EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi!

As the title said, I'm a very new player that is looking for some guiding in procuring and equipping my first Cruiser for PVE, I am running security missions in gallante federation territory and i just got the skill to be able to command a cruiser.

I have done some searching but most of what i find seem to be 4-5 years old and i do not know if these options are still viable or not.

I would greatly appreciate tips and suggestions on which cruiser and what to fit it with and if i need to get any other skills before its i am ready to start the level 2 missions

//Pooi lost in space

As opposed to frigates, where speed matters because you're fast and agile and thus hard to hit, cruisers are slow enough that you'll have to fit an actual tank for defenses.

So, for fitting, you should look at a fitting guide. To sum it up, for PVE you probably want medium to short range, because the NPCs will fly to you and orbit until they die (not very smart), so look at the medium blasters and/or small / medium drones. Then you wan an afterburner so you can control the range during the fight.

And then you want a tank. PVE fights are often wave after wave of weak enemies, you need endurance with your tank. For comparison, PVP fights are very short, enemy sees you and they unload everything as hard as possible, and someone dies within 15-30 seconds, so you need a tough tank but not necessarily endurance.

So a tank consists of a repair module (shield booster or armor repairer), resistance modules (shield hardeners, armor hardeners), and possibly some hitpoints (shield extender, armor plates). Which tank you fit (shields vs. armor) depends on the ship; shields use mid slots, armor uses low slots, so decide based on the slot layout of the ship.

Now, for Gallente cruisers, you have a couple options: the Vexor is a very versatile ship that uses drones + blasters, and the Thorax is a gun boat (blasters).

Gun boats like the Thorax are easy to fit: put in the guns, put in a couple of magnetic field stabilizers in the low slots to increase gun DPS, then go for the afterburner and the armor tank.

The Vexor offers a couple tricks:

1. Drones don't require fitting resources (power grid, CPU, or slots), so you can just rely on drones for damage and remove the guns. This gives you enough power grid on the ship to let you fit oversized (battleship size) armor plates (800mm or 1600mm plates), for a huge pool of hitpoints.

2. Otherwise you can go for drones + guns for very nice damage, but your tank will be somewhat weaker. The Vexor has enough slots to give you a choice between armor OR shields, depending on what skills you've trained.

EDIT: As the previous poster recommended, I too recommend the Vexor. Drones allow you to "select your damage type", which means if the enemy has a weakness to EMP, you launch EM drones, if they have a weakness to Thermal you launch Thermal drones. The ship is very versatile and is a huge, huge favorite for PVE (and PVP).

If you don't mind spoilers, you can look up the PVE missions that your agent gives you on eve-survival.org, and this will tell you what resistances to fit and what types of drones to bring to each mission.

Vexor is the standard PVE platform for Gallente. Some tips on flying the ship for nullsec ratting can be found : https://wiki.braveineve.com/public/dojo/vexor-newbro-edition

Highsec level 2 missions are a lot easier but also a lot less rewarding. The basic concept is similar - orbit something at high speed to speed tank the damage and let your drones do the work. For level 2 missions you won't be facing battleships and can skip the heavy drones.

Thank you all for the help!

I really appreciate it!

Vexor Osmium search
https://o.smium.org/search?q=vexor

People usually recommend the Vexor because you can choose damage type, they dont use ammo (the drones are considered the ammo as they are lost sometimes), and you can employ range/speed tanking, which will help free up slots in your ship for more damage, speed, drone range, etc.

There are also other Vexor posts here in this sub forum, so I suggest you check them out.