Skill Discussions

I've come to the point recently where my character is seriously running low on combat skills to train. I'm a pretty casual player who runs missions, roams wormholes from time to time, and generally doesn't have time or effort to expend on capital ships. My first thought was giving a bit of love to my trading skills and maybe even dabbling some in manufacturing. When I bounced this idea off some good friend in my corp, they were horror stricken. "NEVER TRAIN INDY SKILLS ON THAT CHARACTER," they said. It was as though I had brought up some age-old taboo that nobody ever spoke about, but was understood to be evil.

I inquired as to why this would be so wrong and I got mixed answers. Most of them claimed that having an independent industrial character was simply better for me, but I have never been one to play alts. I had two accounts at one time, but I let it lapse after a few months simply because I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to one or the other.

So I pose the question to the community at large: How bad is it to train some nominally "industrial," type skills (not mining skills, I have absolutely no desire for them) on an otherwise combat focused character, such as trade skills, manufacturing, PI, research, etc?

If you're going to sell the char at some point, definitely a good idea to heed their advice. If not, who cares?

Honestly though, I can't imagine playing this game with one account.

The only reason I trained gas mining on this character was becuase of a multi-billion ISK opportunity in the early days of wormholes. It makes me feel dirty.

The only negative for the character itself is that it increases your clone costs.

For you, there might be the added negative that with one character, you won't be always free to be where you need to be to pursue both the industry and the combat part at the same time. Simply parking an industry character in a station (with the occasional jaunt to transport materials) is often a bit more convenient than having to travel back and forth with your combat character.

…and as for the skills, your combat character will want Graviton Physics V anyway, so just build from there.

This is a sandbox game, so play it how you want to play it.

If you want to dabble into other fields instead of combat only, do it.

Remember, This is you game, play it how you want too.

Many of my industry alts are combat pilots *shrug*

They are very specialized combat pilots though, and will likely not pilot many different ships.

Examples:
* Character A is really a Hulk pilot, but is primarily an Onyx pilot after that, but is also a Tengu pilot, and heading for a Basilisk.
* Character B is really a trade, research, and manufacturing character, but also a Basilisk, Falcon, Tengu and Manticore pilot.

Science is all int > mem, and industry is all mem > int, with clashes somewhat with a combat pilot attribute mapping of per > wil.

Character A is mapped generically. Character B is mapped int > mem, and currently training a per > wil skill, so that is gonna take a while longer, but I really don't care as the character trains so few combat and ship skills.

I'm a bit of everything.

It comes down to the fact that it's not 'wrong' at all to train any skill you feel like on a character, but the fact that it will increase clone costs is something to keep in mind.

If you are rich enough, or die rarely enough, the extra 5-10M cost when you get podded might be less annoying than the hassle of changing between characters to manage industrial stuff. It all depends on how important clone costs vs the annoyance of changing chars is to you.

Anything beyond the clone cost, such as people saying that it's just wrong to train Indy skills on a combat char, is simply people trying to force you to follow their own preferences about what a char 'should' look like.

(And if you're planning to sell the char, then it's a completely different story, since many people want purely minmaxed chars if they're buying them)

The big reason is, the attribute layout.

If you are a combat focused character, you are most likely specced perc/willpower.

So if you want to train industry skills (memory / intelligence) then you will be gaining less SP / hour. So generally, it is more efficient to train it on a dedicated character with memory/intel attributes.

This ensures that you can spend the max possible time training combat skills.

meh. Do whatever you feel like.

Most of mySP are in combat skills, but I can also mine, build, good trade skills and some PI. It was needed back in 0.0, where we where more or less self sufficiant. And I like to log in, and do what ever.

If you want to dabble in production or whatever, do it. Its Your sandbox. Different people **** in it, but its yours. Do whatever you feel like and sod everyone else.

I'm somewhat tied to my home system with market orders, but thats never stopped me from going up to Amarr or anywhere else for days on end. After all, the market orders, productions will still be there when you get back.

True dat, True