Ships & Modules

So if skills play such a huge differance should I attempt to get all of mine to level 5 if they are combat centered? Would it be okay in your guys opinion to get a valiant and use it for a while? Because it seems to be quite a nice cruiser.

It's always a good idea to get your skills up to level 5 for whatever your interests are. I assume that by Valiant, you mean Vigilant.

You might consider buying a few Thorax's and taking them through their paces first. You can afford to lose 20 or so Thorax's for the price of one Vigilant. My advise is to get some experience under your belt before taking the more expensive ships into pvp. (Both in skill levels & actual player skill.) That said, if you can afford to learn and lose on faction ships, more power to you, I suppose.

My advise - buy 20 frigates of your choice. Lose them. Buy 20 more, lose them too. Repeat until you feel comfortable. Then do the same for cruisers. Once you feel good about your chances in a Thorax, you could consider giving a Vigilant a spin. Otherwise it's very likely that you'll just be giving someone else a very nice kill.

Start with getting everything relevant to 3. At a bare minimum. That's probably the greatest point between time spent and value of increase. From there, get them all to 4. 4 is usually an alright standard, you're at 85%+ of maximum efficiency with the ship for the most part.

Most important skills I'd recommend:
Power Grid Management (V)
CPU Management (V)
Weapon Upgrades (IV)
Hull Upgrades (IV)
Shield Management (IV)
Mechanics (IV)
Navigation (IV)
Capacitor Management (IV)
Capacitor Systems Operation (IV)
Acceleration Control (IV)


That's not to say simply stop there. I'd just say that's the beginning of laying down a good core. You've maxed the two most important fitting skills with that, allowing you to (for the most part) properly fit your ship. You've attempted to maximize your buffer on any ship by increasing your shield, armour, and hull buffer by 20%, and you've gained the ability to use the Damage Control II module, potentially one of the strongest modules in PvP. You've got some basic capacitor management, hopefully making it so you don't run out of cap at the worst of times. And you've trained up your speed so you can try to keep within your preferred range.

More is better, but that is good in addition to minimum III's for all other important ship specific skills.

Oh, and the ship loss plan laid out by Victoria Thorne is always great advice. Keep flying until you start finding success. You won't win every time, but you want to try as hard as you can to make sure you win as much as possible.

Oh, and the cardinal rule of EVE:
"Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."

Edit:

You should really consider starting with frigates, because typically the base hull is around 1/20th of the Cruiser hull and gives you some experience, and even fitted they are still substantially cheaper than a Cruiser.

Also, when getting into Cruisers, you need even more skills than frigates to be at least to basic levels, such as Drone skills. I don't know if you noticed, but the Thorax has a rather decent drone bay for a blaster ship. It has 50mbit/s bandwidth with a drone bay to match, meaning it can field 5 medium drones. Those actually account for quite a bit of damage against opposing Cruisers during a fight, or instead of mediums you could bring two flights of 5 small drones, which, while being only moderately weaker, perform substantially better against frigates.

So for that I'd get the Drones skill to level 5, while also training up all the Drone support skills. This is really heaping a lot more work on you.

For any PvP application, you will also need the skill Propulsion Jamming to at least 1, higher is better. You will need Stasis Webifier and Warp Scrambler/Warp Disruptor modules to hold your enemies down to kill them.

When you do figure out what ship(s) you want to fly, start:

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Template:ShipsMatrix

for fittings.

Also setup and use evemon to plan training. http://evemon.battleclinic.com

Goldensaver's and Jacob Holland's advise above is quite good.

One thing to add:

A more powerful more expensive ship in EVE makes you more of a target, not less of one. (Unlike most games.)

In low-sec, you might have someone decide not engage your Vigilant or Mach, but it's likely that you'd be meeting them and their friends shortly afterwards. (Or them turning back up in a ship that they consider more appropriate to kill what you are flying.)

In high-sec, a Mach will draw more attention than a Tempest or a Maelstrom. (It's more likely to be fitted with expensive stuff, so it will be a higher priority for gankers to take a look at.) It also tends to be better to learn to mission on cheaper ships, it's quite possible to lose a faction battleship in a level 4, if you have no idea what you are doing. (If you know what you are doing and lose one, that's a different story.)

That said, a Mach is a great long term goal. I love mine.

Do not fit your mission boat with more than 500mill in modules. there is no need for it and that is asking for someone to gank you. spend the isk on your pod and jumpclone pods so you have pvp pods.

this game is about one thing and one thing only. blowing up spaceships, yours included. do not ever forget that.

Can someone explain to me how jump clones work? And thx for the 500mil warning..........was flying around in a 1.3bil vigilant for a while and didnt think it was a bad idea.....(cuz you know.....noob thinks highsec is safe)

So ive been training up abit and practicing on normal ships, I decided to take my nice ship out today and WOW.......everything in level two missions dies in one hit.......huge improvement

Well you can check out the RvB Community - Here you can easily learn small scale PvP and the mechanics of gates, stations etc. And every Saturday Mangala Solaris leads the "Ganked" public roam to 0.0 space - where we engage other groups and larger fleets. In my opinion small gang PvP is much more efficient for learning PvP then trying it solo. RvB is a newbe friendly alliance and you will get some helping hand for your first steps. Also we have prefit ships on cheap contracts for the members. Believe me or not - ive learned more on manually piloting and PvP micromanagement in here then in the large CFC 0.0 Battles.

oh... and we are based near Jita in Highsec - so you can easily join :)

Have fun.

Wow. You're gonna lose that expensive toy in glorious fashion!!

Good on ya!!!!