EVE New Citizens Q&A

Thermodynamics is one of the best PVP skills but is still extremely good in PVE too.

Screw up and aggro a whole room of rats? No big deal, overheat the tank and survive long enough to flee.

Only just able to break the tank of a Mordrus Mammoth in that silly level 4 mission, and it's taking forever to kill? Overheat guns and melt it.

Elite frigate orbiting you at 12km and your drones aren't tracking it well? Overheat a web.

You can get away with training it only to 2 or 3 but do train it and learn to use it. Also carry nanite repair paste - if you are running missions or complexes, repair while using acceleration gates between rooms.



As for the most essential skills of all:
- Powergrid Management
- CPU Management
- Weapons Upgrades
- Drones

The first two skills are so powerful that they are worth training to 5 within your first month of play. The second two are not as OP but still worth getting to 4 quickly and to 5 within 10 weeks.

open ISIS and look at 2-4 different ships

look for the skills that show up in the mastery tabs for say example
amarr transport, angel frigate, gallente marauder & maining barge

the same skills you see appearing each time you change faction/ship type are the skills you're looking for

I know plenty of guys that tell me that you don't have to worry about getting her pregnant if you just pull out. The funny thing is that they all have kids.

So yes you can say something like this but that doesn't help the guy that looses and expensive fit faction BS in a mission where he is scrammed and burns out his tank. I know I've not used overheating much but it is very difficult to turn on and off and even more difficult to tell if you have actually clicked on it when trying to turn it off. For a PvPer that is used to using it what I am saying may seem silly but for a newer player still learning the game I recommend getting familiar with it before you use it in important situations.

I was playing with overheating while just floating in space before I used it in the burner missions and had a hard time with it even when I had nothing else to focus on. During the burner missions there were a couple times where I burned out a mod and had to move > 250 km off grid to reset the NPC so that I could go repair and try again.

Again I am not saying don't ever use it or that it is worthless. All that I am saying is in PvE there is no need for it and if you don't know what you are doing it can cause problems. I think that is important for a newer player to understand before they start messing around with it. I am also saying that in PvE overheating is not so clearly a beneficial thing as it is in PvP.

Right and I get that. The point that I am making is that in PvE I don't find myself coming across moments where I "need" it and not having overheating locked off can lead to you accidentally turning it on and burning something out and if you try to unlock it when you need it often at that moment things are so busy and urgent and it takes so long that by the time you get it unlocked and then overheated it might be too late or at least that time would have been better spent GTFOing.

Regardless I am not advising that no one ever use it. I am saying for newer players reading this in the NC Q&A section of the forums that if they PvP and don't overheat they will likely loose the ship anyway so overheat but if you are doing PvE experiment with overheating in non-critical situations so that you can get familiar with how it works because if you just click on it when you need it then it has the potential to cause more harm then good.

TL;dr
I'm not that I am not recommending abstinence I am recommending experimentation in non-critical situations.

The first three skills I tell every new pvper to train are the following:
High Speed Maneuvering 1 (this is not pvp specific)
Propulsion Jamming 1 (this one is pvp specific)
Warp drive Operation 2 (this is not pvp specific, level 3 within the first week)

Evasive Maneuvering and Spaceship Command are the only two skills that will affect you every time you undock or pass through any system in the game. I consider 4's in those a 2 month goal, with 5's as a long term.

Fitting skills of course are useful. The primary ones are:
CPU Management
Power Grid Management

Secondary are :
Shield Upgrades
Weapon Upgrades
Advanced Weapon Upgrades

Tertiary:
Energy Grid Upgrades
Hybrid Weapon Rigging
Projectile Weapon Rigging
Armor Rigging
Energy Weapon Rigging
Launcher Rigging


If you plan to do any pvp at all, train thermodynamics. If you plan to fly anything worth more than 100m train thermodynamics. Learn it and use it. I have lost so many fights that I could have won if I just overheated the right module. Think of it as a 15% performance boost to any module on your ship whenever you want. This used to be a week long train, and was kinda a hard thing to suggest. Its only a day now, so you really should be getting it within 3 weeks of starting if you want to do any pvp. Ignore the person above me talking about training stuff to five. The only skill I would train to five in my first month (or even two months) is below.

Drones 5 is used on probably a majority of the ships in the game, I would train it and Drone Interfacing 3 within the first month of playing.

Additional quality of life skills:
Contracts 1
Every skill under electronics to level 1.
Broker Relations
Accounting
Anchoring 3
Advanced Drone Avionics 1
Capacitor Management
Capacitor Systems Operation
Controlled Bursts 3
Leadership V (you never know when you might be made a squad commander)
Cloaking 3 - MWD Cloak trick will save you so many times.
Cybernetics 3 (for access to 3% fitting implants. screw skill training implants, they're a waste of money)
Astrometrics and related skills : Access to exploration sites, wormholes, and combat probes are very useful