EVE New Citizens Q&A

When people say you need a battleship to do level 4 missions, they mean a battleship level of tank and DPS output is needed to comfortably complete them. It does not mean level 1 in any battleship and large gun skill will be enough. If that is all you have, you're better off with your battlecruiser. A battleship is large, slow and has trouble hitting small targets. If you don't have character skills to get the benefits out of using a battleship hull, you're just paying a lot of money to get extra disadvantages for no extra gain.

Also, missions are missions are missions, so keep your options open. If you are getting bored with level 3 missions, it is very unlikely doing level 4 missions for an extended period of time will yield a different result. I'm not saying you shouldn't do them, but I'm recommending you take it in to consideration when making your long term plans. How heavily you want to invest in a career where after a few months you will likely feel, that doing another mission and sucking on a barrel of a loaded shotgun seem like equally attractive options.

Harb is more than enough for LV4s if done correctly, I used to run them in a myrmidon back in '07 or whenever I started playing this game.

That said, I feel I should stress the point the guy before me made, if you're bored with LV3s, you're gonna be even more bored with LV4s. Rats have more HPs, missions are longer/slower and they start to repeat themselves very quickly to the point of you remembering every little detail about every single mission.

There's ways to make more money while having more fun. Look around a bit and consider if that's really what you want to do.

About remaps: You'll want to conserve your remaps a little bit - create a training plan for 6-12 months on evemon and use the nifty "Optimise attributes" function in there. It'll tell you straight up which attributes to get.

LV4s don't get much more challenging...In fact, on the long term, it'll be much easier than what you're currently facing.

Exploration is decent, you can do 0.0 exploration solo with close to zero skills. Initially, you'll want to bring T1 frigates with cheap pods. Once you get more comfortable with it you can switch out for covops and practically never get caught. This'll already top out L4s in ISK earned, forces you to spend less time training things and buying a big expensive ship. Most importantly, dodging gatecamps, sneaking through hostile regions is already quite a thrill compared to L4 missions.

"Wormholes" are quite a large subject as there's a number of things to do in there. I assume you're interested in the shooting sleepers part of W-space. You can go anywhere from soloing C2s while basing in highsec to joining a dedicated wormhole corp and running C6 sites with capital escalations.

A solo player few weeks old can already take on C1 wormholes, gradually working up to C2, C3, C4 - and in extreme circumstances even C5s (Note that this is truly extreme, only few people are capable of soloing C5 without using alts). Early on the income is comparable to L4s, but once you master the art, it will be far more lucrative than L4s. The act of shooting sleepers is fairly boring, but you tend to have some unexpected visitors now and then which spices up things.

Another easy option for new players is factional warfare (FW). FW areas in losec are littered with what are known as FW plexes. You basically sit down in a plex and fend off the occasional pirate or opposing faction wanting the plex for themselves, or just run away if you don't feel like fighting. Each plex you complete earns you a decent bit of money in the form of loyalty points, this'll beat anything you earn in missions, especially when you're a new player.

Anyway, this is just the tip of the iceberg, there's plenty to do in eve.

I keep St Mio's "What to do in EVE Online" handy, just to remind myself that there is a world outside the mission agent's office :) (it's getting a little old though, so I guess someone needs to make an updated version)

0.0 exploration is nowhere near as profitable as lvl4s. wormhole pve is somewhat closer, but certainly not better with the current ribbon prices. you are right though in that lvl4s are not more challenging than lvl3s, at least not if you run them correctly (as in min/maxing for speed and safety).

@OP: do not expect a challenge from mission running in EVE. whatever challenges you may face can be easily overcome with more skill training, googling the right strategy and a more expensive ship.

if you want to know if you are ready to run lvl4s, consider the 500/500/50/5 rule. if you can fly a ship that can tank 500dps while dealing 500dps out to 50km and not run out of capacitor for 5 minutes with all modules running, you will be able to finish most if not all lvl 4 missions against the appropriate faction.

Only exploration worth doing is Account Management site, can net you 600+ mil within seconds from the moment of finding it and drop rate is 100% :)

your statement is as valuable as 'playing the lottery CAN make you very rich'. back in autumn, i've been running my anathema through 0.0 for a few weeks and looted roughly 2.3 billion total. although i did not run a spreadsheet, i'm pretty confident in stating that the extrapolated isk per hour ON AVERAGE is lower than that of properly run lvl4s (with roughly equal ISK/effort).

Yes, nullsec exploration can be fun and the whole 'treasure hunting' thing is nice.

But isk/hour is very unreliable, because:

1. Lots of people are doing it, so finding available data/relic sites is hard
2. There are apparently far fewer people running the other sigs, so you waste alot of time scanning stuff out just to rule them out
3. Gank risk is extremely high (if you're in a frig at least), so basically you have to be alone in system to comfortably hack the sites, so there's a lot of waiting/hiding 'downtime' involved. BTW I'm mainly a solo pvp-er, so I'm not particularly risk adverse. I did try to hack sites with other people in local and died almost every time :)

Actually, you'd probably get more isk/hour hunting explorers to kill and loot them!

Which brings me to my second point. OP, as you realized:
- There are a ton of different things to do in EVE
- Each one requires a high degree of specialization to become good at it

So my advice would be to try out several career paths before committing time and SP to one. You're still in NPC corp and haven't really tried PVP yet, right? So at the very least get in a Corp and try PVP before deciding on your EVE career.

Your 1bil drop site can be first you scan or 983rd one. I might draw Smash The Supplier once in that time and farm it for a week making basically guaranteed 300mil from tags + probably another 200+ mil from salvage/loot. Difference is you take risks and put huge amount of time investment while 1 hour a day is enough for me to kill everything and clean it up with noctis. And if you are really into L4s you will draw a lot of those juicy ones within a month.

But whatever floats one's boat, it's sandbox after all.

oh thats right !

you're the one trial player i read on these forums who managed to get snuff ISK to buy Plex !
wow congrats on that.
you kn0w your way around exploration and null sec then.. better than most newbies for sure !
Yeah I would say.. since you have experience roaming low/null sec.. you could definitely do FW ( faction Warfare ) but i'm only suggesting this if you want to try PvP.. as you'll be fighting another player.. not some boring NPC cross with predictable patterns.

that would be definitely exciting !
looking forward to seeing your continued adventures !