EVE New Citizens Q&A

Yeah,

I'm worndering the same thing. I've found the certificates tab on my Character Sheet and am using it to train for basic career skills. Am I wasting my time?

If you want to be very very specialised you may.

Fair enough. So let me pose this question, would a Maller be a good ship to get into if I'm interested in PvP and PvE? Also where would a good place be to educate myself on alliance PvP?

Certificates are a way to show new players there's a whole lot of skills out there that affect your performance, moreso than just the simple "cruiser lvl 3" requirement stuff. No more, no less and as such they're just guidelines at best. Some make sense, some might not. What you can also do is just show all skills and rclick->info them, figuring out if they're useful to you or not or ask around. The problem you, and any newbie, run into is that there's no easy answers to anything as everything is situational, therefore most answer should start with "that depends" and because of that you get all kinds of conflicting and confusing answers.

To try and give you an answer on ship/race choices have a look at the link in my signature, one of the guides talks about it. Problem is ofcourse that explaining stuff like that is, by definition, a generalisation and thus it all depends on the context and situation you're in. To get a bit more specific on your question: no pvp focussed corp is waiting for a Maller pilot, Maller generally "sucks" in most situations and is fairly useless in group pvp. The Amarr way of doing things doesn't really translate too well to small ships but it's fantastic for bigger ships. Realise though that some Amarr cruisers ARE wanted, but they're all T2 or even T3 ones. Guardian and Zealot can be very useful in fleet pvp although it depends on the total fleet composition, which should change depending on what their role is and what scenario they'll be in.

There's many roles in PVP, being "dps" is only a part of it, and many of those roles are specialisations which can be done by relative new players. So learn about the possible roles in fleet pvp, pick something you find interesting and focus on getting that trained up. This might mean switching ship types or even ship race, you bring what is useful.

1) The Maller is all right. It's more tank than DPS but you can run Level II missions in it no problem if you know what you're doing. Running missions is fairly easy, the biggest problem with them - and the reason people don't like Mallers as mission ships - is that it's DPS that gets you through the mission faster and getting through the mission faster is what Mission Runners are all about.

2) The Arbitrator is a better DPS ship IF you have good drone skills. If you've got good drone skills and put some drone modules on the Arby - you've got 5 little buzz saws that will make short work of most Level II rats. The catch there is that you've got to have your drone skills trained up. It also has turret and missile slots but those don't add much to it's DPS because there aren't many of them. It's a Drone Boat. As a Drone Boat, it's a great choice for miners - whose weapon is the drone.

If you are a new person using Amarr ships - either of these will get you through your Level II missions.


Now ... what I did ... was use them both ...

I had a high/low team of a Maller and an Arbitrator - I'd send in the Maller first to get the agro - then send in the Arbitrator to blow things up. Worked really well until the rats got smarter - and started going after the Arby when he showed up. *shrug* It still worked then ... just not as well. Of course - that won't work at all if you only have one account.


Another factor is how you plan on doing things. The tactics you plan on using dictate how you fit your ship. You can have different fits for different jobs and save them in the ship fitting tool. Just use the right fit for the job. The same goes for ships as a whole. Some ships - no matter what you put on them - are simply not going to excel at certain roles - though they may well shine at others. Think of your ships as tools onto which you can attach various adaptions that let you do different things. Understand what the adaptions do in modifying the tools performance - and what that tool is simply unsuited to do. For example - you can use a drill as a drill or as a screw driver - but it makes a terrible hammer. You can use a drill as a hammer but the results are not likely to be pleasing ...

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I suggest you too look http://www.rifterdrifter.com/ for frigate combat.

Harbinger can be fitted to run a variety of missions.

It can also be outfitted to be a pretty decent slugger in combat.

Depending on your fitting you might have to swap rigs. It depends on what you need.