EVE New Citizens Q&A

The Drake is not renown for its DPS ability. Merely it's tank. With level 4 missions you kinda "need" a battleship (and/or battleship class damage) to chew through the rats efficiently.



Any "large" weaponry has trouble tracking and damaging frigates... cruise missiles are no exception. They are, however, quite effective at hurting medium to large targets.

For small targets you need to use drones (T2 drones are pretty much a prerequisite for larger ships) and/or employ some "utility" mods (e.g. stasis webbifier, target painter, etc).



Wait, what?? Outside of support skills, it takes a week to get Caldari Frig 5 and another week to get Assault Ship 4. You don't NEED to have every skill at level 5 to be effective.

edit: didn't read that part right... the Nighthawk is pretty much the same as a Drake... except with a better tank and slightly better DPS. Fun to fly, but not really what you need.



if you can [decently] use Heavy Missile Launchers then the frigates are not too much of an issue. Just kill them first while speed-tanking everything else.



Being able to use the Blackbird (and its T2 variants) will endear you to many allies/fleets and make you loathed by all of your enemies/targets. I hear nice things about the Hookbill too.

As mentioned before, a Raven is a cheap and efficient mission runner and ratter. Another path to train for could be a Tengu, although they're expensive. As you noticed, heavy missiles can hit frigates a lot easier than cruise missiles. T2 launchers allow you to use T2 missiles, which do a LOT more damage to battlecruiser and battleship rats - so it greatly reduces mission time.
Generally training for T2 weapons allows you to use T2 ammo, which does more damage or has a far greater range (like barrage for guns and scorch for lasers).

For the rest there's a lot of handy skills you can train to IV or V that will benefit all your ships, like:
> shield skills;
> capacitor skills;
> navigation skills (speed is also part of your tank) and spaceship command;
> fitting skills (electronics, engineering, weapon upgrades, adv. weapon upgrades) and rig skills;
> drone skills so you can use T2 drones;
> some social skills to increase your mission rewards.

Back in the day, I found the Cerberus and Nighthawk to be great mission ships. Yes, the damage output on both is significantly less than the Raven but they just tank so effectively that it makes mission running a little more fun.

Overall I found the Nighthawk to be great fun, uses heavy missiles and has a drone bay adequate for taking out frigs.

you would be better training for a nighthawk for missions

caldari suck for pvp other than the drake or ewar.

The Nighthawk is a nice ship but it takes very long to train (Cruisers V, Battlecruisers V, Leadership V) and doesn't do as much DPS as for instance a Tengu.
The one thing Nighthawks are used for a lot is L5 missions because they can fit a very nice passive tank which isn't as vulnerable to energy drains as Active tanking Tengus or Ravens.

For the rest it's true that Caldari only has a few outstanding PvP ships compared to Minmatar and Amarr but there's a few very useful ones indeed. Be prepared to be primaried a lot in your ECM ships though ;-)