Skill Discussions

Hey everyone I'm a new player looking to get set on a good training path. I've done the military, advanced military, and exploration career mission chains and am now currently doing the SOE arc as is recommended to new players. I've done a LOT of reading prior to getting this game and one thing that a lot of people say is that training skills and doing it right is very important. So I have some questions:

- How important is it to train core and support skills to 5? I ask this because a lot of people don't recommend training a lot of skills to 5 initially. I'm looking to min-max my training to get the most out of it.

- Do you guys have a list of skills that will be good for almost every ship and situation that I can plug in?

Thanks for the assistance

edit: Also, when should I use a remap? I have 2 bonus remaps available, and I see that "23i 21m 21p 17w 17c" was recommended in another thread for the first year of training.

What I can tell you is "don't remap yet". Because a few hours or days less training time are not worth the options you would lose by an early remap. What I did: Trained targeting, shield, armor, engineering, navigation and drones to IV on my main while I tested the T1 ships up to cruiser on four Alpha accounts I kickstarted with ISK from my main. (I sold some skins and clothes from the starter pack.)

I changed my opionion on stuff so many times that I am glad I didn't rule out anything from start.
If you are very sure you won't do any of the few CHA related things and have an idea what ships/race you like most (perhaps from playing alpha clones) you can make a Skillplan for that and optimize a INT/PER remap with a third party tool. I trained trading and social skills to III before the remap for easier loot selling and better rewards on missions. (Glad I didn't spend more because missons became boring to me very fast and trading is to much 0.1 ISK games for me.)

Fitting skills are incredibly important. I recommend looking at the T2 variants of common modules and skilling to those. Look at getting into a BC with T2 modules. Don't worry about BSes yet, a well fit BC will go a long ways.

Thank you everyone for the tips and advice. It's been a lot of help and have been glad to see such helpful people here.

+1, Unlocking T2 mods often gives you a double or triple bonus (the skill bonus, the Mod bonus and for weapons the Ammo bonus as well)

I would also recommend training all applicable skills (depending on what you want to do) to 3 or 4 before you start going down the Lvl5 road. Not only can you train several lvl3/4 skills in the time it takes for a Lvl5 but it also makes changing your mind less painful (nothing like training Mining 5 to only change to combat a few days later)

That's the spirit. And have fun in Karmafleet, they should be able to answer all your further training questions in channels.

Training core skills to V is always a good investment, but whether it's required....depends on what you are doing.

In general the PvE in this game is quite easy and you don't need a perfectly fit ship nor max skills to succeed. There is however, a point of diminishing returns for flying larger/more advanced ships with poor skills. As you get into bigger and more advanced ships fitting becomes tighter, and you need to step up your game in fittings to squeeze the most out of those hulls.
It's often the case that you are better off staying in a smaller ship and improving your skills than jumping up to the next class of ship right away. This is usually a problem for mission runners who can have access to L4 mission so quickly that they are trying to fly a battleship with very low skills. In most cases you are probably better off flying your L3 ship and picking and choosing L4 missions.

Also remember you could shoot for a more advanced smaller hull, such as a HAC or T3 cruiser instead of moving up in hull class. Most any PvE in Eve is trivially easy for a T3 cruiser.

For PvP....in a large fleet sheer numbers and the presence of logi may make up for skill shortcomings-- but you may not even be able to fit a ship that conforms to any sort of doctrine your corp is using.
Solo....win and loss often comes down to tiny margins. Even among those guys you see doing epic solo PvP on YouTube- they often barely survive a battle, limping home in structure. For them those tiny margins make or break the engagement. 3% of this or 5% of that may not sound like much when facing a month of training time to get it to V...but those little percentages add up to an advantage, and you need every single advantage when flying alone.

The Engineering and Navigation trees are critical skills that will affect every ship you undock, regardless of what it does. These are, in my opinion, the 'must have at V' skills. Most are fairly short training investments in the grand scheme of things. Believe me, once you have half a decade of playing Eve...you'll look back at 3 weeks training time as 'the good old days' when your current queue is laid out for the next six months, and only has four or five skills lined up.