Skill Discussions

Yeah I edited my post I think you just meant the Command/Dictor Ship Requirements and not the Skillbook Reqs themselves being split up as well.

Unless the new skills are much cheaper, that would violate the if you could fly it before, you can fly it now rule.

They DO use the same sized modules and weapons as frigates. This points to destroyers not being a separate class of ship. However, they wouldn't T2 ships, not sure how you made that connection. Just because it would require racial frigate 5 to train?

The destroyers for the four races are pretty much the same: lots of turrets and good tracking. It would make sense for there to be only one skill to train to enable flying this type of ship, rather than a racial skill for each race, unless the destroyers' capability diverge a lot more than now.

quite a while, they want to re-balance the destroyers before they change the skills for destroyers, then they'll be doing cruisers, then battlecruisers (again, ships first then skills)

and considering we're still on frigates... i wouldn't worry too much.

the joy of this game is that eventually, at some point, you'll find a use for some thing you trained eons ago without knowing why you trained it.

also on the first weekend of the alliance tournament slep/slep/scim setups were quite popular, so i'd say it never hurts to be able to fly a sleipnir.

"because i can" is all the justification you need to do anything :P

it will, ccp have said it will.
oh wait, yeah needing freighter 5 will happen but being given it for free won't happen. you'll just be able to fly it without the skill.

How? They either keep the pre-req at Racial Freighter IV which breaks the proposed paradigm, or they split Jump Freighters into four Racial Jump Freighter skills (which also breaks the proposed paradigm) and require Racial Freighter V just for learning the Racial Jump Freighter skill and requiring just the Racial Jump Freighter to actually fly the ship (thus letting existing pilots fly their Jump Freighters without giving them Racial Freighter V.)

Personally, I think it's a 50-50 bet between leaving the pre-req at Freighter IV or just handing out Freighter V due to the "limited" number of people that fly jump freighters.

So there is still no official word on if any of the skills will be changed in the next expansion?

Interesting things! (yes, I was that slow to notice the change just now)

I had both Destroyers and Battlecruisers trained to V something like by the end of 2011 - just because I had a perfect remap for that and had been planning to train Interdictors and Command Ships eventually. But I only have two races' frigates and cruisers at Level V, and my current remap is Intelligence/Memory. So I'll wait about the other 2 races at least for now.

By the way, CCP blogs say we won't have to train extra skills to be able to fly what we can now. There was no mentioning free SP giveaway. I see it this way:

1. Players will be reimbursed any SP they had in Destroyers skill, which they will be able to allocate otherwise (to new racial destroyer skills or anything else).
2. They will be able to fly those destroyers they had been able before the change, even without training/applying SP to racial destroyers skill.
3. There will be skill-based bonuses making it unwise to fly any destroyers without actually having respective skills trained up. That would compensate for the ability to fly ships without spending SP or training skills. And not that having skill based bonuses was an unusual thing for ships to have anyway ;)

So as I see it, everyone flying a destroyer will be able to fly it further on, but to be effective virtually everyone will have to invest into respective skills.

I think it is a good idea not to rush into training all these just in a pursuit of slightly possible free SP right now (at least if you have to train on a wrong remap), but wait to see how things progress with destroyers - and then make a decision for Battlecruisers.