EVE New Citizens Q&A

masteries are like what certificates used to be: a rough guide on relevant skills on a ship and has no real importance in the game.

Orbiting something depends on your ship turning speed or "agility" smaller ships generally have better agility and therefore can turn faster and maintain a tighter orbit.

If you want to orbit closer you will have to reduce your speed

Masteries are a "guideline" to being proficient at a ship.

However, do not take them too seriously.

The Masteries are not updated by the DEVs very often and some of the skills they demand are... frivolous.

For example: With the Merlin class frigate, I am only have Mastery Level 3. This is purely because I have the shield amplification skills at level 3.
Having these skills does not mean I cannot use the ship to its full effective potential. In fact... the shield amplification skills are not really needed unless I am using specific modules... which normally do not see a lot of use.


This orbiting behavior is normal.

There is some technical babble involved... but I will spare you.

Basically... the faster you go, the more your agility suffers.

This is compounded by the fact that propulsion modules add extra mass to your ship when activated... decreasing your agility further.

The only way to achieve a "pure" 500m orbit is by being slower and/or exceedingly agile... neither of which is optimal for various reasons (makes you easier to hit and gimps your ship's fit... respectively).


The long and short of it is this; do not worry too much about it. There are a few cases where it actually does matter (see: drone ships and/or under heavy webifier effects and/or scram kiting), but operating at close range with an Afterburner and experiencing some orbiting "drift" is normal.

Mastery is a rough guide at best, but outright wrong in some cases, especially at level V. For example many ships at Level V mastery will list the 4 Shield Compensation skills at level V. But these skills (mostly) only effect the relevant Resistance Amp modules (an uncommonly used module) and if you haven't got them fitted to your ship, the skills do nothing for you.

As a rule of thumb I tend to consider Level III mastery is fairly accurate and should be blindly trained. After that study the benefits and cherry pick which skills you think should be trained higher.

Orbiting a larger ship is a perfectly valid tactic, in fact a must use tactic in many cases especially at brawling range. If you are 'under his guns', meaning he can't track and hit you, then you shouldn't use your AB as you will be reducing your own DPS due to tracking issues. However, it's very situational. For example if you are part of a gang, your DPS might not be important, keeping alive and tackle on is your role, so keep the AB burning. If you are part of a gang, you might think you are under his guns, but in fact it is just he is shooting someone else and that includes not just shooting, but webbing and target painting. Also keeping under his guns doesn't keep you under his drones and again they may not switch onto you until later. So when in a gang, often your priority is to keep yourself alive. But if solo your priority is often to burn him down as fast as possible before help arrives, so you would engage in more riskier tactics such as switching off your AB and even reducing your ship velocity.

The range you orbit at also effects his tracking, the closer you are, the better for tracking negation purposes. But the orbit you order is never achieved, as centrafugal forces throw you out, more the faster you go. So yes, it is common for the actual orbit to be 800-1000 when you order 500. Note, that instead of using the right click menu to set your orbit range, you should have it preset on the orbit button in your 'Selected Items' window. Obviously if you want to orbit at say 600m you might need to set that figure to 400m to get the desired result. Note that the tighter you orbit the slower you will go, so there is a line between getting in close to negate tracking to getting in too close that your speed is so badly affected that you improve his tracking.

Level 5 masteries are mostly useless achievements for those with nothing better to train,

Levels 1-4 are often useful, to some extent at least, but not a requirement.

Neither masteries nor certificates (nor tutorials) existed when I started playing EvE. You can survive without them.

Several have hinted at this but I will come out an just say it.

Mastery levels are irrelevant.

Instead of training mastery levels look at the skills that affect your ship or ships, the modules you have fit to those ships and in this case your drones, train those to at least level 4 and be done with it.