EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hey folks

I've been playing off and on since 2009 and it's pretty obvious that I suck at pvp. Doesn't seem to matter what I try.

When I first started eve i spent billions of isk on the best battle ships I can fly, golems, rattlesnakes, widows I get smashed like the first time I go out. It was depressing. It doesn't seem to matter how many billions of isk you drop into fittings a hand full of frigs and cruisers will take you out every time.

So I eventually gave up on being a cool BS pilot and trained for a carrier. I have the same problem with it as I had flying BS but it's less obvious. The whole missiles can't hit anything smaller than a BC isn't an issue anymore so I do enjoy it more. The drones give enough flexibility to take out most groups I run into but pvping in a carrier still doesnt balance out. Plus it really pisses of the kill board fanatics. Yes I don't die as often but I still die way before I rack up enough kills to offset the loss of my carrier. Most ships get away before I can target them, and if I hang out in an area camping for two long i turn into a hot drop magnet.

I haven't played eve in about 3 years this time and I'm trying to get back into it. But what should I fly? I've had alot of people recommend t3 cruisers but imo losing spl when you die is lame af. As much as I die I'm not even going to consider it. Ive also had alot of people say if I die alot I should fly cheap ships. Yes i probably wouldn't cry as long but cheap ships sucks and if I can't survive in something expensive I doubt downgrading is going to increase my fun.

What I'd like to find is a tanky ship that's we'll rounded. Works good in fleets, works good solo, and maybe even holds its own in a C5 WH. I've been looking at training for the Damnation. I'm 50ish days from sitting in it but is it even worth it? I hear it's a really tanky ship with good dps. Plus I figure the command mods will help too.

Ty for the advice! I'd really like to not suck so bad at eve lol

You sound like a firm believer in the principle that "bigger is better", and you need to STOP THAT immediately. Bigger is not better in EVE, it's just more expensive, and as you've seen, this game absolutely allows a bunch of newbies in small ships to gang up on a veteran and totally kill him.

Second, per a dev blog released today, T3 cruisers are due for a "rebalance", which will probably mean huge nerfs. It's unclear if CCP will remove the skill loss penalty from them, but they may not be a hugely recommended ship in the future.

Finally, for what to fly, the current PVP trends seem to be moving towards smaller and more gimmicky ships (higher tech). Bigger ships (battleships) are too slow and don't offer enough "tank" or damage application to be useful in today's highly mobile fleets, and they're especially not favored when the same DPS can be delivered by a HAC (which is a cruiser-sized hull with more mobility than a battleship).

And capital ships are not meant to be solo ships, not really. So that's why you've been losing them, and not finding them fun.

And also, there's no super-ship that can let you solo a fleet of organized PVP ships, esp. if they know what you have.

So if you want to come back to the game, look at joining a fleet and using a T2 / T3 ship (HAC, HIC, Logi, Recon, T3D, whatever), but part of a group of people, with fleet roles and organized tactics.

You can also try solo, but you'll have to pick your targets very carefully, and assume they'll bring friends or that they're bait for a bigger fleet to be dropped on you. The T1 cruisers and battlecruisers are versatile, and you may be able to do OK with SOME officer mods (but don't waste your money on bling fits like last time, more expensive isn't better). Instead of bling, look at squeezing damage out of the available game mechanics: overheating, boosters, fleet links (possibly from alts), etc.

That's my advice. Take it with a grain of sand, though, cause I'm not a PVP'er.

Memphis Bass right on the Bigger Better thing, and i think that we have established that.

T3's and what not can get as expensive if not more than some Cap ships.

Fleet: Ok this is where you have to have some sort of social skills and not be a complete shut in. Coms, a must, don't talk about lag nor bombs. Most FC's will pod your ass back to base. The good ones will. You will HAVE to use specific load outs as per doctrine. If you go this route, i can guarantee you will at some time be able to fly anything in the game....(Doctrines change when CCP nerf bats something to death)

Gang: This is the same thing for the most part, but usually more relaxed coms wise, pending FC, and have to use a more gray matter to be able to be effective. Sometimes drinking is involved...caution. But this is where you bring out some shiny toys or go slumming with trash ships and kill a Nag with 4 Assfrigs, three HACs and a Drake.

Small Gang: Two or three peeps, this is the most fun group wise. You dont create a big blip on the OMFG BAD GUYS!! channel, and you can actually get some nice kills.

Solo: ok, there is a lot of hand wringing that this is art form, and it is, is pretty much dead. But i still believe that you have to do some of it or try as it teaches you stuff all the other activities above will not. This is where you learn to how to scan, find,lock , point and engage your target. You learn how to keep your speed and angle up to minimize damage, and take out your prey.

there are other things you learn, but your should find this out.

Thanks for all the advice!

It's difficult for me not think bigger is better dispite all evidence to the contrary lol. I mean you can fly and afford to buy every frig in the game in a few months of playing. The bigger stuff takes longer to skill and is more expensive. Ive never been able to get it out of my head. Logically something you have to invest more time and money into should be better. It seems like if the game was designed to have frigs and cruisers at the top of the food chain they wouldn't be the rookie ships. Seems backwards or unbalanced or something. Idk it's never made sense to me but it's eve what do you do.

So I take it from the replies training into a damnation would just be repeating the mistakes of the past.

What about a Curse?

Ive always liked them. One of those and two smaller ships took out my 5 bill isk golem and taught me torps suck at pvp when i first ventured into low sec lol

Its been mentioned several times that bigger isn't always better. which is true, so i'm not going to harp on that point any more.
but a few other things that came to mind.
you are being beaten by gangs of ships, which is also very important, this is an mmo after all. there is nothing wrong with battleships and capitals in pvp, but barring a few exceptions (there are one or two pilots who do some truly magical things with solo battleships) they require support from other pilots to fly effectively.
I know that the "elite solo pvp" is super popular on twitch etc. but I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of pvp that actually happens in game is small gangs.
and in those settings sometimes even one larger ship can make a considerable difference to how a fight plays out.

the second, is to kinda counter the whole "small ships are better" thing that seems to be going around. as a fan of large ships myself, I'd say rather that all ships are just tools, and in general, the more powerful a ship is, the more specialized it becomes. you probably shouldn't undock a battleship against a frigate and destroyer gang, just like using a chainsaw to build an ikea shelf isn't likely to end well.

Join a PvP focused group and work on specializing in specific fleet roles. No better way to learn.

I can fly all classes of sub cap, and still fly Dictors more than anything else. I love tackle. From scouting ahead to diving headfirst into a hero-tackle on the enemy super, tackle offers so much flexibility and fun. Usually operating independent of FC instructions, sometimes jumps away from the fleet- no spamming F1 here. From disposable Ceptor tackle to pinning down supers in a HIC, tackle scales from newb to bittervet.

Logi. Don't have to be top of your KB to be New Eden's greatest space cleric. Simply organizing the logibros and keeping them anchored and alive is an FC skill unto itself. It might be that you excel at small unit leadership. It's not always about the ships.

Flying in a fleet allows you to specialize far more than trying to do it all in one hull. With 50mil SP you should have solid (if not maxed) core skills, so it's a matter of just training up the specific ships/classes you want to fly.

Eve is not like other MMOs. I spent my first 6 months in Eve trying to play it as if it were just like all the other theme park style MMOs out there. After banging my head against the wall for 6 months I finally realized that I had to unlearn everything those other games taught me.

So I was in this game for almost a year before I started playing it with an open and cleared mind and was finally able to learn how to play it. That's how long it took me to unlearn everything that I had learned from other MMOs.

Things to keep in mind when playing Eve:

-There is no level cap
-There is no best fit
-There is no "best in slot" gear
-The only best ship is friendship
-There is no queueable or balanced PvP
-If ever you find yourself in a fair fight something went horribly wrong.
-Flying more expensive stuff only motivates other players to come after you more.
-One of the keys to Eve is doing more with less
-Experience and game knowledge is far more important than skill points or "gear"
-Who you know is more important that what you know and what you know is more important that what you are flying.
-PvP is more about match-ups and counters rather than any ship category being inherently better or worse than any other.
-A ship fit is fairly useless if you don't know how you intend to fly that ship.

If you try playing Eve like you can grind your way up to level cap and then go grind for a high gear score and then button mash your way to PvP glory then you will only make really nice killboard posts for the players that blow up your stuff.

The best advice for the fast and easy method to learning PvP in this game is flying cheap and hooking up with more experienced players to fleet up with and learn from.

The word "better" is completely subjective. Even to make a subjective decision on if something is better or worse you first need to define what better and worse would look like. In the case of ships in Eve you would have to define what it is that you are trying to do.

If you were looking to maximize your isk making then a blinged out faction battleship could be an excellent choice. In incursions or trying to speed run level 4 missions or run DED 10/10 sites or cranking out anomalies again an expensive fit faction BS or Marauder can be an incredible ship. It should be no surpirse that just as in real life tools which make you good money require a decent up front investment.

Back to the discussion of PvP. It has already been explained by ShahFluffers how a BS can be effective in fleet. Large PvP battles with capitol ship also have large amounts of support ships. Cap ships are relatively useless without a large and diverse support fleet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNUu75fH8Uc

The above link is to a Rooks and Kings video called Clarion Call 4. It demonstrates how a small number of battleships can completely destroy entire fleets of opponents. To be very successful in Eve you need to understand the game. You need to have a plan and know how to execute that plan and know how your opponents might react to your execution of that plan in the heat of battle. You also need to have a decent understanding of what your opponent might bring to try and counter you.

Eve is a complex game. There is no one ship that is any more or less powerful than any other. Everything in this game is situational. In WoW a level 80 character doesn't have a chance against a level 90 and a level 10 could not even damage that same level 90. Eve is not like that. In Eve a frigate can take out a BS and a BS can take out a frigate. Who wins and who doesn't is completely situational. There is no flavor of the month best PvP class in this game.

Since there is no "best class" or "best in slot gear" or "ideal spell rotation" in Eve, that means you need to learn the game. You need to learn how to gather information, read situations and adjust to what is happening on grid as well as what intel sources tell you is incoming.

TL;dr

Eve is not an overly simplified game where anything can be described as better or worse without adding on a very specific situaion with which to judge better and worse against.

As the others have mentioned, there are a few big differences between this game and other games:

1. Economy is player-made; we manufacture the ships. Thus, "more expensive" can actually happen just because it's "more rare", for example if nobody bothers to manufacture any Kestrel frigates, they'll become exceedingly rare, and thus very expensive, while remaining the Tier1 ships that they are. The cost of ships does follow the cost of manufacture, somewhat, but pirate and faction ships are loyalty point rewards rather than manufacture, and thus are 10x as expensive while only being 1.5x - 2x as effective. And the same goes for Officer modules, which are drops rather than being manufactured.

2. The universe is one big galaxy not divided into inaccessible sectors. This means newbies have to be able to go to the deepest 0.0 or wormhole space from day 1, if they so wish. This means the newbie T1 ships have to be able to not just survive the space, but have some useful role while they're there. This means that there are special combat mechanics in this game to let newbie ships survive when attacked by the large capital ships that you normally see out there. Namely, big weapons hit big slow ships and do NO DAMAGE to small fast ships. Lone small ship vs. lone capital ship, the small ship will eventually die from a lucky shot or get bored and leave. Swarm of small ships vs. lone capital ship = capital will likely die. This is coded in the game on purpose, and is very different from how max-level purple-geared WoW characters can one-shot AoE entire villages of low level newbies.

3. You're not building one character with one ship. The ships are tools to be used, whatever ship is the best tool for the upcoming mission. You're building a tool belt; your character is equivalent to a whole account in other games, where you have a DPS, a healer, a CC, tank, crafter, etc., in this game you can have all that in a single character. Just load up the tank ship if you want to tank, load up the DPS ship if you want to DPS, etc. As a result, however, no single ship is a solo pwn mobile; every single ship has a huge glaring weakness that will definitely be exploited by the veterans. Tank ships don't do DPS, CC ships don't tank, repair ships are vulnerable to CC / jamming, etc. You won't be able to have a single favorite ship, not really. Some of them do come close, particularly some of the versatile T1 cruisers, but still.

4. Capital ships are not solo ships; you need cyno beacon alts to even move the things around, and they are balanced by CCP to be able to hit other capital ships and be vulnerable to smaller ships. Some people use them for ratting, sure, but they risk the ship when doing that; a capital ship kill is very prestigious and 0.0 space is full of daily roaming PVP groups flying small fleets of subcapitals, looking for capital ship kills.

Ultimately, this game really is a strategy game; I like chess analogies and the ships in this game are the pieces you use to win. Don't get too attached to any particular piece, as they all have their uses.