Skill Discussions

Just to give a bit of background I will mention that last year I played a few weeks and quit due to real life commitments. I am therefore not starting from scratch but I have changed my thinking a bit...

Obviously like most new players my goal is to get into the nice and big ships to blow other people up with. I like taking things a step at a time though so right now I am just training into some very basic mining skills (just enough to pilot a venture at an average level).

After that I want to start training my combat frigate skills (while mining for some ISK and something to do), and to make things easier for me I decided to train level 3 mastery (I know its not perfect, but it seems to be a good guideline) for a ship, learn it and pilot it and then skill into the next upgraded ship. The goal is to specialize into frigates (before I move onto higher tiers of ships).

My thinking was to follow this progression:

1. Incursus (Who doesnt like a Jousting Rabbit???)
2. Tristan (One of the better looking ships to me)
3. Ares (The God of War)
4. Ishkur (Another Jousting Rabbit, but on steriods)
5. Nemesis (The Sneaky bat)

I hope that I will be a general specialist frigatier by then, and can then either focus on reaching level 5 mastery on the ships or move onto the next tier of ships (Cruisers etc.) Hopefully by that time I will also have a better idea on what I plan to do in the game.

is this a viable course of action? is going for ship mastery a good idea?

mastery up to level 2 or 3 is a decent guide to what skills you need. After that they put some rather unimportant skills on the list (warp drive operation pops up a lot, you can get away with that at level 0 for most of your career, it's purely convenience).

A character with Warp Drive Op 0, is great for making bookmarks.

you could also start warp cancel and repeat till out of cap before you let yourself get to warp. That way you dont need an alt to do it.

IMO first 2 skills you should learn to 5 is Power Grid and CPU Management.

Like Dalloway Jones, the only concern I would mention is the addition of CovOps like bombers to your frigate plan. Bombers use the missile tree for torpedoes while the frigates you mention are turret based. If your primary focus is on gunnery, also training missile skills will slow down your progression early on. Of course, it opens up many more ships for use- but you must weigh that against being better at one thing than okay at two. This is more of a concern for early players than veterans who tend to have a wider array of skills. Do you want more gunnery skills at V, or both gunnery and missiles at IV, for the same amount of training time?

Core skills are the most important to get to V. These affect every ship you undock, and getting these to V is never a waste of time. A freighter pilot needs to be able to align and hit warp quickly just as much as the null sec guy dodging gate camps in a Ceptor, for example.
Also, as ships get larger and more complex, fitting them properly becomes more difficult. So what may seem fine at III or IV now in core skills will become a liability as you progress up the ship lines. This is often played out by newish players flying large or expensive ship hulls, but fitted poorly with low meta modules that don't realize the potential of the ship itself.

Really, what you need to consider going forward is the ROLE you want to play, rather than specific ships. The role you play defines what ships you will want to train into. For newer players, this is often tackle- which dictates being able to warp disrupt (or scram) an enemy at distance, and maintain that distance during the fight so the enemy can't escape.
Other roles are more specific to fleet action than solo game play. For example I invested heavily in EWAR as a new player, because it appealed to me- but I found it rarely was used in the PvE content I was focused on as a new player. Only once I got into fleet PvP action, and fleets large enough to warrant dedicated EWAR over just another DPS ship- did my investment in EWAR begin to pay off. As a newb, I probably should have put my training time elsewhere.

All that said....at the moment CCP is all about drones and hybrids. Drones were always something of a necessity as most ships over cruiser sized uses them anyway. Now that they are OP to such a degree that the current meme is 'Ishtars Online', I would recommend following drones as a primary weapon system. Hybrids cross with caldari, which also have good drone pirate ships. Drones mesh well with Amarr, and a focus on cap warfare instead of lasers saves training into lasers as well.
So in summation, gallente is current FOTM the way 'Winmatar' used to be.

for damage application .. train the relevant gunnery support skills faster than you train your actual weapon skill.
they are more important than being able to use T2 guns

better tracking means more hits ... etc

Coincidentally, training shield tanking skills to a very good level takes only about a month.