Ships & Modules

You got the advice to read up on the missions beforehand earlier in the thread - this is really helpful - just one thing: it is eve-survival.org, not .com.

Go there, find your mission and read up on what kind of resists and dps you need to be efficient against the enemies of that mission. In some cases, its literally a ship-saver.

Personally I'd drop the minmatar progression path and go into amarr for missioning. The Nightmare is a beast of a missioning ship, something great to aim for. Both the Minmatar and Amarr paths will not be very quick into L4s. If you want to jump into L4s fastest, your best progression path is Caldari. Get into a Drake, and then a Raven. After that I'd cross train into beam lasers for Tachyons, grab Amarr battleship IV and jump into a Nightmare. That's how I would do it if I could do it again, the Machariel is fun to fly but I think the Nightmare is a more efficient missioning ship in the majority of situations due to superior dps at almost all ranges and isk efficient faction ammo use.

If you do as I suggest, you'd want to grab your fitting skills first, then your tank skills which would be shield. So electronics and engineering 4, get 5 asap, then grab heavy missile launchers and heavy missiles skills to like 3 or 4. Then shield upgrades, shield management, shield operation and tactical shield manipulation 4. Maxing those out would be nice, but not necessary at this stage of the game. Then grab cruise missile launcher and cruise missiles, that will allow you to run L4s with a Raven. That'll keep you busy while you cross train beam lasers, gunnery skills that you didn't need for missiles, and amarr battleships.

This progression path I believe is optimal because it's the fastest way to get into an L4 capable ship (the drake can even start L4s, but the dps is pretty pathetic), and then it's probably the best to transition to a Nightmare due to already grabbing shield skills as it's pretty much the only shield tanked laser boat and Caldari battleships which it also requires to fly. Pirate faction ships typically require two battleship faction skills to fly, the Nightmare is Caldari and Amarr. They are well worth it, something great to aim for later.

People may disagree with my progression path, but remembering back to missioning in a Maelstrom with 1200mm artillery (1400s didn't even fit, not enough advanced weapon upgrades = / ) and how long it even took to get from Hurricane to Maelstrom level, running all those useless L3s I would never recommend that path to anyone. It's much better to go with Caldari and get into L4s sooner via the Drake.