EVE New Citizens Q&A

Really depends on your long-term plans. Drones are important for almost every ship, some more so than others. Being able to fly T2 drones is a must (at some point at least), doing so only takes about a month of training, including decent drone support skills.

As far as primary damage, drones boats are less common in PvP. Blasters and AutoCannons seem to be the preference. Lasers have their place, but require a lot of cap skills on top of the gunnery skills. In PvE you can make just about any weapon work well.

I think your best bet is to pick a ship you would like to fly (do some research on it, don't just go for what looks cool) and then focus on its bonuses. You should use the weapon system that your ship gets a bonus for.

If you are flying Gallente Hulls like the Vexor, Myrmidon, and Dominix you should make drones your primary focus to a degree. Keep in mind that no matter what, drones will be a force multiplier. T2 guns are a necessary for market reasons as those meta 4 tech 1 guns get freaking expensive.

There are things you can do to protect your drones on a drone boat like fitting a remote armor / shield repper. Fit your PVE ship to snipe from a distance using SEBOs and Omni Trackers with Sentry Drones. You can also use small drones which are harder to hit and move faster.

The recent updates to the rats have made it much harder to simply collect aggro, drop drones, and sit back watching a movie as death and carnage pillages the NPC villians around you.

As a hardened Gallente Pilot, my advice is get your T2 medium drones immediately due to the reasons that no matter what racial you fly you will have increased hitting power of all damage types. Then get your T2 med and small guns. When it comes to battleships, if you are flying a Domi, the T2 Sentries are a must.

I would suggest you try to aim for a good balance of laser and drone skills, especially if you are going to be doing a lot of mission running, and especially if you are going to be doing combat exploration sites.

The trick is to go in, don't be too eager to kick the puppies out, take the agro yourself, then let them out to play.

You do need to manage them a bit, as they tend to wander off on their own if you don't keep an eye on them, and npc's will swap target, so you have to occasionally pull them back into the bay to retake the agro.

But with a little care, the puppies will kill small fast movers a hell of a lot faster then you can with turrets. Which is a must if you have webbers and scramblers in the mix against you.

I never use anything other then Hobgoblin II, they can put some serious hurt on even BC types.

Energy weapons boast some of the worst tracking in all of EVE, which means that on bigger boats you wont be able to hit anything small without drones. Furthermore drones are useful to all races and necessary for all bigger ships. They will never be wasted training time so spend as much time on them as you like without regrets. They will always add about 1/4dps on any ship for free so I would say a full range of T2 drones with supports at 4 is a must for any pilot, whether he is industry, pve or pvp.

Guns and missiles can come close behind, eventually you will want them all since you will want to crosstrain to secure your account against future changes. Did LVL 4s for years with a BC and low medium guns trained without even breaking a sweat so not training your guns to the fullest right away wont hurt you. Getting warp scrambled and webbed with no means of killing the small tackling frigates will hurt a ton more though so prioritize your drones for that until you are confident those no longer pose a threat.

Don't neglect your tanking skills as well, if you can't kill them fast enough, you need to be able to outlast them.

Fly Safe o/

Its not so true, Artys are terribad at tracking... i mean seriously bad. Drones are just drones.. they can be switched from small to medium and large, long range, ECM, salvage.... they are usefull but not a main weapon, not even on a carrier where its all there is, its usefull but only after reps and triage.

Although lets not confuse you, Figther's are not drones, they are only for carriers.
If i could get a ship that have has much dps has a good ship only with drones... i would drive it all the time because i love drones, but non are that much effective with only drones, drones are secondary weapons in most cases.

Just another thought why drones should be your new best friends.

If you are going to be doing a lot of mission running, you are going to be doing missiona against Gurista and Sansha, and take it from me, when you have them mass jamming you it's a real pain.

But once you have the 'Puppies' out and fighting they will carry on killing things. OK, they are not so easy to control as often you can't see exactly what they are 'chewing on', but they will keep on chewing, even if you yourself are jammed to death.

I use a Gila with Sentry II's in 0.0 for ratting. Works fine.

I keep all my cap for non offensive stuff which makes me happy, and as sentries stay with you they are easy to pull in when targeted.

In terms of PvE, drones are amazing. Sure, some get blown up, not hard to replace though.

In terms of damage, your drones should not be relied on for DPS. Majority of the time, in a PvE setting, they'll get blown up, you'll have to recall then, etc. You're better off using a boat that has damage on it's own with turrets, IE Omen or something similar.

But do not disregard drones. They can add up to another 170 DPS (Full flight of Hammerhead II's with specialization and Drone Interfacing V). They're a neccesity.\

But if you wanna try the drone damage direction, head for a Myrmidon and a Dominix. They both rely on drones to begin with. And they have the tank to deal with it.

YTK