Ships & Modules

My advice? Get a Merlin (guns) or Kestrel (rockets) as soon as possible.

Condor is a cute little ship, but it's quite weak in effective hitpoints (EHP) and it has few weapons.

As was mentioned, getting a Merlin or Kestrel is really the way to go, especially for combat missions.

Kestrel can either be outfitted with rockets, or with light missiles if you have some skills (it's a tight fit to get 4 light missile launchers on there together with other modules if your skills are low).

My first advice is to decide whether you want gunships or missileboats. Reason for that is so you don't have to train up two seperate weaponsystems as that takes alot of time. E.g. skills that increase rate of fire for guns, does not apply to missiles and rockets. So you'd have to train BOTH the fast-fire skill for guns AND the one for rockets/missiles in order to improve.

Pick one and go with that (personally I'm very much in love with the missiles after the new animations).

Here's a route for missiles ships you should aim for if going Caldari:

Frigate: Kestrel
Cruiser: Caracal
Battlecruiser: Drake
Battleship: Raven

And for the gunships:

Frigate: Merlin
Cruiser: Moa
Battlecruiser: Ferox
Battleship: Rokh

As far as mission running goes, the benefit with missileships over gunships is the fact that you can

1) Choose your damage type according to what resist is weakest for the rats you have on each mission,
2) Missiles have very long range, so you can stay outside the range of the pirate weapons and bombard them with missiles, which means you don't need to focus as much on tanking early on.

Here's a setup for Kestrel with missiles. It takes some skills to fit it all, but you can upgrade to Meta3-4 modules to reduce the fitting requirements as all. This is just a T1 fit I slapped together.


[Kestrel, New Setup 1]
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Power Diagnostic System I

1MN Afterburner I
Small Shield Booster I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Light Missile Launcher I, Scourge Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher I, Scourge Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher I, Scourge Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher I, Scourge Light Missile

For low skill pve, use a destroyer. Catalyst is better than Cormorant.

The condor, like its 2 counterparts, currently makes for good fast-tackle if you can't fly an interceptor. Past that it's about useless.

There are new stars for this and others in the features and ideas section. Dev sticky post.

3launchers more slots.

The caracal is a nice L2 mission grinder. Fit rapid missile launchers and range tank all the way until you get enough money to jump into a drake.

I still have my old caracal as a missile destroyer, and I have blown some frigs and dessies with it.

The condor is a cool little ship. I prefer the gallente version, the atron, much more though. They're both very fast and light, but they are not very good for straight combat or npc-killing. They are good for scouting dangerous areas, making quick trips for courier missions or picking up some small items at a trade hub. PVP wise they're good for scouting and applying a warp disruptor. I prefer the atron to the condor because the atron swaps a highslot for a lowslot, is faster, uses guns, and has a drone.