're using Healthy instead of Overcharger. Overcharger increases your shield strength to 30 points instead of the base 25. The logic behind this being that, the less shield you have, the quicker you reach 100% of your shield by nature of having less of it that needs to be recharged.
3) That you're using either Boosted Converter or Improved Generator. Bigger Mineral base users aren't included here, you weirdos. If you're really curious about it, shove Improved Generator over by one second to the right.
Some things to note first:
Recharge Delay and Recharge Rate are not the same thing. Recharge delay is the downtime spent before your shields begin to recharge, your recharge rate is the amount of shields you gain per-second after your delay has expired. If you take any form of damage, you must run your delay again before your shield can continue to recharge.
Time is in seconds. Should've added that before I finalized.
The above graph is a simple 1:1 comparison of Boosted Converter in BLUE, and Improved Generator in RED.
Boosted Converter takes the base shield recharge delay of 7 seconds, adds an additional penalty of 2 seconds, but doubles your shield recharge rate. By default this rate is 3 shield per second. This doubles to 6 per second.
Improved Generator has no penalties associated with it, but leaves your recharge rate alone. All it does is shave 1 second of your base delay of 7, turning it to 6 seconds. That's it.
As an aside note, statistically speaking, Boosted Converter is actually better than Improved generator. Minus the overclock in question here, a recharge rate of 6 per second takes a 25 hitpoint shield from empty to full in just 4.16 seconds, add the recharge delay of 9 and you get 13.16 seconds from broken shields to fully charged. 9 + 4.16 = 13.16.
Improved Generator leaves you waiting for 6 seconds for your recharge to start, but you get the base rate of 3 shields per second once it actually starts. 6 + 8.33 = 14.33. So comparing them 1:1 on their own seems to indicate that Boosted Converter would be better. Except that you're shield-less for 3 additional seconds, and any damage forces you to run the delay again. Whether or not that's worth the slightly faster fully recovery time is for you to decide and isn't the point of this discussion. Moving on.
The Shield Batter Booster overclock rework for the DRAK-25 has added a passive 3.5 second recharge delay bonus, which appears to be flat, not proportional. 3.5 seconds regardless of the base delay, or any modifications made to it by taking Boosted Converter, Improved Generator, or not taking either (once again for you Bigger Mineral Bag creeps).
Stacked with Improved Generator (red), the base delay of 6s turns into 2.5s, which taken on its own is actually an incredibly generious and quite frankly rediculously low delay.
Meanwhile, our Booster Converter users will be pleased to know that 9 seconds minus 3.5 = 5.5 seconds, which is actually lower than someone using Improved Generator on literally any other class or overclock build setup by default on top of returning 6 shield hitpoints per second instead of the regular 3.
Pitted against each other, Booster's time from damage to fully recharged is as follows:
Delay: 5.5, Recharge 4.16. Total: 9.66s
Generator meanwhile:
Delay: 2.5, Recharge 8.33. Total: 10.83s
Here's where some nuance comes in, while the time taken to reach full charge is very handidly won by Booster, by over a second. This is where I wanted to bring back up the regular debate between the two: in an ideal situation, Booster is better. Assuming you can evade damage for the full duration of the delay, regardless of Shield Batter Booster or not. Fall damage, running over obsticles and hazards that hurt you like thorns imbeded in the ground, hot rock, radioactive crystals, and any other hazards which may not glyphid/mactera caused, on top of glyphid or mactera causes will force you to wait the entire duration again.
Zooming in on the first data point: 8.5 seconds. Where the lines overlap. This is the point where the additional recharge speed from Booster outpaces Generator. The amount of shield you will have recharged at this point is actually identical (hence the lines intersecting), and that amount is 18 total shield hitpoints. About 60% of your full capacity.
At and before this point, Improved Generator, is actually better. Why? Because no one plays perfectly. As previously mentioned with any source of damage potentially resetting your back to the start. Taking damage during your recharge is better with Generator between 2.5 and 8.5 seconds simply because you have more shield to tank damage for you. Using generator between 2.5 and 5.5 second seconds will grant upto 9 extra total hitpoints you have vs. someone using Booster who would have no extra hitpoints by the fact that their shields haven't begun recharging yet.
After 5.5 seconds, the additional hitpoints begins to tighten as Booster users regain their shields much quicker after they start recharging. Decreasing from a 9 point lead in favour of generator at 5.5 seconds down to zero at 8.5 seconds, which is where booster users outpace their generator counterparts.
And all for what? a 1.17s difference in total time spent waiting to reach 100%. So food for thought, a more cautious player may choose to take Generator over Booster, as any additional hitpoints you get or save from blunders during the recharging process may just be the difference between being downed and surviving the next hit.
Anyway, that's all I've got. If anyone's gone anything to add or I've made any errors, minor, major, feel free to obliterate me with them in the comments.
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