EVE New Citizens Q&A

1 Your idea of rushing to a BS and then go pvp is wrong for two reasons. In EVE bigger isn't necessarily better, everything has a place, a role and a counter. Because of that you hardly ever see a battleship in solo PVP because where you might think it'd have massive hit points and dps and how cool that would be, what pvpers see is a slow, cumbersome, easy to catch & counter snail. EVE doesn't have a logical progression in that regard, there's no "must be lvl 80 and have tier 12 gear" going on here, it's all viable in their own way. Secondly, the fact that you can pilot a ship having the required skills in pace does not mean you have the right support skills to make it work and it also doesn't mean you know enough on the game and its mechanics to make it happen. So if you want to pvp do it in SMALL ships, frigates. Partly because they're awesome and you learn much more from them, partly because it's much easier to get the needed support skills and partly because it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

2 mining is a quite mediocre form of income but as per usual there's lots of people bragging, lying and trying to look cool. In reality a good mining ship makes some 10-15 mil solo in high sec. If anyone gives you radically different numbers he's not mining in high sec and/or he's certainly not using only one account for it and as you probably won't be using 3 accounts for mining you can just discard their bullshit. There's many ways to make isk, running missions is another or perhaps trading. A good option is exploration which meshes nicely with you wanting to train ship/combat skills and it also teaches you a lot about scanning. Try to layer your income, bit of this and that, that way you will probably get less bored. Apart from that, you can make isk with anything you want in EVE as long as you put in the effort to get GOOD at it, so you could even make profit from PVP. Note that mining requires a vastly different skill set which doesn't at all mesh well with your combat/pvp desire so any time you waste on training mining related stuff is lost, and again it's just one of the ways to make isk, a choice.

3 depends, as explained in #1 you're fine with frigates for pvp, they're fantastic for it. For you right now the only reason to scale up in size would be if you want to run lvl 3 or 4 missions for your income, other than that you're just fine sticking to frigs for a long time and perhaps look at cruisers for exploration. And as stated doing missions is a choice, just like any other. Do expect people to brag about how they do lvl 3/4 missions in their frigate and how awesome they are, in reality it's super slow due to lack of dps and range and slow means crappy income, so again; just ignore their bullshit.

Thank you for the info. I may have explained it wrong, but I do not want to go solo pvp in a battleship. a Battleship is just my goal in this game, I might even buy one even if I have no use for it because I like them, and If I get the chance to properly use it, that's even better. But for now, a BS is a long way to go so I will focus more on frigates and other small and affordable ships to lose. Thanks again for the reply.

1. if you wanna PVP, do it now in cheap-ass frigates. That way, you know what you're doing when you get into the bigger ships. BIGGER IS NOT NECESSARILY BETTER.

2. yes, via missions, PI, scamming, priacy, trade, manufacturing, etc.

3. This is two part... however, before we go any further, do not get discouraged about how long it'll take. You have to set yourself mini-goals that'll get you to the long-term goal of the other stuff...

3.a. (long/lazy way) take all the skills listed in the recommended certificates section for your tristan, and train them to L4. This will take you approximately 30 days. Please note that my timeline is based on a brand-new character with no training time whatsoever.

3.b. (long, but less lazy). Train all the recommended certificates for the frigate (this takes 2-3 days tops), and READ what each skill is doing. Take EVE-Mon (or EVEHQ, or any of the other skill planning programs out there) and then plan your skills out for what you want to do.

You can do either of these two, and throw in propulsion jamming (for points/webs), Afterburner, and IIRC high-speed navigation (for MWD) to level 4 for an additional 5ish days of training.

Now, jumping up to a cruiser sounds like a great idea to you, but you have to have the support skills to do it too. The guns take more fitting (PG and CPU), you need better gunnery skills to even think about fitting the guns, you need better skills to fir the armor reppers, and so on.


If you take the "long" route I showed above (taking all the recommended certificate skills to L4), each class step takes about a month, maybe 6 weeks. Obviously this is very focused and would potentially be boring; so a more balanced approach is something more like this:

Frigates -> mostly L0/1 skills, training to L2,
Dessies -> Mostly L2 skills, a few L3, and training the rest to 3
Cruisers -> Mostly L3 skills, with a few to L4, and some L2 stragglers
Battlecruisers -> More L4 skills, with the rest training up
BS -> L4 across the board.

(NOTE -- THIS IS VERY VERY GENERALIZED)

You'll note that I'm missing any mention of L5 skills. This is mostly because they take forever to train, and you can get better increases in the same amount of time by training other skills to L2/3/4 than just one to L5. Obviously if L5 of something is a prereq for a skill that you want/need, then you'll have to train it.

For example, the "Gunnery" skill gives you 2% ROF per level. Let's say you have L4, and the time to L5 is 3 days (it isn't, but we're using it for the sake of discussion).

"3 days" isn't so bad for 2% gain (just wait til you're training 60 days for that ) ... BUT, if you look through the skills, you'll see that there's a gunnery support skill called "Rapid Firing", which gives you 4% ROF per level. It's a 2x skill, so will take a few days to train to L4 (I think like 2 and a half). Now that 3 day train for 2% gain seems pretty silly, right?

(edit -- oops, forgot I changed the L5 training to "3 days")

1. Find a newbie friendly corp. They'll give you much more in-depth help and get you going in the right direction.

2. If you like combat, want to earn a fair amount of isk and want a use for that battleship you've got your eye on then you might try agent missions. At first they're just fun but later on they get profitable enough to fund other activities. A lot of the ship and weapon skills also transfer over into PvP, especially if you're patient and train the support skills (you really should, they make you much more effective). It'll take a while before you have the skills (both player and character) to tackle lvl 4 or 5 missions and it still doesn't match the thrill of PvP but it's worth looking at if nothing else and most battleships make good lvl 4 boats. You can quite easily fund yourself through agent missions.

Exploration is another fun activity. The rewards are very luck based, you might need to cover a wide area to get decent returns and you can have dry spells but you can also get lucky and make a few hundred million in a night. Again, the ship skills are useful and it's good practice.

Industry/trading can be profitable but more than any other part of EVE it's a numbers game and requires patience and some mental skill to really excel. The skills generally aren't relevant to combat (maybe some slight overlap with the navigational skills and cap management skills but other than that, not much).

3. As to when to advance onto larger ships, I can only offer the following;
-Can you afford to advance? Ideally you want to be able to afford 2 of the ship you are aiming at so you can replace it if you lose it to inexperience. And never sell your current moneymaker to get money for a new ship until you're sure it's going to work out.
-Can you use it's primary weapons at least to T1 level? A megathron with T1 425mm railguns makes me frown. A megathron with 250mm railguns because you can't use large hybrids makes me cringe! Same with drones and missiles. Make sure you can use at least the T1 version of the appropriately sized weapons.
-Are your support skills good enough to use your ship for it's purpose? As the ships get larger you will run into the case of your opponents being more difficult to hit. Typically you want to be able to upgrade all your modules to T2 (where appropriate) by the time you reach battlecruiser class. Velicitia has a good suggestion on where your support skills should be for each hull size.

and the biggest one;
-Do you feel ready? Generally larger ships deal more damage but they're also expected to tank a whole lot more and are much less responsive in things like turning and locking targets. A frigate or destroyer can get through low level missions dodging most incoming fire and so can have minimal tank. Cruisers and above will start to take significant hits so make sure you're confident you can handle the increased pressure.
There's too many variable for me to give a definitive answer but for everything but for missions, I'd tentatively say by cruiser class you want to how to manipulate transversal velocity to hit smaller targets, know the basics of the different tanking methods (and choose 1! Don't mix active and passive or shield and armour), the properties of your chosen weapon system and be able to manage your capacitor well enough to last the mission (doesn't have to be permanent but can you last several minutes under pressure?). By battlecruiser you need to know how to use drones to destroy frigates, and have learned your opponents damage types so you can selectively tank against and deal back that damage. Battleship pilots should know how to balance your capacitor vs tank so your capacitor (and shields if you're shield tanking) stay at peak recharge and your opponents E-war type and which ships wield it and methods to counter it.
And that's just my opinion on missions.

/wall of text
Hope to helps
Begin the criticism of everything i've just said

1. Don't. Learn PvP in small ships. Don't rush jump into something that is a big, bulky, slow and more expensive target.

Would you rather spent your money on 1 BS and then loose it and have nothing anymore to do

OR

Buy a shitload of frigates, loose them 1 by 1 and learn stuff from each fight.

Also...youtube doesn't make you learn PvP...EVE is a sandbox, every fight is different.

2. Yes. A lot of people don't mine at all in the game and make loads of ISK. Missions and ratting are the most obvious ones, trading, scamming, piracy etc all are viable too.

3. Well. Don't rush in stuff you can't fly. Just because you can sit in a ship doesn't mean you can use it. Cruisers means you need to have all your skills up to cruiser level, until that happens, stick with Frigs/Dessies.


If you want more help. Don't be affraid to contact me in game...

Could you please specify what skills should I focus on leveling up to 3/4 or what skills are recommended for missions/pvp?

Skills do highly depend on what race you fly, what ships you fly, what fit you use and what you are fighting.

PvE is a bit more clear on what you need, but PvP is all about adapting to fights.

Take a look at these things:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=896803#post896803