EVE New Citizens Q&A

I was just browsing the General Discussion forums when I stumbled upon a thread about implants and their supposed overwhelming advantages which left me with three rather simple questions in my head.

Just how important are implants?
Do I need to invest millions of ISK into implants in order to survive & compete with veteran players?
As an indy pilot who has little hope of having an escort that won't pop in seconds to 2k per hit weapons do I need to worry about implants myself, or is it best to accept my inability to survive in the face of a veteran pirate or bored capsuleer and not waste money on implants for a few months?


I just picked the game up last week after years of wanting to get into EVE and have been focusing on trade. I joined a corporation consisting entirely of new players and while I have not yet been brutally murdered myself, a number of my fellow co-workers have had far less luck than I. Two members of my corporation were left speechless after being destroyed by players in ships that they felt they could at least compete with.


When I was purchasing some low level implants I noticed that several implants were worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of ISK and can't help but think that every veteran player is cruising around in flying death machines, whether they be Atrons or Paladins.

To answer your questions in simple terms, implants aren't that important.

They split into two main categories:

1) Learning; and
2) PvP.

The second category has a few sub categories, which for the purpose of simplicity will in general terms include advantages to attributes of your ship and/or its functions... and yes I do put it into a broad PvP category, because everything in EvE is PvP is some form or another.

For both categories, implants can be broken down to a number of levels. Starting from giving you very small advantages (i.e 1% to agility of your ship or 1% damage to medium energy turret and so on), to modest ones, to fairly decent ones. The price tag generally scales with the advantage provided by the said implant.

So if you do spend 3-4bil ISK on your implants, you will have a decent advantage over your opponent but nothing completely overpowered. So the assumption that anyone flying these pimped out clones will instantly win and defeat anyone without the same implants is not accurate.

Therefore, I wouldn't get too hung up on implants and I would only use what I can afford to lose.

I'm an industrialist, and my head is worth more than most of my ships.

If you lose your pod in hisec, you had to be doing something very wrong to begin with. Generally you should never lose a pod in hisec, unless you do stupid stuff like AFK.

When I PvP, I clone jump into a cheaper clone.

EDIT: FYI, a Mining Foreman Mindlink is 1.1 billion ISK.

Sorry if piggybacking another question is bad form, but I had a similar question. Do intellect or memory implants help with learning new skills (either enhancing them or increasing the speed of learning)?

Thank you.

Almost everything in EVE, implants included, follows a rule that a linear increase in performance has a significantly faster than linear increase in cost. Paying out the ass for incredibly expensive ships and whatnot will not make you a god. 10 t1-fit frigates could easily take down a pirate faction battleship worth billions.


Basic implants are very cheap. Hardwirings (Stuff that affects your ship) affect any single attribute from 1-5%. The 1% implants are usually 300k ISK - 1 mil ISK, which is very cheap, whereas the +5s will be over 100 millions.

As far as attribute implants go, you have +1 to +5 to any single attribute. +4s are 20 million a piece, but +2s are under one milion.

Because of the slot system, you can only have so many implant sets in at one time, and even the most expensive implants are not going to radically change a ship's performance. For example, a Snake set, an extremely expensive pirate implant set that makes your ship faster, will give about a 25% speed boost.


So, basically...Without a ton of resources you will be able to get most of the performance that a rich player would enjoy.



And even in this case, you don't have to PVP without implants. In lowsec, it's very easy to keep your pod safe. Even in nullsec you won't get podded all the time - it's easy, and cheap, to just keep a stash of +2 or +3 implants around and plug in the two that affect the current skill group being trained at any one time. So the difference between someone who PVPs and someone who does not might be ...a month of skill training, maybe?

+3 implants for learning (first five slots) are pretty much always worth the isk.

+4s are sometimes worth it if what you're doing doesn't get you killed very often.

As far as new players are concerned, don't buy anything else (combat implants) unless you just have a bunch of extra isk or LP lying around, or need an extra couple percent of something to make a fit work (say, I once picked up a 2% capacitor implant to make a big active-tanked mission boat cap stable instead of "drains in 15 minutes").

Also if you've been missioning like most of us do when we're new, you can cash in your LP for +3's and +4's at a reduced rate.

Most of the time, your first five implant slots will go to attribute enhancers, which are basically just to speed up training of skills. There are specialty implants that can go in those slots, as well; a lot of people will use "Genolution" implants in two slots, which will boost two attributes as well as giving you bonuses to ship CPU, powergrid, capacitor, and such, but those implants are on the expensive side (30 million apiece, 60 for the full set). Then there are "pirate" implants, which, in addition to giving the skill-training speed increase, will give you a particular set of bonuses, but those are generally in the hundred-million-to-billion-ISK range, and aren't usually recommended unless you're involved in specialty activities.

Funny thing about slots 6-10: skill hardwirings at the +1%, +3%, and +5% levels are much cheaper than those at the +2%, +4%, and +6%. The former are available through most common LP stores, while the latter generally are only sold in CONCORD LP stores, and there aren't many sources of CONCORD LP other than incursions.

Also, depending on what you're planning to train, you won't necessarily use a full set of attribute implants; if you're concentrating on learning spaceship command and weapon skills, you only really need boosts to Perception and Willpower, for example. It's a common pattern: two +3 or +4 learning implants, two or three hardwirings, generally at the +3% level. Depending on the risk levels, of course.