Warfare & Tactics

I've been playing this game a little more than one year now, but I never once engaged in true PVP. Now I wanted to participate in group PVP in hope to have some fun /just for the heck of it/. I don't like fighting up close, but I do like flying small / fast ship or hitting from a distance. What approach would be good for a PVP noob?

Don't die. You can only be useful while you're still alive. It's not a blanket implication, of course, since there are plenty of people that manage to stay alive and be useless at the same time. In fact, this might be a good approach for a new pvp player since you'll blend right into the pack. People that are useful tend to stick out and become known and subsequently called primary. You don't want to be called primary. Ever.

It would be easier to suggest something for you to try if you could provide a list of ships you can fly / weapons you can use and most importantly where you are planning to engage in combat and in which capacity (tackler / logi / ewar / dps etc.)


The most cost effective way to PvP is to grab an ewar frigate and run around the battlefield wrecking havoc !

Chances are that you will die loads of times (to drones most of them) but the cost is small and the thrill factor high !!

Ecm (Griffin) and Tracking disruptors (Crucifier) are my two favorites.

Enjoy !!

I would personally advise putting together a bunch of kiting ac ruppies and practise kiting your potential foes. You'll be out-kited by some ships and be able to kite others but what you'll get is bunch of experience trying.

If you need cheaper ships try thrashers fit for arty kiting.

See me online and I'll be happy to have you along while I'm not fleeted.. I'll be shooting everyone but amarr militia of course but I don't mind newbies tagging along.

Eh i can fly basically all battleship types except minmatars. Have max energy skills and max armor tanking, but decent energy turret. Right now training for t2 railgun. '
I can't log into the game right now, I'll give you the list asap.

I hvae some nice implants so I want to avoid getting poped. What should I do? I don't have the skill for jump clone yet. Should I now focus on jump clone training? I know this is a stupid question, but I'm getting my railgun to t2 to atm, so if need to be I would like to plan ahead.

This is a list of really good tips. The advice to fly Rifters is also always good. As your income and budget improves, you can start indulging yourself in more expensive hulls and fits, being aware that the first time you fly anything you should expect to lose it three times or so before you get the hang of it, and expect to lose it fairly regularly even after that. As it stands, I mostly like either battlecruisers or t2 frigates in smaller PvP, as both are rather affordable for the comparative punch they can bring to bear. In fleets, it's all logistics all the time, but don't worry about larger fleets unless you're involved (or looking to get involved) in an organization capable of fielding them.

The best thing you can do in PvP is learn. Learn hulls and fits, and learn mechanics. I'm not going to post a primer here (that'd defeat the purpose and give up any knowledge edge I might have), but I'll post a few guidelines:

1) Learn common hulls, their fits, and their capabilities. What speed can they go? What can they tank? How much damage do they spit out? What kills them?

2) Learn aggression mechanics. Gates, stations, combat, everything. Learning what this means for low sec versus high sec versus null sec (NPC and Sov), and even WH space is huge.

3) Learn to have situational awareness, with the tools at your disposal. Your map, scanner, local, any intel you might have are all really useful.

4) Learn movement mechanics. How warps work, how points work, how bubbles work, and all that jazz is critical for both escaping and pinning people down, necessary for killing in most engagements.

5) Put it to practice. All the theory in the world isn't very useful without flying out and about at least once or twice a week, if not more. You don't need to dedicate all your time to being some kind of PvP superstar (I'm definitely not one), but actually getting out, seeing what's out there, and what people actually do is the best teacher.


So go, find something you can afford to lose a lot of to learn in , get out there, and keep flying by using what you can afford to lose.

edit: forums ate my post

For the OP's specifics, we can skip a bunch of stuff.

OP, you want to be a kiter, or at least try it first and see if it's really to your tastes. You need to learn the ranges of tackle modules (long points, scrams, webs), the relative speed of ships within and between classes (their speed with MWDs and regular fits), and the way weapons work at range/not always in optimal.

Basically you need to find a fast enough ship that does acceptable dps at range for the weapons you wish to train, while also being agile and tanky enough for you to skirt about on the edge of your tackle range (long point) and avoid getting heavily tackled (scram/web) yourself, so as to kill your target(s) before they kill you, or escape tackle range and survive if you cannot kill them fast enough.

Railguns will be no use here, except small railguns on some frigates & destroyers. Mediums and larges are a bad stats match compared to tackle module ranges on unbonused tackling ships for a solo pilot, as well as tracking and dps issues.

Minmatar are traditionally best at the combat role you've described, natural high speed, agility, enough projected damage, bonuses to tackle range, etc. Gallente ships can be second best, but usually then shield or at least active armour tanked (because some armour modules like plates, and rigs, reduce your speed, while similar shield modules just make you a slightly larger target).
Laser skills means Amarr (or Sanshas/Blood Raiders, neither of which are natural kiters) and usually buffer armour tanked, which is the opposite of kiting. Though T2 lasers gives you Scorch which is the natural enemy of tech1 shield tanked kiters. That and range-bonused neuts to turn off MWDs. There are some exceptions, the Navy Slicer is often a kiter but not for beginners. Equally the shield Harbinger and Zealot are an asset in experienced kiter's hands.

(Heavy) Missiles are another common kiter's weapon system, but Amarr tend only to be bonused to the shorter ranged Heavy Assault Missiles which also don't hit targets as well without assistance (from heavier tackle and/or unfavoured-in-PvP modules like target painters).
Good core/capacitor skills will help you as a kiter, but chiefly you'll need to manage your modules, as running even 1 hardener, tackle module, or your MWD for even a cycle too long could mean to lose your ability to run any such modules sufficiently to kill or escape.

Gallente tend not to use missiles too much, are rarely bonused for them, and instead favour drones for projecting more damage to fast things beyond their blaster range. Though Null ammo has had several buffs so as to work with some bonused ships when combined with weak-tanked shield fits. Gal also crosstrain with Min to enable the Angels ships, the kings of kiters, as well as Guardians (not the T2 Amarr Logistics ship) which are almost as naturally fast & agile but tend to favour armour tanks (Daredevil, Vigilant, Vindicator). Gal racial ewar is a kiter's heaven & nightmare of range-bonused pointing tackle, and sensor damps which can be scripted to keep you untargetable at range or buy you time to get some distance before you're tackled. Against kiters, damps can force them to come dangerously close to even be able to lock & shoot anything, let alone point them to ensure they don't just warp away. As said before, Amarr's racial ewar is neuts to kill prop mods, and tracking disruptors which are similar in result to damps, but more effective unless the enemy uses missiles (possibly to change in the future).

Caldari are shield and missile/range-bonused hybrids users, but actually 3rd out of 4 for natural speed. They are almost always shield-tanked though and so often made to work the kiter role. They have no racial bonuses to scram/web/neuts/damps unlike Gal and Min, thus are poor at dictating range on their opponents. Crossing Amarr and Caldari only gets you the tracking-bonused Sanshas. At least Amarr and Minmatar gets you Blood Raiders with fearsome webs and neuts for anti-kiting/pro-kiting setups.

Training to get JumpClones is very quick, you unlock the ability to have 1 per skill level, and atm you sound like you only need one or two. The key thing to know is you simply need to read up & join EACS corp for a matter of minutes, create as many JCs as you can/want to in different stations, then drop corp. You avoid having to find/create a corp with sufficiently high standings to enable JCs yourself, at the cost of ~1day to be accepted into EACS.
This will let you JC every 24hours between your clones.
Learn to deal with the reduced SP training time of being without nice implants in exchange for the combat pilot training time of being able to cheaply fly your pod about. The other option is pick up some basics of UI setup and combat on Sisi while your TQ char trains in their nice clone, but Sisi is a very distorted PvP situation.

Also, kiting/'nanofag' is an ever-increasingly common tactic, as it scales better against multiple enemy and bad situations than simply having more buffer or active tank. There's plenty of solo, small and medium-sized gang formats that work with it, so you don't have to be solo or without logistics and/or recon ships (you could even train & find you like to fly these), but you will need to know how to manually fly your ship rather independantly of any FC in order to make the most of your ship's strengths. Especially if you fly specialised T2 ships as they are often linchpins of gangs and while e.g. a Scimitar can sit at a very safe range to the enemy, 1 mistake in running your modules too much and you could be very dead in the water and ripe to be pounced on.

Stock up on Nanofiber Internal Structure and Tracking Enhancer modules.

Lastly, watch this video of kiting by some Pros. http://eve-search.com/thread/4132-1

1. Slicer
2. Orbit @ 18k, MWD on.
3. ??????
4. Tears (Profit)

Go out in a ship. Lose said ship. Try again. Rinse and repeat.

Good Luck!