EVE New Citizens Q&A

I need a bit advice to chose what kind of ship and weapon should use. As much as I understand, there is no ship/skill restriction for an Omage Clone and I have no disadvantages to start cross training because I'm at the start of the way (Is that true or should I create a new Caldari alt if I choose to use missiles? Actually this is the first question ).

I prefer to work as long range DPS in MMOs. I like to be a pure demage dealer rather than crowd controller. I don't like pets, they usually behave much like children, hard to control and guess what to do next.

As much as I understand, pets are drones in new Eden and Gallente ships heavily use them. What do you recommend me? Does Gallente has convenient ships for me or should I start cross training immediately? If so, which way?

well as your a paid account you can and should cross train.

Drones are more like a pack of angry squirrels than children tbh.
squirrels with guns granted but squirrils regardless.

almost every ship in eve uses them to some degree or another so training into them is definitely a smart thing to do,
particularly if you like long range dps because if something gets close to you they're basically all you have.
here's why (hint: tracking mechanics)

aside from telling you not to neglect training drones (even if your not going to focus on them) pretty much all the races have boats good at long range

If you let your drone boat orbit semi-AFK in a site that does not pose a real threat that is true.
If you want to fly a more dangerous (and thus rewarding) site with your hands on deck but without to much micro-management I prefer to MJD out and sniper everything from afar. Because in tight fights drones act like the squirrels mentioned above.

The OP sounds more like the "jump out and sniper away" kind of player. (Yet light/medium T2 drones are needed for the frigs that slip through.)

I am doing my rattlesnakes wrong.
Max. damage drones for the big stuff and rapid lights for the small stuff. (Fitting skills are still a bit lacking..)

Alright. So for PvE you have excellent options for long-range damage using any of the weapon systems. Your biggest concern will be making sure you are dealing the right type of damage for the NPCs of your area of space. Drones, Missiles and Projectiles afford you the most flexibility in these cases since your damage type is dependent on the drone or ammunition choice you use.

For solo PvP, your biggest concern will be applying your damage while keeping the opponent from warping away. If you want to fight at range, this places you in the area of 18-24 km using warp disruptors. Artillery, drones, energy turrets, hybrid turrets, and missiles can all be effective at these ranges. You'll want to place emphasis on speed and range, as longer-range weapons usually have lower DPS and you need to control range between you and your opponent to be effective. Very popular for this at the moment are cruisers that use the Rapid Light Missile systems, including the standard Caldari Caracal. By cross-training Caldari and Gallente, you also gain access to the Mordu's Legion ships, which have bonuses to warp scrambler and warp disruptor range (increasing your effective range of control and kiting). Just some things to think about.

You should definitely invest in drone training at some point. While the Amarr, Gallente and Guristas have ships that use drones as primary weapon systems, a very large number of ships in EVE (especially at the cruiser size and up) use drones as a secondary weapon system. Drones are particularly useful when you are flying larger ships, as larger weapon systems have some trouble applying their full damage to smaller, faster targets. Drones help somewhat to alleviate this issue.

The combat drones in EVE are pretty easy to control and predictable as long as you set them to be PASSIVE. When they're aggressive, they might kill the triggers of a lv4 blackade mission one by one and have you face 30+ battleships at a time. So always set them to be Passive.
The problem with drones are 1) they cannot be overheated to do more damage, and generally don't have very high dps 2) they travel slow or can't move at all (the sentries) 3) they can be killed to reduce your dps, and that happens pretty often, whether facing players or npcs 4)usually you can at most carry 5 flight of drones, while it's very easy to carry 10 types of ammos (whether they're all useful is another question).
The advantage of drones are 1) damage type selectable (if you're carrying them) 2) they help a lot to deal with small ships which your large guns or missiles can't hit 3) they may pull aggression from your ship and thus become some sort of tank 4) good range: you can reach something as far as 60km away on a frigate without spending any slots, isn't it amazing? 5) the drones themselves use separate fitting resources and it would be a waste not to use drones on a ship having a drone bay.
Also there're a lot of other types of drones, like mining drones, salvage drones, webbing drones, ecm drones, neuting drones, logi drones, rogue drones etc. They're all pretty useful.

You said you wanted to join a null corp? They will have doctrin ships and will ask you to train into some of them.
I would stick to fitting and support skills (those all ships benefit from) and only train T1 ships up to cruiser or battlecruiser.

I would wait with T2 ships, T2 weapons and even large weapons and battleships until you know where you will settle.

Minmatar is flown a lot and Hurricanes a popular fleet doctrine.

Thank you for your support. It seems Caracal best for me at the beginning than Rattlesnakes for the future.

I have one more concern. If I chose to turn my subscription from omega to alpha clone, let's say one year later, can I use Caldari ships that I already have required skills with my Gallente character?

While some of the things that you talk about from other MMOs do appear in Eve to a certain degree, I feel that they are so different that you are better off droping those ideas and just trying Eve as if you've never played an MMO before.

There are no classes in Eve. You can fit a ship to fill a role if you wanted to but ship don't really have roles and neither do characters.

The exponential increasing of skill training length with each level of a skill with no greater increase in benefit means that you are typically better off spreading skill around instead of focusing on one thing.

I recommend to new players that they spread their skills around and try out pretty much everything. I came to Eve with the " I typically do X,Y and Z in other MMOs " mentality and found Eve to be so extremely different from other MMOs that none of it really applied.

TL;dr
Train and try everything and train more of the things that you find yourself doing more often. However don't commit to any one aspect for the long hauls as your tastes will change as you play the game.

I agree with Kitty Bear above.

First I suggest putting training time into core skills. These affect every single ship you undock and shouldn't just be left at IV and forgotten. As you get into more complex ships or fittings, you will find it becomes much harder to get the load out you want. You start needing to compromise your fits due to skill restrictions.

Most any (Omega) fit you see simply assumes you have an 'All V' character. With lower core skills you may not be able to use that same fit- and if you need to make too many compromises with your fit- you might as well be flying something else. I know grinding the Engineering tree to V's isn't as sexy as training for that shiny new ship class, but you'll get more mileage out of core skills. Despite being able to fly virtually every sub-capital in the game, I still end up flying the same small handful of ships most of the time.

I believe the OP is more on point about ROLES than many players. In Eve, fleets are made up of specific roles- FC, tackle, DPS, EWAR, Logi, Command, etc. It is these roles that you should be concentrating on rather than specific ships/weapon types. Using logi for example, you not only need the Logistics skills, racial frigate/cruiser to V, you need good skills in Navigation to keep up and stay in rep range, Repair modules use a ton of capacitor, so we are back to those core skills I mentioned above as well. Choosing a ROLE will direct your training focus more than choosing a race or specific ship. These roles all offer depth of gameplay and tactics- take the time to really learn your role.
Remember- it is better to fly one thing really well than to fly five things poorly.

As for 'pets', in Eve it's drones. These are a necessary evil. Most ships larger than a frigate or destroyer get drones. This is because Eve favors single weapon ships- all one type and size of guns. We don't have point defense weapons really, no smaller set of guns to bring to bear on fast tacklers. So your battleship will have a very hard time hitting a Ceptor that has you scrammed. Enter the drone. As for their behavior, we do have settings to control them- most of the time you will set them to passive so you can direct whom they attack and when.

Lastly, when you do cross-train initially stick to skills that are shared between races/ships. Like Kitty's suggestion of turrets. All races have turret based ships so training the Gunnery tree will support a great many ships. Both Gunnery and Missile trees have several support skills that affect all weapons of that type, so again, these are the 'core' skills for that tree and should be priority for training to V.

An important note is that Eve does not have a dedicated 'tank' role. Any ship can be attacked so all ships need to have their own basic tank (if supported by logi) or strong individual tank (if no logi is present). So the Shield and Armor trees are another time-sink for training, but absolutely critical to invest in.