Warfare & Tactics

You have two options:

a) learn to solo on your own

b) join an active FW corp


a) is hard but feasible. you don't need SP, just dedication. I know because I did it as a 1-month old player. lost dozens of ships, but killed a lot as well. still, I had an enormous amount of spare time (I could play 8+ hours a day every day)

b) is easy. just find an active corp that accepts newbros, there are several. from personal experience, when active FW PVP corps see war targets is when they undock, not the opposite . this isn't renter nullsec.

Why not circle said button in a combat fit Frig, and take fights as they come? Outcome A. Roamers come: get a GF. Outcome B. No one comes: Get paid. Repeat.

Once you get the hang of Dscan and do it as a reflex, you can be aware enough of the systems traffic to know when to stay and fight, and when to safe up.

You will learn a massive amount of what you can fight in your chosen fit, and what you have no hope of beating.

BTW no one actually 'orbits' the button. It's just a figure of speech. You get to your optimal range of the warp in beacon and sit there. That gives you the initiative in a 1v1.

Well, in a literal sense it's all precisely their fault.

I get the Kite/Brawl idea, and of the dozens of frigates I've currently got filling every corner of my hanger there's a roughly 50/50 split in the fits. I guess my issue is that it's looking like I can't Brawl/Kite harder than my opponents because I'm several million SP and 3 meta levels below them, nor can I stop them from Kite/Brawling me - for the same reasons.

And to the point where the profit and the fighting are mutually exclusive. I could get the same LP profit in a shuttle if I had a mind to. Hell, half the time I spent in plexes was with a completely stripped frig because I was tired of seeing killmails with even the super cheap modules exploded.

The math of that seems unpleasant though. I'm forced to conclude I'm down 1-2 skill levels in all my support skills, I'm still using T1 guns because I don't have any V's trained, and then I'm only using the T1 version of the hull. All told, that says to me that "what I have no hope of beating" is very nearly everything, even before we accept that I don't even know what I'm doing yet.

The fights I'm getting are so one sided that there's nothing to learn. I could try to even up the raw stat differences by upping my hull and going T2 fit - but that just means my lack of player skill will be flushing 30 minutes of button pushing every time I get in a fight. Learning to PvP by way of chewing through Firetails is an expensive way to live.

I don't know if I'd call it defeatist. Maybe just resigned. CCP has fixed a lot of things about their systems over the years, but their fascination with +X% skills is probably my one big issue with the game. I mentioned PS2, because I enjoy going and shooting the space mans. And part of that is the knowledge that nobody there has an advantage over me beyond knowing what they're doing. I don't need to spend 6 months grinding new guns or armor, I just need to figure out how to fight.

EVE has it's own player learning curve, but then there's just the raw stats. Every week your opponent has over you in the game just translates into +5% of this, +3% of that... and those add up. I don't have to feel defeated though, because I know how to win that fight. It's the same thing it was last time I unsubbed: set a training queue and go play a different game for a month (or two, or ten) while you wait for your character to have progressed far enough to do whatever it is you wanted. Just don't enjoy that other game too much or you might let your EVE sub lapse. :P

I'd love to hear how that was accomplished. To put the power disparity I'm working with in perspective, realize that the last Brawler fit (though I use that term loosely - maybe think of it simply as 'not long range fit') was rocking an impressive 68 DPS according to the fitting.

If that's true, maybe I'll have to look them up. :)

I started soloing at like 1 and something mil SPs.

It can be brutal, but it's doable and very satistying when it finally goes right

You definately don't need 6 months of training. Get fitting skills up, some navigation, a t2 weap system, a racial frig to V, meanwhile go and explode gloriously, study the fit of what killed you, think about how's the right way of fighting them, get good fits from experienced players, compare to what you came up with, etc etc

Joining a FW group does not mean having to drop the hopes of being a soloist. We have several solo pilots in our corp who only join fleets if something urgent is happening. The rest of the time they marauder around slaughtering people and teaching our corpies who are interested in how to go about doing it, sharing fits, discussing tactics etc.

Agree with whoever said most real FW groups will gladly undock for a fight - however don't confuse that with leeroying into certain death...unless the **** it lets see what happens mood takes us anyway.

You need a minimum level of SP to solo with any chance of success. T2 fittings with level 5 racial frigate skill for your ship of choice along with at least lvl 4 support skills and good skills in the relevant weapons systems are highly recommended.

Can you pvp in a meta fit frigate with 1M sp? Yes.

But you will lose so many ships and spend so much time looking for potentially winnable fights that the exercise becomes pretty frustrating.

The best T1 frigate in the current FW meta right now is the tristan. Look up the more popular fits and start skilling towards them, a well fit tristan can be done for 6-10M ISK. If you are better skilled for missile ships, the condor is a great choice that requires less SP and is a very dangerous kiting vessel. Just don't put yourself in a situation to get scrammed because the condor's only tank is speed.


Finally, there are plenty of FW corps that are pretty laid back, joining one would not be so bad as you think. It's nothing like being in huge nullsec organizations, and militia fleets will gladly accept pilots from the NPC militia corp.

I agree with my militia bro Demerius that there's no point PVP-ing in 1M ships. Do not PVP without T2 weapons/fits, really.

I'm all for going against the odds, but yeah, that's just silly.

As far as militia goes, don't forget highsec. There are a number of wartargets who don't expect you to engage them there, and there's no telling what you might get. Parked faction frigs, industrials moving a PLEX, freighters with billions in cargo ... or , of course, people just looking to lock you down and let the Navy grind you up. This does, admittedly, work better if you have a neutral scout, but you can probably hire someone if need be.

I think you misunderstood me a little bit. First of all, knowing your SP level and what the distribution looks like would be useful.

Second, I wasn't talking about T2 ships. Assault frigates are for the most part not very good for solo. And the larger T2/3 ships are going to get blobbed hard. Tactical dessies are monsters but not for someone new to pvp.

I was talking about T2 modules - weapons, which lets you use t2 ammo, and t2 mods in general which are significantly better than their T1 or named counterparts. You are not going to prosper in solo combat in a ship that costs under a mill. That's just the hard truth. You can run some pretty cheap kitey ships which will murder a brawler if you point them and orbit at 20k but even then there's some mods you can't go cheap on. There are a few ships that can be fit properly for 3-5M ISK, most decent T1 frigs (referring to the actual tech level of the hull not the modules) will run 6-10M ISK as I said for a proper fit.

If you do not have very many skill points invested into pvp related areas, that is a problem which takes time to address.

If however your character IS well skilled for pvp, there are some highly effective, mostly idiot proof fits you can jump straight into. If you give us some guidance on what your SP layout looks like I'm sure some folks here could suggest ship/fit options.

Finally, you want to try and fight things at your tech level if possible. Facing off against pirate or navy faction ships in tech 1 hulls is extremely difficult. And if you don't know what a ship does or how it's likely to be fit, you will probably die, so either view that fight purely as a learning experience or run away.

Under no circumstances engage anything named "worm" or "garmur" on your own.

You will learn 10x faster if you participate in fleets, whether in a corp or not.

You need to join a corp.

If you solo in an MMO you're setting yourself up for failure.