EVE General Discussion

Except you are wrong, I'll take fw as an example :
- You need support skills (navigation, cap, shield, etc) not only your racial frig skill and weapon skill at 4
- Implant sets make a pretty big difference
- Off grid boosters too obviously
That's a shitload of skills to train for a new player, your example is realllllllllllllllllly specific (fighting an indy char is pretty rare), most people in fw have optimal skills.
So a new character can't solo pvp even in frigs for like 2-3 months, do you find this normal ?

If it's high sec pvp against pve fitted carebears it's not relevant.

Well... keep several things in mind when it comes to EVE pvp:
- EVE pvp can mean many different things:
Most people start by flying in groups, most people continue to PvP in groups as well and with groups in EVE basically as long as you can fly something, you will be of some use - if people ask you for maxed skills to join their fleet, they are jerks, just move on, you don't want to have anything with them anyway; basically if you can fly anything you are asset to most fleets (exceptions being stealth fleets and some strange stuff)
If you want to go into solo pvp, think a bit about what you want?
- You don't really need lot of skills to gank miners in high sec
- or to float cloaked in space and drop on top of someone (basically stealth bomber will do and it doesn't take that long to train to reasonable level and you definitely don't need at on level 5 - sure, it helps, but picking targets will decide on outcome of combat, not your torps doing 2% more damage)
- or to solo roam in (cheap) frig or destroyer in faction warfare space. Sure, you will die a lot, but face it - you will die a lot no matter your skills, and you will mostly die due to picking bad fight or being outnumbered (meaning picking bad fight). If you want more expensive stuff, you can always hop into faction frig or pirate faction frig, pick faction modules... even without maxxed skills; sure, tech 2 frigs are nice, but you won't be using them most of time and it is better idea to practice in t1 anyway; t2 modules are nice, but lot of your fit will be meta 3 and meta 4 anyway; do train for t2 weapons however, but until you do, meta4 + faction ammo does fine
- or hunt ratters / mission runners in whatever space - here hunt is all, you need half decent fit, lot of spare time and patience - if you manage to lock non-pvp ship down, it is usually as good as dead

what you won't be able to do without (lot of) training:
- fly battleship in battleship fleets: if mass scale fights are your thing, you might need to train one up; up to that, battlecruisers are fine and don't take that long to train (and no, you don't need them at V - you are in fleet to be bit more meat for the grinder anyway)
- fly capital: do you really want to fly one? :)
- consistently win 1v1 with 'elite pvpers': don't be bothered about this one, fair 1v1 in EVE is a myth: most people fly in groups, those who don't will use whatever they can to gain advantage, so if you really want to be competitive in mythical EVE solo fights, you will need skills, player skills, expensive stuff, 2+ alts (booster and cloaked alt/scanner/scout), more expensive stuff, enough cash to cover loss of all of that several times without being bothered and a LOT of spare time as even with all of listed, you will still want to avoid most of fights. Most important thing - your 'elite pvpers' won't enga
- probably some other stuff... :)

on to some typical myths:
- you want t2 weapons. It is more important for some weapon types, but you generally want it. Is it mandatory? nah, meta 4 will kill almost as good. So basically train it up when you have most of other skills you might want at IV
- you don't need navigation at V, or most of other skills at V either - train them if you want interceptor or whatever, don't bother otherwise. Sure, in perfect world pilot with all skills at 5 will beat one with all skills at 4 consistently. EVE is not perfect world, piloting errors will kill you more often the this difference in skills; foe's friends jumping on top of you will kill you even more often; fitting not optimal for situation will kill you just as often as your foe's friends... when you get enough player skills to get over these, you will have all your skills at V anyway
- fitting can be *****, agreed on that one; it is reason why most people fit meta modules (except for guns) - solves the issue
- most EVE players don't have skills maxed - contrary to popular belief, most characters are not 5+ years old. Also many people tend to fly stuff they are not fully skilled for (for various reasons - for example my frig skills are << my tengu skills; do you see me in tengu in faction warfare zones? nah, not really)

[Atron, Waaa no skills]

Internal Force Field Array I
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Local Hull Conversion Overdrive Injector I

Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Limited 1MN Afterburner I
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I

Modal Light Neutron Particle Accelerator I, Caldari Navy Uranium Charge S
Modal Light Neutron Particle Accelerator I, Caldari Navy Uranium Charge S
Modal Light Neutron Particle Accelerator I, Caldari Navy Uranium Charge S
[Empty High slot]

Small Auxiliary Thrusters I
Small Auxiliary Thrusters I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I

Tell me this is unusable for pvp or that it takes forever training for it and I'll tell you you're wrong. This is all you need to start doing pvp, you can even start without rigs.

Pvp starts already for very small things like point stuff, uncloak stuff, burn perches/escape points, scout gates/systems and before you are comfortable doing this the fit I just put there will be changed for a T2 one and a T2 frigate/rigs if you do it right.

Pvp is not all about big numbers on your screen and "waaaa 5416843153654163151 critical!!!" and you clearly underestimate what you can already do with a full T1 fitted ship and a 1 day old character

There is a downside to everything... The more SP you have the more expensive your clone becomes and after a time it becomes pointless to fly anything cheaper than that. Why risk your expensive skin in a cheaper hull that can get killed more easily?

The thing is, the skill system in EVE makes a compromise, yes the first few months will be challenging for new players, but in return, since you can only utilize a certain amount of your total SP while flying a ship, you will be on the same lvl with a much older player once you reach it. The older player will have more specializations ofc, but you can only fly one ship at a time besides let us cranky vets have some cookies as well..

I tend to agree with OP - when I was in FW I could take almost any fight within my class confidently because I knew that I would be able to deal more damage, tank harder, overheat for longer than 95% of my opponents.

Yes, any fitting has weaknesses but it's not like I wouldn't attempt to fix these if I felt it was necessary - skirmish links against kiting setups, info links against ecm boats, falcon against larger ships or groups, ...

As a low SP player you have to rely on extremely gimmicky fittings which nobody in their right mind will ever engage and still hope that your enemy has poor skills. You'll spend hours looking for fights that you can win - whereas I can enter a fight I should lose and emerge victorious by virtue of Thermodynamics V and drugs.

You can spend untold billions on a new character and still suck.

There's more to PVP than skillpoints.

Gee, I have been doing PvP (incl. solo) for years, and not one of my characters has all of these skills to lvl 5 (esp. the gun spec lvl5, which i almost always skip for some other new shiny skill).

You actually HAVE fallen into that lvl5-mentality-trap you so casually dismiss. People here have been very helpful and constructive (I am actually surprised how little trolling and flaming there has been), please try to have an open mind and listen to the voice of experience.

Only an elite pvp char (like, for the Alliance Tournament) would absolutely need to have skills like Thermodynamics, Spaceship Command or the Gun specialisation skill at lvl 5... that is bonkers.

Sure, it is nice to be able to overheat just a tad longer. And if you are OCD, you might welcome that additional 4%/2% of damage the later levels of the gun specialisation skills give you...

But we are talking effects of a few percentage points on one stat of your ships performance. It'll only be the deciding factor in one fight out of a hundred. Fights are lost in a myriad of ways, rarely is it balanced on a razors edge.

Where you are wrong is in insisting that you HAVE to have those skills at lvl 5. You don't. And many pilots before you haven't had them. Many pilots you'll be fighting WONT have them.

Oh sure, once in a blue moon you'll lose a fight that you might have won with better skills, but it won't be the deciding factor most of the time. Funnily, it is less of a deciding factor early on, because your real-life skills will be the deciding factor for your loss/win more often, because the swings will be greater. And when you do a lot of PvP, you'll improve much more by actual learing stuff, then by the progress of your SP and getting those lvl 4s/5s.

There are some ships where skills point matters more than others; I'd advise against drone-heavy setups until you have a decent grounding in drone skills, those are rather dependent on the SP invested (much more so than guns and missiles).

But i'd advise you to start pvp in T1 frigates and T1 cruisers and have fun. You neither need perfect skills (they all have some fitting room, much more so than T2 ships), nor should you wait for them (why wait?). After the recent T1 buffs, they are all quite competitive. T2 ships are usually more specialised and have much narrower set of conditions where they do well, more often than not, you should know what you are doing wtih them. T2 interceptors are a good example of a ship class that is not general purpose. (combat interceptors being better in a general role than fleet interceptors, yet still not a good choice for a beginner).

Spread around your SP until you have seen the various racial frigates (and destroyers) with the different T1 weapon systems. Fly them, lose them, get some kills. Then you'll be able to exclude some from your wishlist. Then do the same with T1 cruisers (minus some weapon/racial setups you start to dislike). Also specialise some in small T2 weapon systems you like. Only after you have a broad experience, start to truly specialize and chase skills like a specific gun specialisation beyond lvl 3.

The eve skill system is actually quite newbie friendly. Where other MMOs have skill trees, where that lvl 30 or 50 skill at the top can be a real boon... eve's skill system has diminishing returns. Going from lvl 1 to lvl 3 is just as big a boon as going from lvl 3 to 5, it is just way quicker. So usually you are (for a while) fine with training many skills only to lvl 3 or 4, only going deeper later on. Some lvl5 skills are a bigger deal, when they unlock further skills (the weapon spec kills being one example), but even those aren't necessary to get your feet wet - and very much on purpose have smaller bonuses. You only invest there when you intend to stay with that ship and weapon system for a while. You don't start training Medium Artillery Spec before you ever flew a cruiser/battlecruiser with the T1 versions and liked it... (not as a new character, at least).

But you don't need to fly at max speed, you need to fly fast enough to make your fit work...
It is more than possible in fact, given that you're fitting an Executioner, to fly too fast - meaning that your guns don't track and you end up doing very little damage.

You don't need "as much agility as possible", you need enough agility to keep your orbit speed where you need it to be at the distance you need to be at.
Your executioner needs agility less than the close range, active tanked Atron you're trying to kill because he needs to outmanoeuvre you in order to do any damage at all.



If you want to get full advantage then yes you would need the maximum available level of skill... and the maximum level of every related skill, and the right set of +6% and Pirate Implants, and a multilink command ship providing boosts - plus a couple of Titans in fleet also providing boosts (which is a heck of a long way to go to get the absolute maximum out of a T1 frigate...
But (most importantly) you need the experience in the ship which has allowed you to learn the skills you need as a player to fly it to the absolute edge of its envelope. In fact, once you have that experience and player skill, everything else is gravy.
The best way to acquire that experience, that player skill is to get out there, make hideous mistakes and learn from them - you will not acquire that vital experience by sitting in a station waiting for your skill queue to update.


Given that you're in a tank-free, kite Executioner I'm surprised you're worried about these... A slow bleed setup like that tends to slowly whittle away at the target's defences while ensuring that they can do nothing at all about it...
(Although given the range on the Pulse, even with Scorch, it doesn't really work as you're far too close for comfort to overheated scram range).
You aren't trying to kill something before your tank fails, your only concern is keeping your transversal high enough to avoid the target's response.



But again, you don't need to get the maximum out of your MWD, you just need to get enough out of it to make your fit work, you aren't trying to charge across two hundred clicks of open space to try to get the tackle and the warp-in on the sniper fleet, you only need enough to catch your prey before they can warp out.
You might find yourself outrun by other kite set-ups but if they're running away then you've already won.



Which is relatively viable in a T3...
But in most other ships you're only overheating for a short while anyway - you're cooking your MWD to get away from the fight you underestimated, you're cooking your disruptor for a cycle or two because your targets keep warping out just a moment before you can land it.
It's highly unlikely that you're going to want to cook your guns - and you're going to want to do it even less with T2 guns as they burn out faster anyway...
You're not going to need to overheat as a way of life - and you'll learn your target profiles more easily without overheating at all, for the odd incident where you need to turn something up to 11 Thermodynamics [1] is all you need and that's about an hour's worth of training.

It just doesn't make sense now. CCP not to long ago rebalanced the Cruisers into actually useful ships. If I had a dime for every Cruiers and "new" destoryer (damn you Talwar) roam that came through my space trying to kill me, i'd have......... a bunch of dimes.

The "barrier" to entry into pvp is at it's lowest point in the histroy of EVE. usuable cruiers, destroyers, frigates that now kick as like only the rifter used to, Faction warfare, RvB, eveuni , even freaking allainces like goons still take in noobs with rifters and such etc etc.

At yet these threads keep popping up. See that CCP? No matter how much you cater to certain types in the name of retaining new player, they will always want more. We like to believe that if we just lower barriers more people will play, and maybe some will, but most people won't enjoy anything harder than "push button, win prize".