Overheating your modules increases their performance for a short amount of time. This makes a real difference in a few situations:

• Improving your speed for getting to your anchoring position
• Improving your DPS for winning contests (extremely important)
• Improving your tank when targeted by substantial numbers of Sansha
• For logistics: saving pilots who dip low into shields/armour by temporarily increasing the HP repaired per second.

There are multiple skills that help with overheating modules. They reduce damage, increase repair abilities and decrease repair costs. Getting each of these skills to level 4 should be a priority.

Any time your FC specifies, you should overheat. In addition, there are times when you should overheat without being prompted, these include:

• Overheating Adaptive Invulnerability Fields - If you take full agro in a TCRC or on the final wave of an NRF, you should overheat your invuls to temporarily improve your tank and improve your survivability.
• Overheating your MWD - In certain situations, you may want to get to anchor positions faster, such as when you take a gate and need to catch up with the fleet.
• Overheating your Shield Reps (Logistics only) - If the person you are trying to keep alive is taking lots of damage, and they need to be kept alive long enough for the DPS ships to kill some rats.

Overheating is a complex mechanic with a lot of weird behaviour, just keep the following things in mind to be successful:

• Whenever you overheat a module, there is a random chance that heat damage will occur at the end of its cycle.
• The longer you overheat something, the higher the chance there is that it will take heat damage.
• Heat damage can affect both the module itself and adjacent modules in the same rack (if your MWD has an invul on either side, all 3 have a chance of taking damage when you overheat the MWD).
• By turning heat on for a number of cycles and then off for a cycle you can give time for the modules to “cool down” between the heat cycles. For example, on a TCRC contest you may hear the FC ask for Vindicators/Nightmares to heat “3 cycles on, 1 cycle off”. This means you turn your overheat on for 3 cycles of the module, then leave it off for 1 cycle to cool down, then back on and repeat.
• Heat damage occurs at the end of a module's cycle.