EVE New Citizens Q&A

Heya! So I just started this game about a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent, so decided to go for the full account. I've been doing a lot of reading about the Eve universe (luckily I get a lot of downtime at work), but I'm still at that stage where I'm looking at things and want to do EVERYTHING. Of course, that would take about 30 years worth of skill training, so I've decided (like I'm sure most people do) to build alts to supplement certain areas of my playstyle.

My question is, what careers/occupations/jobs/skillsets are more suitable for an alternate character (one who I will probably train up, then stay mostly static for the rest of their career) and which are more suitable for the long haul (main character who will get all of that tasty, tasty SP from now until the end of Eve).

Some things that I'm specifically interested in:

Logistics characters (the healing type): I've played a healer in every MMO I've ever touched, so this automatically jumped out at me as being a worthwhile pursuit.

Exploration/Scout/Scanner: I've been messing around with scanning, probes, and general exploration type stuff and it's actually interested me quite a great deal.

Making stuff: Kind of a broad idea, but I want to have a character that can eventually manufacture and copy blueprints and just make stuff in general. I've always dipped pretty heavily into crafting in prior games, so I got giddy at the fact that almost everything in Eve is provided from the players.

Mining/Hauling: I'm not really interested in it as a permanent career, but view it as a necessary evil to fund myself.

EWAM: I've been curious about this skillset, simply 'cause it was my job in the military for several years and I thoroughly enjoyed it there, so I figure I'd probably enjoy it in game. Not to mention that in other MMOs, if I wasn't healing, I was doing some type of Crowd Control/Debuffing, so it fits my natural inclinations pretty perfectly.

I understand that everything could become a long term goal, 'cause a simple miner could continue to increase their abilities until they've got perfect mining skills for everything under the sun, but I'm mostly curious about which occupations can be dipped into quickly and perform adequately without having to buy an alternate account to eternally feed them skillpoints. Conversely, I'm also interested in what occupations are impossible to get into without a constant flood of skills being fed to them.

Thanks!

tl:dr - What are some good classes to work toward as a main with a constant stream of SP and which are better suited to alternate characters who won't be receiving SP after I've adequately trained them.

On the same account? Depends what you do with your main. But in the case where you play on one account, marketing is usually the safe bet. If you move to 0.0 or WH, you can keep your alt at a trading hub in hisec. Additionally you can pick up industrial haulers, move stuff for your main. Blockade runner (heavy SP investment) can be useful as well, depending on your main again. Oh and uh 0 tax, just contract your stuff to your alt etc. which is in your own private 0 tax corp, then contract back ships etc.


I don't know about logistics types, I mean it's more group oriented so you would need to invest a considerable time into SP. You would be better off training logistics on your main in most cases.

EWAR? I was going to put this on a second alt and toss it into FW (about 40 day training plan). I still might, but I'm waiting to see how it is after the nerfs coming this month. Sadly I'll find how it is on my main, how broken, not even counting the multiple skill nerfs my main is getting already. But EWAR is a common starting template, and very useful for pvp support especially tackling. ECM can solo pvp rather well, using jammers etc.

I think the main thing about account alts is that they are expendable. So in most cases it's little loss if they die. Good for scouts, good for frig pvp combat. The other thing about alts is that they can be left behind to manage things, such as your market endeavors, managing manufacturing jobs etc.

But after a week, you probably don't need to worry about it much atm. I waited over a year before I started training my first alt, and just because of the expendability reason. If it wasn't purely for fun factor, I wouldn't have done it, as the SP could have gone into my main, and that's a missing 3+ months worth of SP. But nothing wrong with planning, and even starting an alt with a little SP.

Hi and welcome to EVE! To be honest, there's no 'best' way to go about doing things, it all depends on your playstyle etc. However, I can share my experience with you, maybe it might give you something to think about down the road.

1. The meat of the game is in PVP. By PVP , I do not just mean ship-to-ship combat alone, but all aspects of it, including resource gathering to manufacturing to logistics (moving stuff around) to combat to resupply. While the rest of the stuff is important, my personal preference is taking part in the combat part of it. Therefore, I would recommend a combat character as a main, long term character, supplemented by alts which would perform one or more of the jobs above.

2. PVP (ship to ship combat) roles include: Scout, tackle, DPS, logistics (healing), ewar (crowd control). The basic role for new players, which everyone recommends, would be tackling. Scouting and tackling are the key factors in most engagements I've been in. While aiming for something to specialise in down the road would be good, I would recommend getting yourself out there and participating in solo, small gang, medium to large fleet battles to get a feel for what you would enjoy best. In addition, trying a bit on everything on your combat character would let you learn the different playstyles and counters (i.e. for a logistics pilots, you would want to know or be able to estimate what range you should stay at from the rest of the fight to avoid tackle or DPS).

Therefore, in view of the above, I would recommend the following:
1 Character for PVP. Personally my character can do it all. However, keep in mind this may result in high clone costs when you get to high SP levels. Another approach some players take is training up a generic role on their main, and have specialised probing/ewar alts, which mitigates the higher clone costs in part.

1-2 characters for industrial purposes. Personally, I don't do much industry, but I have a generic support alt which does research, manufacturing, trading. I'm also training up this alt for scanning/probing and general cloaky stuff to support my main. Also, a same account throwaway alt for hauling (only need to be able to fly bestowers to haul myself battlecruisers, as I'm -10 and can't get to highsec), and a same account shopping alt parked in a trade hub.

To be honest, you'll probably figure out what your needs are the longer you play, and will be able to decide what long term vs short term skills you will need. To reiterate what another poster said before, you don't necessarily need to do mining/hauling to make money. A trading alt would probably make you more ISK with less effort (depending on how much you get into trading of course).

tl;dr, combat as main, constantly adding skills, other support functions as short term alts to train skills as required.

Hey, Im posting on my main because, dammit, I do all of those things.

Logistics : Frighteningly useful for any combat groups. A useful phrase when talking to recruiters will be "I have Logistics 5. Do you do full ship replacement for logi ?". If they arent prepared to replace your ship, say 'thank you' and move on. Ive trained Minny cruiser V for the Scimitar and Gallente Cruiser 5 for the Oneiros and have no regrets. The cruiser logi are getting massively buffed - train things up to about 3 and try it.

Mining : Dont. Just dont. At least rats shoot back. Anywhere with decent rocks has better rats.

Hauling : At some point, learn to fly some sort of Industrial. Sooner or later you will need to move crap, and at that point, an Iteron 4, a Badger 2 or whatever will come in handy.

Salvaging : Rifter, MWD, four salvagers and cargo expanders is ker-ching when combined with ...

Probing : Probe out mission runners. Then warp in, drop their location into your Places folder and wait till they are done. Odds are high they will just leave. You then Ninja Salvage. Note : being there when rats are may be unhealthy after the next patch. Then theres gas sites, grav sites, ladar sites and wormholes (take spare probes). Oh yes, and combat scanners are worth their weight in Morphite, because you'll notice many battle reports say 'And we got a good warpin 15km from their fleet'. That was their combat scanner.

Mining : Dont. Really. Dont. I was in a mining barge today, helping a corpmate. In a grav site. In null. Mining Bistot. And in an hour I made less money mining arguably the 3rd best ore in the game than I had 20 minutes of flying in a rifter picking up loot belt ratters had left behind.

Industry : Getting Production Efficiency 4 and a set of ammo and frigate blueprint copies can be very handy. PE5 is neccessary for industry, as is hauling huge amounts of minerals around the galaxy.

Ewar : A Blackbird is a useful low-skill ship, but its roughly the same investment for a Falcon, or an Arazu, as for a Logi.

Tech 2 guns : These hurt people good. They take lots of skill points. By doing several of the things on the above list, you're writing off the ability to use T2 guns for a good long time.

Awesome, thanks for the replies, everyone! I think I'm finally getting a plan of sorts put together.

I probably should've been more clear about my intentions with the alts. What I'm planning on doing is having my main account (this guy!) who's going to be getting skillpoints from now until eternity.

I'm going to have a second account specifically for training alternate characters that I will eventually transfer to my my main account when they're 'done' then train up another character for the same account. My overarching goal is to have 2 full accounts, with a main and an alternate main who will be continuously be getting skillpoints, while having four characters that are static, but have all of the right skills to make them useful in supporting my main.

So, the main thing I was trying to figure out, is at what point would certain alternate characters be considered 'done?'

Since I can strike mining off my list (thank God), here's what I'm kind of thinking character wise.

Logistics Main
Market Alt
Scanner Alt

Researcher/Builder/Reprocessor
EWAR
Hauler alt

I'm not 100% sure about which I should use as mains and which alts. The Hauler alt seems pretty obvious, since I've read plans that you can train a pretty efficient one in about 42-48 days.

I'm not sure exactly where to put the Researcher/Reprocessor Crafty guy, the EWAR character, and even the Scanner alt. Would it be more efficient to, say, train the EWAR guy in Scanning first, then move on to EWAR and make him my second main? Should I somehow mesh them all into my logistics character? Should I just make the Logi a 'long-term alt' that I can stop training once he has sufficient skills, since Logis tend to get targeted pretty quickly, so clone costs could get higher if I used a main character for them?

Which of the jobs above would benefit most from just training for up to the point of being useful, then remaining static, and which should I continue to go the long haul with?

Scanner, ewar and logi all go quite well together. The prereqs for recons include those for covert ops, the prereqs for logi include those for recons. I did this with one of my chars, starting off as a scout/prober in a cov ops, then training up to falcon, then on to logis.

Scimi is the preferred Shield logi atm (over the Caldari Basilisk, which can only work in pairs/groups).
Then you also have the option to train for the GAllente / Amarr Logi ship which will be an Armor logi.

EWAR, that really depends on what kind of EWAR you want to be:

Long range tackle = Gallente
Long range webber = Minmatar
ECM = Caldari
Disrupting = Amarr.

EAch race has it's own type of EWAR they are good at.

Also, minimum skills doesn't mean you can fly it...keep that in mind, specially for the more advanced roles.

A logi pilot with the logi skills below 4 will be flamed at and laughed at, 4 is the BARE minimum, 5 is recommended or even mandatory for certain fits/fleets.

This is what I did originally: I started my main account and played it for a few months. My primary focus was training for logistics and since that was a long term plan I needed something to do in the meantime - I focused on salvaging. I had some basic combat skills and some tackling abilities so I could be useful in the event of a combat engagement but they were minimal.

I moved out to 0.0 ten days after creating my character.

Later on, after that few months, I figured out that having a hauler / market alt would be tremendously useful for what I found myself doing. I started one. I did a "quick" plan for being able to have all the various hauling ships up to a freighter. Combined with that I trained up the market skills.

My reasoning: the character who would be selling / buying stuff would also be the one moving stuff. So why separate that into two characters? One character was good.

Once that skill plan was done I moved the character over to my main account. That way I didn't sacrifice training time on my main.

At the same time I also started a 'real' alt who was designed to fly large ships. Basically that character was going to be my big ship / DPS character and my logistics character would focus on cruiser sized ships and below. In time, I retired my alt and now I only play my one account.

All that to say: put your hauler and market character together. I would also have that same character do the industrial aspect in terms of building stuff / research or whatever you may do on that side of the game.

Basically have a combat character and a non-combat character. The core skills for each are very different so it is worthwhile to have the two characters. I would consider logistics to be part of combat since, again, the core skills for that are, basically, the same as they would be for any other combat style. Exploration - I'd leave that on the combat side of things although a reasonable argument can be made to put it on the industrial side so that's a preference thing.

To expand on my earlier post, this is my current status w.r.t. main/alts (not the best I know)

Main Account 1:
1. Combat main (able to fly all subcap roles for 3 races, including logistics etc.)
2. Shopping alt (parked in Jita, just need to buy stuff occasionally to be shipped to where I live), minimal skills (took 1 day of my main's training to get some needed skills)
3. Basic hauler alt (again, minimal skills needed to fly Bestowers, at Min indy level 3 and rigged can haul up to 1 battlecruiser + fittings).

Alt Account 2:
1. Industrial main (Has market skills for trading, science skills for exploration/hacking/probing and research, manufacturing, processing skills etc., and advanced hauling skills inc. covops)
2. BECAUSE OF FALCON ALT （nuff said, also training up for combat boosting)
3. Spare slot/recycled slot (for general purposes)

Why the shopping and basic hauler alt on the same account? It's for when I used to have a bit of downtime, and didn't have the other account active, or was actively checking buy orders and needed to move some stuff to my main (flashy red can't get into highsec). Plus, back in the day, CCP gave you certain skills depending on the race and bloodline, and additional training for a bestower which could haul battlecruisers only took a few hours.

The second account, when active, was used for trading PVP, as well as general industrial purposes. Falcon/ewar/booster alt on the second account for obvious reasons, i.e. used in conjunction with combat main when required. The spare slot was used to recycle alts for various purposes (i.e. normally shady purposes or trolling etc.)

Another thing you might want to consider is generally useful stuff on your alts, such as the ability to fly a cloaky ship (cloaky haulers/cov ops etc.) and the ability to light a cyno (extremely useful if you have batphone and don't wanna waste your combat main).

I alternate training on the second account between the alts as required, but pretty much never stopped training the combat character (apart from a few hours here and there).

Hope this helps.

Regarding T2 ships (interceptors, cov-ops, logistics ships, etc), keep in mind 2 things:

1. Because they aren't exactly equivalent between the races, currently certain ships ARE favorites. You can take a look and compare each class across races, and kinda figure it out, but for example only certain ships can boost shields, or have increased range for the critical Warp Disruptor tackling module, etc. This is why old characters train up all the races; when it comes to T2 ships, the "best" are spread across all races, kinda forcing you to train all.

2. CCP is very likely going to balance T2 ships as soon as they finish with T1 ships. Once they do that, they may equalize the abilities of all the T2 classes, so that you don't have train all of them to get "the best." This is why, if you check the character bazaar, you see a lot of characters for sale that can "fly all ships" or multitrained; people are selling them expecting the upcoming T2 rebalance. In any case, by the time you get to the point where you're training for T2 ships, they may be rebalanced already, so you only have to train a single race.