Skill Discussions

Are Certificates a good guide of what skills you should be getting for a speciafic career path?

As a relative noob at this game I only recently realised what the certificates tab actually does and upon looking into it, it looks like it's there to set a noob like me up for at least basic career paths, especially, when you are overwhelmed about what skills you really need to set yourself up to be successful in nullsec.

So what are your views on using certificates to assist in skill selection?

Most skills in a cert are good to have. The core competency certs are a line that you should definately get, with the exception of advanced weapon upgrades 5 for the Elite cert.

Outside of that, and by the time you do that, you will have a clue as to what to train and what not to. Also, use evemon, find a ship you want to fly with weapons and put those skills into your skill plan. Go from there.

I think all of the Core certificates to Elite are valuable at around 50m sp.

Generally the Standard cert for whatever you want to do is a pretty good baseline.

Also look at the missile/turret/drone control certificates so you don't miss any of the support skills for your preferred weapon system (which is very easy to do).

I find certificates pretty good when you look the recommend ones for the ship you fly.

Beside that many of them (the elite especially -specialist drone operator seriously-) have ridiculous requirements that shouldn't be yout goal as a beginner pilot.

I fully agree that aiming for the standard&improved core certificates are a good thing. You can also try to reach the turrent control improved if you plan to have another career than trader.
Improved navigation is good too, it will always be useful, as well as basic drones certificates.
All of these will be useful whatever you plan to do in this game.

After that I think it is a lot better to improve skill by skill according to what you fly, what you like and what you feel good

I dont think certificates are that usefull, just take the time to read the skills description and you will have a good comprehension of what they do .

If you know what you want to do , you can plan your skills accordingly. By example, if you want to do pve or pvp, there are support skills that you will need no matter what., then you train weapon support skills and weapon system

if you plan to be an industrialist or doing production, you wont need those ship support skills but you will need others that are not needed at all in pve /pvp

If you re a trader, you can if you want never leave a station and just train those trading skills and get someone do teh moving for you with contracts.

just a word of advice, try to focus on a particular "job" when you start playing.

Core Fitting doesn't include shield upgrades. Imagine, "This certificate represents an elite level of competence in fitting ships. It certifies that the holder has maximized their fitting capabilities. You have now reached the point where you should be able to use any valid module configuration without fitting issues."

And yet you don't have shield upgrades 1, and that sweet fit with the MSE is *quite* impossible.

I honestly don't know if the certs are more helpful or hurtful to the people that would actually use them.

I'm training my skills for the certificates at the moment. I'm a new player and I wouldn't have known about these if my boyfriend hadn't of pointed them out. you can also make them viewable to the public, but most people don't seem to do this - I think that is something to do with PvP and the enemy having the advantage of knowing if they have a chance or not. But I like having them on show!

I always reccomend Core Competency Standard and Armor/Shield/Passive Shield tanking Standard to new players no matter their career paths. Miners will enjoy more tank and fitting options when they finally get that hulk, traders aren't as weak as they can fit tanks to their ships. Also, should that dreaded Wardec drop on there heads they can attempt PVP without the base combat skills of a two day old noob.

The truth it that there is some wierd skill requirements for some certs, especially at the elite level, but all in all I would use them as general guidelines rather than hardcore must haves. Also it is a lot better than the way it was, before certs came around it took hours just reading through all the skills, a lot of them you have no idea why some skills even exhist, for the longest time I thought that Signature Resolution did absolutely nothing as I didn't understand the targeting mechanics. This caused massive amounts of confusion on my part as I was trying to 'drink from the firehose' in respect to trying to understand all the small little things that Eve has to offer.

Certs are a good thing to start with, but as you learn more about game mechanics and the style of play that you like the more you will deviate from them and eventaully never look at them.

As a side note, I would like to thank whoever came up with the Skill Queue and the Certification Program, those two things alone make the first days of Eve a lot more simple. **** I remember setting alarms so I could change a skill in the middle of the night, and only training short skills when I was on while the longer skill trained while I was away, I do not miss that.

Getting back on topic a little, the Elite Certs tend to be just trophies more than actually useful, it alludes to the fact that after a certain point of understanding in the game that you won't need Certs anyway. Look at the fact that there is no Capital Logistics/Capital Tanking Certs along with Capital Gunnery Certs. It is implied that the player training for capitals will know what they are doing by then and doesn't need any assistance at all. iirc there is no Jump Drive Certs either, and glad there isn't.

/rant

>Not getting advanced weapon upgrades 5

Some 90% of loadouts on battleclinic are designed for characters with max fitting stats. If you ever want to use the odd oversized module (as you should, since most oversized modules are some 5x better than their smaller counterpart) you'll need top notch fitting skills.