EVE New Citizens Q&A

The traditional progression for security missions is frigates/destroyers for L1, cruisers for L2, battlecruisers for L3 and battleships for L4. However, with some piloting skill and specialized fits it's not too much trouble to take on the majority of L2 misions in a destroyer. I'm very much in doubt that these could be done in an Incursus despite it's impressive tank. Perhaps someone with more experience flying Gallente ships can contradict me.

I was planning on attempting them and just seeing how far I can get before blowing up, but the real reason I was worried is whether I should be skilling for my Cruiser right now rather than becoming more proficient in my Incursus. I guess the answer is to start queuing skills for the Thorax to make the switch. That's really unfortunate. I was hoping I could stretch the Frigate for a long time since it's so cheap to replace and re-fit haha. I of course want to stay within my budget, but I also don't want to be farming low-paying L1 when I could easily move on to L2 for higher pay making the cost-saving irrelevant.

Frigate flying is somewhat different than cruiser flying. Frigates are fast / agile, cruisers are somewhat slow and thus need actual armor tank (or shield if you're Caldari).

The issue with missions is that they're not related; you just get random missions. Some are easy, go kill some named pirate and about 3-4 escorts. Others are hard; Angel Extravaganza for example will hit you with 5 waves of multiple cruisers and destroyer + frigate escorts, and you have to then activate a gate and repeat the 5 waves, 5 more times.

It's hard even in a cruiser; when you have that many enemies a cruiser will have to have a good armor tank and plenty of capacitor energy to keep it going, and a frigate will have to be very careful about where to fly and where to orbit, cause you can orbit a cruiser to avoid its guns but get hit by his friends who are shooting you nicely from 40-50 km away, and from that distance you're a sitting duck which is death for a frigate.

Good news, though, is that because the game has been around for 10+ years, we have websites like eve-survival.org where you can just look up the mission ahead of time and see what you'll be facing.

And you can also refuse 1 mission per agent per 4 hrs, with no repercussions. So if you see one of the harder ones, just decline and wait 4 hours before asking that agent for another mission. Find a station that has 2-3 agents, so you can switch between the agents if you've declined one of them.

Great advise here... add into that Tech 2 and Tech 3 destroyers and you have a lot of very powerful ship options that open up to you without ever having to skill past small weapons.

Several years ago I spent some time running level 3 missions in a tech 2 assault frigate and I recall it being a lot of fun.

Also keep in mind that a lot of the skills are shared between all or most combat ships. Racial cruiser and the associated racial medium weapon skill trained up to about 2 or 3 should not take long at all. It really is not that big of a deal to train into cruisers and give them a try.

As a new character I can't say enough that almost certainly the best thing that you can do for yourself is just try lots of different stuff. Eve's skill training system really encourages it and having options is always great. It will also go a long way to getting a feel for the game and helping you find your personal playstyle.

I did quite a bunch of level 2 missions in destroyers because I only had small weapons trained.
Used DPS + speed fits and that worked quite well most of the time.

I'm going to go against the grain and recommend you get into cruisers ASAP. Not only are they good for level 2 missions, but can also do a variety of other activities such as exploration sites and are very powerful in PVP.

However, as mentioned above, the typical mission running progression is as follows

Level 1: T1 Frigates/Destroyers [Incursus]
Level 2: T1 Cruisers, and most missions can be done in destroyers. (Still a ton of small frigates to kill, some cruisers) [Thorax]
Level 3: T1 Battlecruiser [Brutix]
Level 4: T1 Battleship [Hyperion or Mega]

[ GUNBOAT you should use for each mission type].

OP, if you like flying the Incursus have you considered joining a fleet for level 3? You could join team with a cruiser or two. In this scenario your could provide screen for the larger ships and take out the frigates/destroyers.

Another ship which you should consider flying is the Catalyst. It is a destroyer gunboat and would make economical use of your gunnery skills..

The "cruisers for level 2" advice bothers me. I've used an Ishkur (T2 drone frigate) in lvl 4's. It wasn't efficient, but it wasn't hard either.
As far as what ships to use: Drones are easy. You can get a drone control range well over 20km on alpha, which is really difficult to get with small turrets. Drones are effective against different target sizes. Even if you skip to a thorax, a lvl 2 mission will have mostly frigates which means you'll be most effective relying on your drones anyway as medium turrets vs small targets is rough.

Catalyst would be a worthwhile option for progression, but I'd do it sooner rather than later, so you can practice with it in easy level 1's before ramping up the difficulty in lvl 2's.

Keep in mind: 1) don't mix guns 2) don't mix tanks 3) controlling the range will tend to make you win.

-So, swap out both guns and ammo as needed to balance range or damage as needed.
-Don't bother with shield modules if you're fitting armor, don't bother with plates if you're relying on your rep, there's almost always a more specialized option than a damage control.
-In addition to your weapon choices, afterburner and ewar will help you control the range.

An algos will make life easier on you, but the skills for a catalyst will take you pretty far as well, and a DPS catalyst will have about 20% more damage than a similar fit DPS algos. It'll have roughly double the DPS of a similar fit incursus, maybe more.

@ ergherhdfgh
I hope you'll stop reacting to words this way. And allow people whose experience comes from "other MMOs" some time to get used to EVE.

I had someone misinterpret "progression" after my first post here. It wasn't justified, and I found it unwelcoming and quite annoying. Alpha clones provide an opportunity for EVE to expand fast - but it's still a high-threshold game. I think experienced players need to work at seeing the game and its forums from the perspective of new players, rather than expecting the converse.

FWIW, in my case it might have a silver lining, but that's partly because I quite like boisterous forums, and partly because the forums are actually nicer than the last time I played EVE (when the objective of many forum participants to drive new players from the game).

IMO there's a definite and obvious progression in EVE for new players. It's not missions or ship size though: it's income.

You learn early that you should only fly what you can afford to lose. No doubt the oft-repeated comment that T1 Frigates can be useful in Fleet PvP is true, but that doesn't make T1 Frigates an interesting long-term objective. If you look a little further out you discover some substantial cost thresholds for appropriately-fitted ships with interesting capabilities (powerful enough to solo blitz L4 missions; capable of fitting a Covert Ops Cloak; high-end transport and mining etc, etc).

For a while, and very obviously for a beginner, the game is designed around steadily increasing income. This can be capped as low as a reliable average income of a few tens of million ISK per hour, but at that point I suppose earning enough to buy PLEXs starts looking interesting, pushing the number up to 100 mill / hr or more.

50 mill / hour or more is a lot for a new player (despite all the claims that "anyone" can make 10's to 100 mill per hour every hour via exploring /lol).

Most of the time when someone innocently mentions "progression" it looks to me this is what they mean: getting from "scrabbling for a few ISK to buy your next skill book" to being able to afford to buy and fly mid-range ships (in the 100-500 million range (fully fitted).

It's certainly what I meant (obviously so too) the first time I used "progression" in this forum, and was "slapped" for daring to use WoW terminology. A polite comment would have been ok, even if unjustified, but it was more like "you're an idiot for having played WoW, more so for using WoW terminology here, and probably don't have 'the right stuff' to play EVE at all".

Even if every experienced player had signed up to a list of "Politically Incorrect" words and concepts, with substantial designated penalties for using them, new players should be left out of it. Randomly going after people, even if they do innocently use concepts from other MMOs is, IMO, almost as bad. People try to use their existing experience to help them understand new things. It's natural, and even if it's wrong sometimes it's not deserving of criticism.


(By the way: what's "GD" (mentioned in your earlier post)?)