EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello everyone.

I've been playing for about a month now. I'm starting to get the grasp of what I will enjoy once I'm done with learning all the basics of the game but I'm completely at a loss on how I will get there. Let me elaborate.

1) PVE: I've started as a caldari mission runner with a focus on missiles and shields. I loved doing lvl 1 missions with kestrel and lvl2s with corax/caracal. It was a breeze with all these ships. But once I started doing level 3 missions with my drake, mission running felt painfully slow. I just hate the slow movement/low dps/heavy passive tank combination. I felt no excitement and had no fun at all. I could just choose my targets, activate my missiles and leave the computer to do housework.

I came to the conclusion that I liked fast moving/high dps/low tank ships(speed tanking?) that require you to actually control your ship actively. Fast agile and fragile ships that will let you finish your mission fast but if you make a wrong move you will need to gtfo fast or you're ******. Now that's the excitement I'm looking for! :) I don't want to use a bigger hull than a cruiser. I'm willing to commit my time into training T2 ships. I don't have a weapon/tanking choice atm. But as I've mentioned my skill training is focused on missiles and shields. I'm also training for drones.

ATM I'm doing highsec missions while training my support skills up. What I eventually want to do is exploration and ratting in nullsec/wh space (ofc within a corp).

So which route should I take for PVE? Which ships(and races) will suite my playstyle?


2) PVP: I'm not looking forward to doing pvp in the short term but I will get into it after I join a nullsec/wh corp. Again I'm not fond of big ships. Just like in pve, I want to use small fast ships that will get in do their job and get out quickly and when things go wrong and I can't get out, the loss won't bother me or my corp. I like the idea of specializing in certain roles (ex. e-war sounds cool). I want to do mostly small gang pvp in wh/nullsec.

So which route should I take for PVP? Which ships(and races) will suite my playstyle?


Cheers.

You can do exploration from day 1, no need to run missions as a 'stepping stone'.

PvP wise, small and fast is a very common theme in EVE. Size matters, but not in a 'bigger is better' way. It can be, but not always. Different ships have different roles. You say E-War and small gang fighting interest you. In that case I highly recommend the Maulus as a starting ship, you will need a group to fly with though. Start looking for newbie friendly PvP corporation. Some of the largest and most well funded and known are Pandemic Horde and Karmafleet, though there are smaller corps as well.

WH corps, are a bit more (much more) private due to the difficulty, and trust required in working together in W-Space. I speak of trust in WHs since there are no stations in W-Space. The people you share a POS with need to be able to trust their stuff with you, and you have to be able to trust them with yours. Not that trust doesn't matter elsewhere in EVE mind you, but it's a very important part of living in WH space.

E-War is great for learning PvP. It will force you to learn what other ships are capable, otherwise you'll be damping or jamming the wrong targets. The lessons you learn in that apply to all forms of PvP. Likewise, I recommend you start exploration NOW. It too will teach you a lot: how to travel safely, situational awareness and other things like that.

Check out this YT channel for some exploration, travel, and PvP lessons.

machariel. sure it is a BS, but it flies like a cruiser.

alternatively try dropping some of that massive drake tank, and fit for more gank. adequately prepared for lv3s pose almost no threat to any capable ship, many people start into them with almost no sp and then some of the extra tank may be needed. I went back and blitzed some lv3s not too long ago and they almost never got through my shields, and yes I was flying an armor tank.

training into a cerb sounds like a boring dead end to me. Might be fun for a bit, but that is probably just because RLML are stupid good. past that.. well it seems hardly better than a drake to me.

As for PvP.

If you want to go into the E-war of the fleets. Each race has a frigate line for E-war too, take a look in those (aka, try out cheap).

I personally love my Griffins, they are dirt cheap and ECM can really make your enemy curse at their screen when jams land.
But same goes for neuts (against cap heavy ships) and damps (mainly for people who want to exploit their range advantage).

Another thing you might like, is being tackler (either fast or heavy tackle).

Large ships take for ever to train. Small and medium ships are not so bad at all. Small ships actually train really fast. You can do level 4 missions in cruiser sized ships, tech 2 and tech 3 cruisers are very capable in level 4 missions and the burner missions will probably be right up your alley. My point is that there is no need for you to ever train BCs or BSs if you don't like them.

As a matter of fact staying cruiser and smaller is probably the ideal plan for almost all new players and never going larger than cruiser is probably a good fit for better than half of all playstyles.



The skills to use ewar are not a long commitment to train. Focusing on any "specialization in this game is probably not a really good idea. Having options is typically a way better path.

A lot of new players want to figure out their eventual playstyle and commit to the perfect skill plan for that style. This game is not about skill points. Just train up your generic or support skills that work for all or nearly all ships in game at the same time train up all racial frigate and small weapons skills to 3 or so and then try them all out. You will figure out what you like and just train that or train what you are using.

There is no reason that you need to figure out what you are going to like before you figure out what you are going to like. Just play the game and have fun and do more of what you like. It's that simple.

As for PvP there is no reason to wait to start PvP if that is where your interests lie. You need experience to be good at PvP and experience means doing so just do it.

If you wait a year to PvP you'll be a year old character that still knows nothing about PvP. The year worth of skill points is nothing when compared to a year worth of PvP experience.

On the eveiseasy youtube channel he runs around on days old alts and kicks butt at PvP to prove the point that waiting to PvP is silly.

My advice, train everything to about lvl3 and try it out, this will give you 80% of the performance for a fraction of the time max skills would require. Once you have found what's fun, train further. There are no wasted skillpoints ... an example, early in the game I tried industry and trained those skills, then I lost interest and went the PvP/explorer route, but recently I looted a couple of drone blueprints and was happy to have the skills allowing me to get that extra ISK by selling the drones instead of the blueprints.

dont worry about specialising yet, figure out what you like first .

all of the roles can be filled to some degree of competency with tech 1 ships and modules , in some cases quite well.

combat pilots need navigation, engineering, gunnery and/or missiles , shield and/or armour ,and drones .

navigation,engineering and drones in particular are going to be relevant to nearly every ship you will ever get into so train these.

dont worry about getting them to V yet, III or IV will be fine for now.

This is exactly the mindset that you need to clear out. It does not take skill points to excel at things in this game. Yes it may take time but that is your time spent learning the game.

The best thing that you can do for yourself is drop the concepts that you get from other games about small changes in stats flipping the "balance" in fights in your favor.

There are no balanced fights in Eve they do not exist. The kind of fighting that exists in other games where you have fixed numbers of characters of the same level and similar gear with "roles" that have been heavily balanced just do not exist in this game.

This game is about match ups and counters and meta gaming. No matter what ship you fly there are other ships ( even of the same class ) that are a perfect counter to your ship and if you come up against that counter the other pilot would need to screw up massively for you to not loose your ship.

So the key in Eve is about knowing which fights you can win and which you can't and the only way to do that is experience. Also even at that meta gaming comes into play where a player will pretend he does not want to fight you as he is in a ship that should not be able to win against you but he either has some non-standard fit or has a couple buddies on the other side of the worm hole in system or some other thing up his sleeve and is just baiting you into committing to combat. Or you are baiting him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1hwoFYA_k

I know I mentioned it before but the above link is from the eveiseasy youtube channel. It is of a vet running around on a character that is between 10 and 17 days old during the filming and this is from back when new characters started out with only 50K skill points. In the video he is in a rifter on a days old alt fighting and winning against multiple tech 2 frigates at a time. He is far from having perfect skills on that alt.

I can not say this enough drop the concepts that you got from other MMOs about min / maxing and perfecting stats. Eve is about options and knowledge not stats and gear. What you know about this game and who your friends are is far more important in this game than any amount of skill points or expensive modules.

I appreciate all of the helpful comments here.

I decided to experiment with different types of T1 ships/modules before going too deep in to a certain route and in the mean time train all of my support skills to at least lvl4.

Cheers! o7

Lolwut?

I don't know what your neighborhood is like, but I see lots of small gang action in null. Not all of them involve bombers or interdictors either. Lots of 2-4 ship gangs. Null is a big place, please don't make blanket statements on null based solely on your local segment. Some areas of null are crowded, others you can fly for hours without seeing anyone. Some are farmed out, others are so neglected the scan ring is almost solid green.