EVE New Citizens Q&A

Certificates are guidelines on what can be useful skills to have and at what level for a certain ship / module.
The higher the level, the more efficient you can use certain things.

But they are not set in stone things to have and it's not like you MUST have them or MUST follow them to the letter. But it can help you with spotting what might be useful to train for a certain ship or module.

All ships bigger then cruiser utilize drones.

As for weapon systems:

Amarr: Lasers, with some drones and missile ships.
Gallente: Hybrids (Blasters) and Drones
Caldari: Hybrids (Railguns) and Missiles
Minmatar: Projectiles with some missile ships.

Of course, this is general rule, nothing prevents you to fit "unusually".

This is what we were all talking about above. Just being able to undock a ship is meaningless - it takes a long time to be able to actually fit one in a meaningful way :)

For most weapons I have used so far, the T1 meta 4 variant is almost as "good" stats-wise as the T2 variant with the huge exception that you cannot use T2 ammo. However you should have little trouble in most highsec L3 missions in a BC with T1 ammo and launchers. T2 ammo is pretty amazing in some cases though so you'll want it.

Meta 4 launchers ('Arbalest') are also relatively expensive right now; they went up 1M ISK in the last month or so to about 4M a pop. I usually use meta 2 or 3 as my missile skills are bad.

You can also use faction ammo for higher DPS. I always do now, but I also almost never purely PvE so it is much more important for me to maximize DPS.

Drones are another story. T1 drones are ok but T2 drones are little beasts in comparison. You'll want T2 drones. I don't have them yet (I'm kind of focused at the moment on some other skills) and I want them badly.

Generally heavy missiles, Heavy Assault missiles, and rapid lights are for cruisers and BC's, yeah. Rapid Heavies, torps and so on are for battleships. Generally. There are exceptions (stealth bombers (T2 frigates, yay!), etc).

Faction ammo works in T1 launchers, yes. It's a higher DPS variant of normal ammo.

Great! What are best T1 fraction heavy missiles, torps and cruise missiles? I must live with T1 weapons for a month.

Of course! Anyway there is a bit too much weapon types in EVE for my taste!

In short there are four types missile damage: kinetic, explosive, thermal and EM so I should always have missiles of all four types on-board just in case?

In short, Caldari torpedoes are for PvP and cruise missiles for PvE?

Anyway I have to accomplish a week long training to get acceptable T1 fit for BC and BS.

Time for another 2 isk worth of opinion. :)

It depends on what or who you're expecting to fight.

The game has several factions of NPC pirates, "rats" as they are commonly called. Each "rat" faction does particular types of damage, and is vulnerable to particular types of damage. If you are doing NPC agent missions, the mission description info will tell you which rat faction you will be fighting. Use the type of missile that works best against that rat faction.

The Eve-Survival web site is a list of different missions the game has, what you need to do to complete them, what type of rat you'll fight in each mission, what type of damage you should equip yourself to do, and what type of damage the rats will do so you can set up your ship defences for that type of damage.

Rats also spawn in asteroid belts and inside anomalies. The type of rats that spawn in each system isn't random, CCP set up which types of rats will spawn in each system, and it's only one type of rat faction in each system. DOTLAN is a useful web site you can use to find out which type of rat faction will spawn in a particular system, and you can equip your weapons and defences to match that particular rat faction. You can also earn isk by hunting rats in asteroid belts and anomalies. Concord will pay you a reward for each rat ship you blow up . The weakest rats with the lowest rewards are in high security space. Low security space has stronger rats and bigger rewards, and null security has the strongest rats and the biggest rewards, but also the highest risk that another player could ambush you while you hunt rats (ambushes often happen in low security space as well, and can happen in high security space but are less common). As well as the rewards, you can loot and salvage the wrecks of the rat ships for modules and valuable scrap to sell. Rats are easy to prepare for with only a small amount of research needed before you fly out to shoot them.

If you want to know about which missiles to carry to fight other players, that's more complicated. Each playable race has ships that are strong against some types of damage and weak against other types of damage, but players can fit different defence modules to their ships to improve their weakest defences, so it's not a simple case of saying "you should use damage A against Gallente ships and damage B against Caldari ships and damage C against Minmatar ships, etc". Scourge (kinetic) is thought to be a generally useful all round damage type, and Inferno (thermal) as well.

The weak point about missiles is that they only do one damage type, If you've picked the right type of missile to use, you'll do a lot of damage. If you picked the wrong type of missile to use, not so good. Combat drones are the same, drones only do one type of damage so if you want to spread out your drone damage types, you need to carry several different types of drones.

This is an area where gun type weapons (Minmatar projectiles, Gallente hybrids and Amarr lasers) can have an advantage because they all have ammunition that can do several types of damage at the same time. Minmatar have two different types of ammunition that do three of the four damage types at the same time. A Minmatar ship that uses a combination of missiles and projectile guns could cover all damage types at the same time depending on ammunition choice for the guns and missiles. Guns are not always superior to missiles though, they have less range and big guns have problems hitting small fast ships compared to big missiles hitting the same small fast ships. A general rule of thumb, small weapons (guns and missiles) hit small targets more easily, big weapons work better against big targets.

You can use this link to see what types of damage certain NPC's are weak to, and what type of damage they deal.

http://www.eve-outtakes.de/damagetypes.htm

I think you have too much ISK on your hands for a new player and I see an embarrassing loss mail waiting to happen.

Several things:
1) If you've never flown lvl 4 missions you might underestimate the amount of damage you take. Especially as you are using Torpedoes, you will be right in the middle of them and might be webbed & scrammed, unable to fly away, dying. For new players I'd always suggest a MJD and long distance weapons, as it's much more forgiving, you can always micro-jump away to safety. Take on too much with your fit and you will be trapped.

2) There are locator agents in this game. These are NPCs who will tell anyone that has the required standing where you are. You just posted a rather expensive fit, with little buffer. (BTW, it's normal for a PvE fit to have little buffer.) And you have little skill points and experience. You should expect several people to have taken notes and they might show up tomorrow and kill you in order to loot those faction modules from your wreck. Never, ever publicly announce that you are flying with expensive modules.