EVE New Citizens Q&A

from a quick glance:

You have so few support skills done yet that I would be surprised if you didn't see immediate gains from spending a day training caldari cruiser to 3 and using light missiles in your L2 missions. More tank if anything.

If I was you, I would ask one basic question: "How early do I want to be PvP capable?"
if it is soon, flesh out your support skills while flying the corax. The same skills are needed for the caracal anyways so nothing lost.

If it is 'someday, but first I want x iso', then go ahead and get into a caracal before putting some time into the support skills.

Generally you will never go wrong flying a decent cruiser. Flying good destroyers are more for FW type pvp, though they both require some time put into the basic core skills and missile support stuff.

EDIT:

Since all ships really only shine after your dump time into support skills, best advise is probably to pick the one you enjoy flying more.
Example, me personally, I stayed in small hulls for a loooooong time since I rather enjoyed being small, quick and fast. For me, flying hit and run in undersized hulls for PvE was more enjoyable than sitting there watching ammo cycle, ships pop and my tank bar slowly alternate between red and white.

I do know that others distinctly enjoy the bigger hulls, and enjoy the experience of overpowering the 'enemy', rat or player. sort of playing 'king of the battlefield'.

Your choice will dictate what ship you park in for a while when skilling up all the support skills.
Bigger ships do lead to easier and quicker ISK but take longer to be ready to PvP in.

The Caracal and Corax are very different beasts. Short comparison:

Offensive capabilities: Corax is a Destroyer class ship. Destroyers in general are "glass cannons" that do a lot of damage best applied to frigates. In the Corax's case, this comes in the shape of light missile bonuses, including an explosion velocity bonus (you can hit fast-moving stuff better). As far as damage, it has 7 launchers with an up to 25% bonus to damage, meaning it tops out at 8.75 launchers. These are frigate-sized light missiles, which don't do a lot of damage relative to any other missiles, but they have respectable range (further bonused by the Corax) and hit almost anything well.

The Caracal is an attack cruiser. Attack cruisers are meant to be fast and serve as front-loaded damage ships. Because it sports missiles with a range bonus, the Caracal also has respectable range. Its damage application is different, though: 5 launcher hardpoints, with an up to 25% bonus to rate of fire. The ROF bonus actually works out to a 33% bonus to damage, which means it has 6.65 launchers worth of damage.

What does this mean? If you loaded a Caracal with the same light missile launchers, ballistic control systems, etc as a Corax, it would do about 3/4 the damage the Corax does. That's a bit sad. That is also the reason fitting light missiles on a Caracal is a bad idea.

What is a good idea? Fitting the Caracal with cruiser sized weapons:

• Heavy assault missiles (or HAMs) - these are the bigger equivalent of rockets. They have better range and damage than rockets, but might have trouble hitting some small frigate targets. Using a stasis webifier or target painter with these is recommended.
• Heavy missiles (or HMs) - these are the bigger brother of light missiles. They have very long range (especially on the Caracal), but poorer damage than HAMs, and they have significant difficulty hitting frigate-sized targets and some small cruiser sized targets. Target painters are pretty much a necessity unless you're sure you're only shooting big targets.
• Rapid light missiles (or RLMLs) - this is a cruiser-sized launcher that fires light missiles at a super-fast rate. It does significant damage (almost HAM-level), but since it's light missiles, it has better range and hits smaller targets better. The downside: it only has 20 shots, and takes 35 seconds to reload. This makes it optimal for hit and run PvP, not PvE. Again: I do not recomment RLMLs for PvE.

If you fit the Caracal with any of the above, you will end up doing more damage except against small/light stuff (assuming you have similar skills for it and the Caracal).

Defensive capabilities: As mentioned before, the Corax is a glass cannon. Especially fitted with light missiles (which are rather demanding on CPU/PG), it just doesn't have adequate slots/fittings to be tanky. It needs to either not get shot, or stay at long enough range that damage can't reach it well.

The Caracal isn't a shining example of resilience either. Attack cruisers are light in tank relative to other cruisers. Even so, as a cruiser, the Caracal can sport a much more robust tank than the Corax can. In addition, it can also smack down high-damage enemies (in PvE) before they can apply too much hurt, and it can fire at longer ranges than Corax usually can (if it uses HMs).

Additionally, the Caracal is significantly faster than the Corax.

So what should you do? Right now, since you don't have Caldari Cruiser trained, nor do you have either HAMs or HMs trained, I would advise sticking with the Corax. In the longer term, a Caracal will be able to outclass a Corax in level 2 missions, to the point where the Caracal can effortlessly blitz them. Work with what you've got, then move out when you have the skills and ISK to handle it.

As a rule of thumb, level 1 missions are usually intended for frigates/destroyers. Level 2 missions are intended for cruisers. Level 3 missions are for battlecruisers. Level 4 missions are for battleships. You can sometimes run missions one level "up" from your ship with some effort (e.g. battlecruiser running Level 4), but you're almost always better using the appropriate ship class for them.

Welcome to Eve and good luck!

I would shield and missile support skills.
these will benefit both ships.

Though you will have an easier time in a cruiser at this point.
this is one of the reasons we stress the whole "bigger=/=better" mantra to new players
they often get the mistaken impression that because shipping up works for lower level missions as is the case here,

That it will work in other areas of the game.

For now, yeah shipping up would be fine, just don't try to PVP in it yet (well you can but be prepared for it to explode).
But you should look into tha skills under the "engineering" category as these will effect everything you fly.
look at missile and shield also, train everything to 3 unless it's a prerequisite for something else you need

That's a good way to go about it. The certs are a good way to get a base level of competency...at least skill competency...you'll notice that except for some of the bigger weapon/drone types they're almost all the same across the ship types.

I chose to focus on the Medium Drone certificate because it included the same skills I would need for the Light Drone certificate without adding too much extra training time. I figured it would give me options and not limit me to light drones only.

Thank you for the compliment! I got it from a book I read recently (Deathstalker books).

Corax is very fragile compared to a Caracal, or even other destroyers.

I tried to run missions in a Corax, and found even a Kestrel to be more durable.

No it's actually not, we probably should have mentioned that it's made of wet tissue paper sooner.

Fit light launchers to a cruiser for level 2's, not heavy.

Personally, I now use an assault ship (blaster harpy) for level 1-3 missions.

With how new you are. you could easily train into a cruiser in no time and be of similar skills. You probably want to focus more on support skills for now and train only quick weapon and ship skills until you get the support skills trained up. So by support I mean skills that help you fit and run most mods like engineering, shield and navigation etc..

You can go level 3 cruiser and missile skills for now but I would not go past that until you are at a point of not needing a whole bunch of modules just to get your stuff to fit like CPU and Powergrid mods. Also training capacitor skills can help also unless you are planning on only passive tanking.

The Caracal has room for a couple of light drones or one medium so you will want to train enough drone skills to make use of that.

Make sure you are fitting mission specific or faction specific tank if you are high sec PvEing. Mission reports helps for find that info out. Also if you don't use Eve Fitting Tool that is an extremely helpful app to have.

Range can help with damage and missile boats can be effective kiters. Don't forget however that the best defense is a good offense and you don't have to tank damage from dead NPCs.

Understanding gunnery and tracking mechanics can help you avoid a lot of damage from turret based enemies if you know how to pilot your ship to avoid most of it. Because of those turret mechanics there are times when a frigate can be a better choice than a destroyer. I have not done level 2's since the ship rebalancing but prior to that I can tell you that frigs were much better for level 2's than a destroyer.

Your next step from level 2's is level 3's and the ship for that will be a Battlecruiser which shares all the same medium weapon and support skills so if you train for the cruiser that will be better for the longer haul. Also with Tech 2 and Tech 3 ships you could get into doing level 4's without ever touching the long skill training times of large ships and weapons.

In review though the most important things to understand for not having to warp out is mission specific resists and understanding gunnery mechanics. There are several threads recently here in the new player section of forums I will not duplicate that info here just browse the first few pages for it.

This is not missile specific, but it's a good skill plan, and the forward is a good explanation of the skill system in EVE. I recommend you follow the plan, just switch out Minmatar ships for Caldari, and focus on missiles instead of the non-missile weapons (do get drones though, those are useful on almost every ship larger than a destroyer) since those are what you seem to be after at the moment. This plan gives you a good general base to work from. Designed to be fairly general so you can try different things at a reasonable level quickly. Followed it myself and recommend it heartily.

http://blog.beyondreality.se/Newbie-skill-plan-2