EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hey,

If im skilling up to get battlecruisers is it worth me getting the cruiser skill up to 5 or do i just get it to 3 and then max out battlecruisers?

I would get cruisers to lvl 3, then get BC's to lvl 3, then max out cruisers.

I wish I would've done this, this way you can get into T2 cruisers and eventually T3 quickly 'cause you'll be able to afford T2 ships a lot easier than T2 battlecruisers.

It all depends on what you're looking for in a ship. If you mostly do PVE missions then you'll want to "progress" fairly quickly to keep up with the mission difficulty and then you can leave cruiser at 3, get BC to 4 and start working on your support skills. If you want to do PVP then bigger isn't necessarily better and you want to stay/start small (and cheap) for a while.

Not to mention training level 4 on most skills doesn't take very long. It's usually a good idea to train it so you don't have to come back to it later.



DMC

Any skill ranks that are not directly pre-requisites are not necessary, both technically and practically. You'll note that all the rank 5's take a long time to train up, while yielding the same bonus per rank that you'd gotten at skill 1. 5 minutes for 5% bonus, all the way to 16 days for 5% bonus - Diminishing returns, in other words.

So, in my opinion, the conclusion you ought to draw: Until the low-hanging fruit has all been harvested, avoid these time sinks.

Rank 4 is an edge case, but for new pilots, I'd suggest stopping at 3. The power difference between rank 3 and 4 is not generally attractive enough, compared to what you could gain in training a bunch of other skills up to 2 or 3 in that time. Typically, the lions share of a pilot & ship's power, in a given situation, is dependent on how well their setup is tailored to that situation. Meanwhile, the situations change quite a lot. Therefore, it can be argued that your ability to adapt and change yields much more of a benefit over time than that extra 5% on that one faction's cruisers, etc.

Eventually though, cruiser rank 5 is one of the top-tier useful skills to have, as cruisers and tech2 cruisers are the ultimate ship size class of Eve, in terms of versatility vs power vs cost vs frequency of use. If one ship class defines Eve gameplay, then it's a contest between frigates and cruisers. Getting two factions to 5 is an excellent goal, after you've trained up all your core skills and have a wide variety of basic/mild access across the factions and size classes.

TL;DR: Specialization and rank 5's are for veterans. Newbies gain more from being a generalist with many, diverse, low ranked skills.