EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello,

Ive re-started a few days ago and while Im training the basic skills, Im reading various guides and forum discussions. What scares me is that all PvE discussions include the words Drake or Tengu in them, while all PvP discussions about gallente ships include words like "sucks, subpar, armor tanking is wrong" and such.

Im currently training for Gallente ships with armor tanks, am I doing it wrong? In the far, far away future months from now where I stop being a pointless newbie and actually start loggin in to do more than setting up a skill queue, Id like to focus on PvE activities, exploration and maybe some lowly PvP in frigates and such.

Is armor tanked gallente pilot viable or should I go caldari like everyone else with minmatar ships on top of that?

1. Some Gallente (and Gallente-based pirate) ships can be shield tanked, so i'd suggest you to train both.
2. For missions, Dominix and Navy Dominix are almost perfect both for newbie (dualrep afk domi FTW) and skilled player (shield tanked sentry navdomi with 1000+ DPS); Megathron-based line and even Hyperion are also quite good now.
3. Considering exploration, drone boats (Vexor/Arbitrator -> Myrm -> Ishtar/Gila) are only ships that can be fitted in all-in-one roaming explorer style. Not the most effective style, but it does not requires alt accounts for scanning/scouting.

Actual question:

Gallente don't suck. People (specially some veterans) just don't want to change and still think Drake rules all / minmatar ships are gods.

EVERY ship in EVE has it's use and every ship has it's points where it will fail. The point is, you need to know which situations your ships excels in and in which it dies in a fire.



WRONG.

1.) Even new players are far from pointless. New players can do a lot of stuff (if you specialize a bit). And my latest alt is actually quite more fun to PvP with as it's clones don't cost a lot when I get podded. 2 weeks and it had a very basic PvP frigate in it's possession (and loads more if needed) and went out shooting stuff.

2.) Just setting skills in your queue means in 2 years time you are still a noob. As you have LEARNED nothing about EVE.
In EVE 15% of the situation is managed by raw SP, the other 85% is managed by skills you picked up while playing, knowledge you learned from past experience and guidance from others.

So by just logging in to set skills, you will stay clueless about how stuff works. Get out there and do stuff.

I tried with my 3 weeks old combat character (this one is a miner to support my income). I fitted 6 frigates and 3 destroyers according to battleclinics advice as much as my poor skills would allow me to (no tier 2 modules, limited guns due to lack of powergrid).

I lost them all in 2 days.

- 4 ships in gate camps (even though I did my best to avoid them by checking the map and staying out of obvious choke points) - no advice from the forums worked (neither gate crashing nor trying to align and warp to a nearest celestial object), I got locked within 2 seconds and literally instagibbed with the gate 11,9km away.
- all other ships in minor FW complexes (I tried joining FW to face lowly ships like the one of my own) in mostly 1vX fights (started as 1v1, 1 or more ships warped in before I even reached full velocity), in just one of which, that remained 1v1, I managed to deal some damage - other times I was evaporated before even reaching distance to shoot efficiently. I still died and got podded after getting the merlin to approx. 60% of shields

What have I learned by losing 9 ships:
- I cant avoid manly gate camps even if I try
- Even if I avoid a gate camp, I will be group ganked anyway
- Even if I manage to get a 1v1, the other guy has skills and gear so supreme I wont even scratch him
- I die so fast I will be better off by learning from YouTube videos than from actual gameplay

I also tried looking for a corp to group up with, but my combat pilot only has 780.000SP and only one of my 6 applications was replied to, asing whether I was US player, which Im not (not a native english speaker here). Good news is, in 7 months I will have the commonly required 10mil SP and will be able to group up with people, if I manage to stay that long.

So now Im back to running missions and exploring in said gallente ships and I have to admit Im happy that way .. PvP sucks for me big time, I explode too fast to learn anything and I dont have the funds to do it regularly. Besides, my spoken english is not very good anyway, so pvp groups with active voice comms will just laugh at me.

Thanks for the opinion on gallente ships though, much appreciated.

I'd counter with it's 15% SP, 5% player skills, and 80% luck that it's not hotdrop-o'clock.

As far as PvE goes, the two most popular basic/navy edition ships for L4 missions are:

(1) Raven (Caldari)
(2) Dominix (Gallente)

As far as exploration goes, in k-space you can use basically whatever you're most comfortable with, and in w-space solo (the usual preferred mode for people who enjoy exploration as such and aren't into the cogs-in-a-machine version for an alliance production assembly line) you're probably looking at ending up in:

(1) Drake -> Tengu
(2) Harbinger -> Legion

depending on whether you're more generally lazy about manually flying or annoyed at having to occasionally dock to get ammo. The other two T3 ships still work, but solo with the Proteus (Gallente) you'll either be drone-reliant, which is an issue against sleepers, or you'll be running on blasters, which are more fine-tuned for PVP, or rails which have rather low overall damage.

However, since Gallente training involves all your general turret skills, armor active tank skills, etc, the difference from fully-specced Gallente exploration boats to fully-specced Amarr boats is literally just Amarr Cruisers III and Medium Lasers V / Advanced Pulse Lasers IV (and some change, obviously you want the medium spec skills and the prerequisites), which is, what, a month or so of training? You'll be burning a bit more than that on T3 training anyhow, so it's worth it.

So... short answer to your question: Gallente is fine, and actually a relatively popular initial PvE/exploration path.

(That said, do what you want. Just because other specializations aren't as simple for something doesn't mean they're not possible, you can go hard roleplay with Gallente boats and toast sleepers in a Proteus if that's really your bag. Most of us end up with at least two races fairly well-specced up through the BC size category, though, for people that like armor it's generally Gallente->Amarr or the other way around. For shield fanciers it's generally Caldari/Minmatar or Caldari/Gallente. Then if you're jumping into PvP a lot as well the Gal/Minnie/Amarr triple is probably preferred. It only gets broader from there.)

'Nuff said.

If this is your attitude, EVE is not for you. 9 ships lost in the process of learning is nothing.

In general for pvp the shipline with most used ships in Minmatar.

However, most of the other shiplines have uses. In WH where I live Gallente (Proteus in particular) is one of the most used shiplines.

What ever you decide to do, in time I'd recommend cross training for ships. You'll find that it helps you have the right tool for the job.