EVE General Discussion

Just though that I should create an alt since most of the people have it or maybe more than one.

My main character is currently a mess. It has skills about almost everything combat related, for 25M skills points. So it's kind of useless unless I choose to focus on certain ships or certain way of life in EVE.

I just wonder if I should make my alt a combat character too. Currently I am pretty interest in Ammar ships and I want this new alt to focus on Ammar related skills, so when I have 25M skills on this one it would be pretty useful.

Or maybe Caldari? Missile ships are fun to fly. No tracking issues have to be factored in when considering combat situations. And they can speed. I remember years ago I saw a video about a Cerberus in team combat. It was literally raining missiles.

I already got ships of the rest two races flying so it's pointless to make my alt a G and M focused combat character again.

Or maybe I should venture into science, in-station trading to support the two accounts?

Please share your thoughts. Thank you.

Why don't you train up alt chars on your current account to see what kind of character you find interesting?

if you don't know, you dont need one

if your main is a mess, then focus him on amarr or caldari or whatever you want. will be quicker than starting from new

or sellmain and buy a focussed combat toon

A lot of people mess up the training on their main at first trying out different things, don't worry about it. If you decide to roll a second combat character chances are your skilltraining will be a lot more focused. Sounds like you could do with deciding what to aim for on your main, then using an alt to try the opposite. Either go purely for one race or consider dual speccing. Amarr/Gall or Min/Cald are reasonably easy to do as the tanking skills are (overall) the same, or you can aim for pirate faction ships which have interesting skill/mod combinations.

If you do a station trader you don't need a second account, just use MCT (Multiple Character Training) or pause your main for a few months. The trade skills take around 3-4 months with a properly mapped character, but there's no point investing the time training an alt then finding you hate trading. Start trading with basic skills and see whether it's something you want to do. New characters get a couple of bonus remaps, you might find making your trader into a hauling or indy alt compliments the trading skills/activities. Or use the third slot for that. Really indy alts can be on the same account as your main as you don't tend to need to multibox with them. Combat characters you might prefer on a second account long term.

Since Gallente is turrets, you already have a character with decent combat skills in that. -> Missiles.

In the time you train a proper combat alt you can also keep training your messy main. Cloaky, dictor, the Amarr too, better skills for a ship you already fly etc. In time, there is no such thing as a messy character.

I have alts .. my main is a jack of all trades .. wrong approach but a mistake years in the making and not one i am going to fix or abandon, even though i have millions in mining, prod, science etc.. i still use this as my main combat toon .. he also has all the nav, cap, cpu etc.. stuff usefull for everything .. catching up on gunnery now.

My alts are for hauling, leadership, mining, refining, PI. They assist the main .. in PVE, commerce and such. If you dont feel the need for alts other than a feeling you should have a need for one .. then you dont need one.

If you have lots of money and would enjoy having alts for the heck of it .. then by all means get some .. who cares .. train up the basic skills that every proffesion needs, nav, cap, cpu, shields, armour, etc... and maybe in 1/2 a year youll know what you want to do with them.

But usually one finds oneself thinking crap i could really use another ship right now to.... haul stuff out of corp so i dont get killed by those persky WT, or to sweep up my Lv4 mission loot and salvage while the main goes and gets a new mission, or an cloaky scout to plant somewhere passively for eyes if your need them, or a trade alt in a trade hub doing trade stuff, or a miner, or refiner, or extra hands to do more PI to make more passive income, or or or

A good looking one, obviously.

the point is, my main should have not been a mess. It is a mess because I somehow wandered into various paths yet completing them. I have skills in missiles, electronic warfare, gunnery for both G and M, and I can fly quite a few T2 ships without completing the supplementary skills.

The reason I think of an alt apart from the reasons I stated above is that, by having an alt I should be able to focus on something, rather than shifting between options. There are only 4 races, if I have two alts, then I would be able to assign Ammar and Caldari to each of them.

I just like to try different things in EVE, and my zeal fades pretty quickly. That's why my main ended up messy.

I just bought a new account since EVE is giving discount on the subscription and a bonus ship. I'll do an Ammar first, or maybe a caldari, oh god I can't decide.

If you're really sore about your main, sell or stop training him and start over again. Now, I don't advise you to do that unless you really can't stand the look of him, but the option is there, and EVE is about enjoying yourself.

Personally, my original skill plan was crap too. I went strait up to mining barges and was out being bored in rock belts all the time. Then when I joined FW I had almost no relavent skills besides some drone training and navigation stuff. In six months though, I was a decent enough rifter pilot to forget all that. Yeah, I do still look at my character's skill sheet at times and want to smack my head on the desk, knowing i'll literally never mine another asteroid as long as I live, but at this point it would be more annoying to me to train from square one (two years later) so I don't bother. Perhaps one of these days when I stop being space-poor i'll buy myself a more cleanly trained combat character, but given my taste for blowing my isk on lokis and such, I don't think that day is coming any time soon.

Well concerning the combat characters, I'd say training a second character just to fly different races is kind of a waste. I concentrated on ship size with my two combat characters. My main flies mostly Amarr but will fly any race, although he concentrates on sub caps, mostly cruiser and below. My other combat toon is a Caldari fanboi and concentrates on battleship and up. While my main has enough battleship skills to fly pirate battleships and my alt is awesome with Caldari battleships and flies marauders as well as BLOPs, so both of my toons are workable for both PvE and PvP. The Caldari one has spent months on navigation and other prereqs for capital ships that my main can completely avoid.

One thing to think about is your kill board. It can never be undone. Since I use both of my characters for PvE and care bearing (my Caldari alt is my JF pilot as well as my dread pilot) I have been the hunter as well as the hunted on both toons, and my kill board will never be that great.

Then the toon here that I am posting on is a trader type that favors Charisma skills, and flies Orca, Rorqual, and has all kinds of trade, corporation management, and leadership skills. He'll eventually be a booster too. Paynus is one of my newer toons.

Remember, most of your time is going to be going into your engineering, EWAR, and other prereq skills, so training all of those over just to get another race is kinda silly. Plus, once you start getting skill points, one race kind of bleeds into another. So like as an Amarr pilot I have the option of several drone boats to pick from, and with my Armor skills, that leads me to Gallente. So training up some hybrids for Gallente, along with some missile skills for those cool Khanid ships like the Heretic and the Sacrilege, ultimately opens up Caldari. Just need to train some shields to polish off the Caldari, and then I can pretty much fly the Minmatar missile boats (there's just a couple), but it only takes like 4 days to get small projectile up.

Basically what I am saying is that if you're training to get into all the different kinds of ships of your race you'll be building the skills that open up other races. So training ALL those core skills all over just to fly another race is not efficient. Better to make a combat toon main with indy alt, or small ship main with big ship alt, or PvP main with PvE alt, or something like that.

Finally, the other reason to have an alt is just your group. Your main might be in a large null sec alliance that is permanently wardec'd, so it'll be nice to have an alt that can run to Jita and get your stuff for you or run around high sec doing incursions for extra ISK or whatever.