EVE New Citizens Q&A

Was wondering if you guys could give me some suggestions on which race's ships would fit me as a player.
This might not help but In other mmo's I usually play the dot based mage or the support healer. I like keep track of multiple things at once and don't mind pressing/moving around alot of stuff in mid-combat. I would like a ship/race with a high skill cap but mostly with things other than straight dps. I am probably going to go for small group pvp in null/low sec though maybe one day participate in fleet sized battles. I am typically not a solo player and would probably not pvp much if I am not in a small group. When not PVPing I would probably be exploring with a friend or trading/missioning by myself.
Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed :)

The best advice that I can give you is forget everything that you have learned in other MMOs. Eve is not other MMOs.

This game is not about skill points.

I recommend training all race's frig skills and weapons skills to 3 and then trying them all out. Also train more generic / support skills until you figure out what you like or use more.

You will eventually want to train nearly all of the ship skills so it's difficult to train something that you won't wind up using.

Due to each level of a skill taking 5 times longer than the previous level "specializing" early on in this game is a bad idea. Once you are capable at most stuff and run out of short skills to train and need to start picking level 5 skills then you can worry about a "specialization" but it is really more of a prioritization at that point then an actual specialization.

Many other MMOs have heavily balanced combat that is structured around skills and gear that are hyper-balanced where tiny "stat" difference make a night and day difference. That is not the case in eve. In eve knowledge and experience trumps all so just get out there and PLAY the game.

Tl;dr
If you haven't figured out your playstyle yet ( likes and dislikes ) there is no need to worry about specializing. Just try stuff out.

This game doesn't have the class and race restrictions that other MMOs have. There's no magic here, it's all tech, and otherwise if you want the role of healer, DPS, stealth scouting, tank, tackle, crowd-control/jamming, industrialist, etc., you simply fly the ship that's suited for that role.

Each race has ships for almost every role, but there are peculiarities:

1. Typically a fleet commander will set up his/her fleet with similar ships, so either all ships are armor-tanked or all ships are shield-tanked. Shield-tanked ships are typical in PVE group content (incursions); PVP can use either, it just depends on what your group prefers. In any case, for healer (logistics), Amarr are armor+energy, Gallente are armor+tracking, Caldari are shields+energy, and Minmatar are shields+tracking. Thus, to keep their options open, people usually train 2 complementary ships, or whatever their group uses all the time.

2. For DPS, each race uses its own weapon systems: lasers, hybrids, projectiles, missiles, and drones. Each weapon system has advantages and disadvantages, but the race's ships complement the weapon system and make it work pretty well. Again, however, what you're doing and what your group is doing are things that matter: for example, missiles and drones take some time to get to the target and apply the damage, so for fast PVP skirmishes, guns are preferred. On the other hand, missiles and drones are versatile and easy to use, so for PVE (where the NPCs just sit there), they're very popular.

3. Certain advanced ships (T2 frigates, T2 recon cruisers) have the ability to do electronic jamming from huge ranges, and thus are very popular for PVP. However, the jamming types vary from race to race, and you may want to train multiple races just to cover all bases, or to provide what your group needs.

4. There are "faction" ships, produced by the "pirate" NPC groups, that require the skills from 2 races to be trained. For example, the ever-popular Dramiel frigate requires Gallente and Minmatar frigate skills.

Now, briefly, the skills in this game aren't limited by race or class, and you typically have 160-200 different skills, each giving 5% bonus here or there, with the accumulated bonuses adding up to a pretty big increase in overall combat effectiveness. There are:

- ship skills (Spaceship Command group) - these unlock ships for you
- weapon skills (Gunnery, Missiles, Drones) - train the weapons for the ships that you've unlocked
- support skills (Armor, Shields, Engineering/Energy, Navigation, Targeting, etc.) - all your ships fly better if you train these
- non-combat skills (Trade, Industry, Reprocessing) - train as needed

So, because of the way the skills are organized, it's feasible to train all races' T1 frigates and the small versions of all races weapon systems, just so you can figure what you want to do. So you can get a feel for Amarr lasers, vs. Caldari shields and missiles, vs. Gallente armor and drones, etc. Try a number of ships and roles, and try all of the activities in the game, PVP, exploration, mining, trading, etc., to get an idea of what might be fun for you.

Then, as you train up some support skills (useful for all ships), you can research the bigger / T2 advanced ships and figure out what you and your group needs, and then train the ship and weapon skills for those.

Being able to fit tech 2 modules is relatively easy (requires a bunch of skills trained to 3). Being able to fit T2 weapons is harder (the prerequisites are involved), but the increased DPS is very necessary for PVP, and very useful in PVE too. And finally, the advanced T2 ships themselves have pretty high prerequisites, but come with special abilities (such as the aforementioned huge ranges for jamming).