EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi folks. Newbie here.

Just about to embark on the first epic missions.
Currently using three 75mm Gatlings.

Was looking for some generic advice on what a good next step up would be.

Thanks, and happy Update Day!

What is it about your current fit you'd like it to do better?

Drones and missiles are usually the best PVE option, but in this game you can make just about anything work.

Hybrids are the Gallente gun. They share it with Caldari. Gallente kind of specialize in Hybrids and drones where Caldari specialize in Hybrids and missiles.

With hybrids you have blasters and rails. Blasters are short range high damage. Railguns are long range lower damage.

Within each specific gun type you have different meta levels. Meta levels used to be pretty much equivalent to quality meaning that a meta 2 was just like it's meta 1 version only slightly better and meta 3 was better than meta 2. Things have been changed up a bit but that is roughly how things still are with weapons.

Meta 5 is tech 2. Tech 2 are very good weapons at a good price but they have higher fitting requirements which means you need better skills to make them work in your fit without having to use a bunch of fitting mods.

With blasters you pretty much have 3 different guns with many different meta variations of each. Those are:
Light Electron Blaster
Light Ion Blaster
Light Neutron Blaster.

You can do a "show info" on each of them. Hint if you shift + click on the show info button it opens in a new window. You can then go to the variations tab and hit "compare". In the compare UI you can select which stats that you want to view. I think you are limited to something like 10 stats to view at once. You can also select multiple weapons and remove what you don't want. So for example you could add all 3 of the small blaster base type in and then remove anything higher than meta 5 for example.

Once there you will notice the basic difference is that the electron blasters have the lowest potential dps number with a fast rate of fire and fast tracking, lowest fitting requirements and lowest cap usage or activation cost. The Neutron have the highest potential dps number but the slowest tracking ( making it harder to apply the dps ) and are the most difficult on fitting requirements. The Ion blasters are in the middle.

You could do this with pretty much everything in game. It's a good way to see what is out there and get familiar with stuff. I recommend going into your market and unchecking the box that says "show only available". Then use the market UI to see what your choices are. Go to the "variations" tab from there and use the compare feature.

Early on in the game actually landing damage on targets can be challenging at times. Tracking helps with this but so does piloting.

Anyways there is a lot to learn in this game and I've probably given you too much already, at least for sitting. Don't worry too much about learning everything. Just try some stuff out and read some more and then rinse and repeat etc.. Eventually this will seem pretty straitforward for you.

I know that you asked for some quick generic advice in the OP. I also am aware that I gave you a decent amount of text that only showed you how to look up and compare information on your own. Applying damage in Eve can get complex and I know that you did not ask for specifics. At this point into the game it's also probably too early to bury you in details.

That being said I'd like to share some links that you can maybe refer back to at a later date when you are hungry for more specifics:

http://go-dl.eve-files.com/media/0910/eve-tracking101.swf

The above link is a flashed based tracking guide. It does a good job in walking you through the basics in a manner that is easy to understand.

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Gunnery_Guide

That link is the Eve University, Gunnery Guide page. It has many links on the side but certainly not all of the information that the Eve uni wiki has to offer is linked there. This is a decent site to search through for any information Eve related. Don't be afraid to search on their page or google other terms like "wrecking shots" etc...

After all of that there is the famous spiralling and tracking video released a few years back by Agony Unleashed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT8VqVcLDqc
That is more of a practical application guide to some of the information you'll gain from the previous text based info.

If this is too much or too far off from what you are looking for feel free to ignore it.