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EVE New Citizens Q&A

 
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T2 frigs
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Senshi Hawk
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#1 - 2011-11-17 00:32:00 UTC
Once you reach racial frigate V and all the secondary skills, would it make any sense to train lvl 1 for ALL the racial t2 frigs, or would I be better off specializing lvl 5 of a specific class? Or both?

The training time is surprisingly small to cover every single T2 class. To fly them well is another story.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#2 - 2011-11-17 01:51:42 UTC
Many people who fly stealth bombers will choose to fly a Manticore for general combat and a Hound for POS-bashing. The Manticore has been a long-time favourite due to its generous fittings (slots, PG, CPU). The Hound is nice for POS-bashing due to being able to provide higher DPS.

The long-time favourite covops frigate is the Helios for combat work, Cheetah for probing and sneaking around, the Anathema for looks, and Buzzard for people who fly Caldari ships.

I don't know interceptors too well, but I suspect you'll find one interceptor favoured for flying speed, another favoured for tackling speed, while the other two languish as the bridesmaids.

As far as assault ships go, the Jaguar is popular amongst my friends, with the Ishkur a close second (the Ishkur and Enyo get some love with the Winter Expansion).

My advice would be to learn to fly each of the hulls as soon as you can, developing the necessary specialist skills over time. If you're training to use Cynos, I'd go for Cyno 5 so you can use covert cynos too.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Malcom Dax
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#3 - 2011-11-17 12:25:25 UTC
OP picks up on it a bit. Training to be able to get in the hull is one thing. Flying it well is another story.

I'd advise you to pick one or maybe two ships that you want to specialize in initially and skill up for those. Learn the different ways it can be fitted and flown etc etc. Imo its a waste of your time to train up to a lot of ships that you cannot fly well. If you do want to swap to a different ship then training up to be able to jump in the hull wont take too long. In the meantime, you can use the time you save to train further skills for your chosen ship.

.
Louis deGuerre
The Dark Tribe
#4 - 2011-11-17 15:08:10 UTC
It can't hurt to train all frigs to L5 as it takes little time and gives you a wealth of options.
Personally I find the racial stealth bombers don't differ that much (altough damage type bonus is an important factor) but in other categories (covops, assault, interceptor) the differences are more pronounced and having access to all racial ships is very nice.

When starting out I recommend the T1 route up to a BC or BS in a single race to start with, but right after that expanding your options this way is a wise decision.

That said, Amarr frigates could use more midslots, so I would not start with them.
Khanh'rhh
Sparkle Motion.
#5 - 2011-11-17 17:15:42 UTC
He's not asking whether to cross train racially, he's asking whether it is better to specialize in assault ships, over COVOPS, for example.

IMO lvl 4 in the relevant spaceship command skill is a good starting point to use it. That's not a lot of time to invest into it.

"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." -Soviet infantry manual,

mxzf
Shovel Bros
#6 - 2011-11-17 17:23:12 UTC
Khanh'rhh wrote:
He's not asking whether to cross train racially, he's asking whether it is better to specialize in assault ships, over COVOPS, for example.

IMO lvl 4 in the relevant spaceship command skill is a good starting point to use it. That's not a lot of time to invest into it.


Yeah, this is pretty much good advice. Take each one to 4 (except EAF, they're crappy in general) and you'll be able to use each type of T2 frig fairly effectively. If you find one you really love and you want to max it out, that's great, but lvl 4 will make them quite effective without a huge train.

In general, you'll find that taking T2 ship skills to 4 is a good starting point (and Logis aren't even usable 'till you hit 4). It gives you a solid amount of bonuses to make it worthwhile, but it doesn't require more than a couple days of training.
Alaric Faelen
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#7 - 2011-11-20 02:20:18 UTC
Good advice- I have two races frig to V, and SB, EAS and Inty. I haven't done AF but will probably go back to get that too.

Personally I love the SB, but the inty is probably a little easier to just jump in and tear things up.
Capital T
Doomheim
#8 - 2011-11-20 05:24:04 UTC
Senshi Hawk wrote:
Once you reach racial frigate V and all the secondary skills, would it make any sense to train lvl 1 for ALL the racial t2 frigs, or would I be better off specializing lvl 5 of a specific class? Or both?

The training time is surprisingly small to cover every single T2 class. To fly them well is another story.


Personally, if you don't want to fly a interceptor, cov ops, or electronic attack frig, then why train for it? If you were going to want to try any of the other t2 frigs in your racial class, then I suggest training the specific ship skill to lv 4. If you find yourself fond of hte vessel then train it up to lv 5. :)

Cov ops are good to use, assault frigs kick butt, and I have never flown a eaf or interceptor, yet. But they are handy to use and have their place. It depends on what you want to do... Training the skill to lv 1 is very noob imho. Just to get the ship and fly it, meh, train it to lv 4... then try it I say. best of luck.
Capital T
Doomheim
#9 - 2011-11-20 05:24:46 UTC  |  Edited by: Capital T
Dam double post... please delete, or create a delete option so I can do it myself please?
Vimsy Vortis
Shoulda Checked Local
Break-A-Wish Foundation
#10 - 2011-11-20 05:39:50 UTC  |  Edited by: Vimsy Vortis
I dont know where you live, but if you live in Highsec don't try and use a stealth bomber for any kind of PVP that involves anything other than you sitting cloaked near a jetcan waiting for a hauler to pick it up because in any other situation a bomber will die pretty much instantly.

Interceptors and assault ships are cool though.
Harlot Hohannson
Eye on Wang Poo
#11 - 2011-11-20 12:42:10 UTC
Generally speaking, if you are going to bother training for a ship you want to get it's skill up to IV as a minimum... level V depends on a few things but certainly isn't critical for lower skilled players. It's better to put that training time into getting your support skills up.

Support skills are those that benefit ANY ship you fly and make you tougher, faster, better able to fit modules etc. Search around for a guide when you have time.

If you are wondering what T2 frigs are good for here are some basic tips... You are welcome to disagree and everyone has their favourites but this is a 'generalist' outlook so you dont waste your time...

TLDR for PVE by the way... Assault Frigs can do some great stuff in PVE and Interceptors are great for epic mission arcs. Otherwise you are better off ignoring tech II frigs and should head into cruisers and battlecruisers.

INTERCEPTORS:
These are fast, low(ish) on tank and intended pretty much exclusively for PVP (although you can run epic arcs in some of them fine). There are two types for each race, basically one based on speed and one based on combat. For PVP they perform several roles the primary two being scouting for fleets (jumping ahead of a fleet to give intel on hostile fleets) and also tackling (they tackle very quickly where other ships take a while and could let people get away).

The combat variants are also very good for solo PVP if that is your thing, particularly the Taranis, but also the Crow and Claw,,, The Crusader is somewhat overtaken by the Faction ship Navy Slicer but is still fun. All of these are somewhat dwarfed by the Faction frigs Dramiel and Daredevil, but are considerably cheaper.

EAS:
These sound cool in concept but in practice they are too expensive and dont do a whole lot more than their cruiser counterparts offer aside from move and lock faster. If you enjoy the blackbird, arbitrator, celestis or bellicose then you will like these. A better idea is to look at the Recon class of ships as these can be very powerfu. Although the recons will take some time to train into, it's better not to waste skill points training EAS as its a dead end training wise.

COVERT OPS:
Again two variants here, Probers and Bombers.

Probers are very cool ships and give you access to very secure travel and the ability to probe much better than any other ship. They are next to useless combat wise, you can use them to find someone in space and decloak on them Klingon style to tackle and hold them down but you are going to need backup to actually come and kill your prey :P

So they might sound boring or not. If exploration interests you you cant go wrong here.

Bombers offer battleship weapons on a frigate. They are quite a unique class and one of their weapons (bombs) can only be used in 0.0 space (and wormholes) but in small packs they can be devastating. Again with the cloak you can use them to travel very safely. They are generally paper thin and tend to die very quickly to any sort of damage. You 'can' use them in solo PVP but you really have to know what you are doing... better to train Interceptors or AF's initially as you will probably get more use out of those classes.

ASSAULT FRIGATES:
While it's arguable that these have needed a fix for a long time, these are still a lot of fun, and reportedly a fix IS inbound shortly after the next big release at the end of this month. These ships have the toughest tanks for frigates and do considerable DPS (damage). The payoff is that they are not quite as fast or agile as other frig classes (although EAF are strangely WORSE than AFs).

IF YOU WANT TO USE TECH ii FRIGATES FOR PVE THEN THIS IS THE CLASS TO TRAIN.

Theres a couple of turkeys here but the following are all superb PVP ships. Ishkur, Harpy, Hawk, Jaguar, Wolf, Vengeance. even the Enyo is pretty nifty although it's not for everyone since its a VERY risky ship to fly in combat. The Amarr suffer here since the Retribution has only one mid and is therefore pretty much useless for combat, although it should do nicely for PVE.
Harlot Hohannson
Eye on Wang Poo
#12 - 2011-11-20 12:56:13 UTC
I forgot to mention but you could also consider the Destroyer class of ships. They are due shortly to be getting a rather nice boost to their effectiveness and will be very good at killing frigates, but also will be amazingly cheap compared to tech II frigs and very effective. It doesn't take much to train them to level IV and they are so cheap you can lose tens of them every day with no stress :)