EVE beginner

[RedImperator]

As far as beginners go, I have a few pointers.

Caldari are great for PvE, but if you want to move into PvP...either accept the fact that you are going to be an ECM Pilot or crosstrain another race.

I hear all PVP is sniper battleship duels.

Not to me. To me PVP is three guys trying to make my Probe* slow down enough that they can blow it up and steal my stuff, while I'm flying at Ludicrous Speed towards a gate screaming "Not meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" at my monitor.


*(I'm a Caldari/Amarr pilot, and it's still my favourite Trader Ship for Poor People, screw T1 Industrials, which have the life expectancy of a leaf and attract pirates like flies.)

Ever try the MWD/cloak trick with a Badger? Good for collecting pirate tears in local if you pull it off...though I wouldn't load the boat with anything too expensive.

[Lagmonster]

I'm a Caldari/Amarr pilot, and the Probe is still my favourite Trader Ship for Poor People, screw T1 Industrials, which have the life expectancy of a leaf and attract pirates like flies.

Ever try the MWD/cloak trick with a Badger? Good for collecting pirate tears in local if you pull it off...though I wouldn't load the boat with anything too expensive.

I didn't even know it was a trick. My Probe runs a cheap MWD, cheap capacitor embiggening device, cheap cloak, and two cheap anti-warp-scrambling-thingies, and it hadn't occurred to me to try any kind of combo.

[White Haven]

Basically you take a slow ship, you align-MWD-cloak at the same time, then you disengage the cloak right as the MWD cycle is about to wear off, all the while spamming warp. You should warp the /instant/ the cloak and MWD cut off, because you spent your cloaked time aligning, and once the MWD falls off, your speed is above the warp threshold. Personally, I prefer a good blockade runner, of course, but it's not a bad imitation. Of course it takes some doing to fit a proper-sized MWD on a T1 industrial.

[RedImperator]

Basically you take a slow ship, you align-MWD-cloak at the same time, then you disengage the cloak right as the MWD cycle is about to wear off, all the while spamming warp. You should warp the /instant/ the cloak and MWD cut off, because you spent your cloaked time aligning, and once the MWD falls off, your speed is above the warp threshold. Personally, I prefer a good blockade runner, of course, but it's not a bad imitation. Of course it takes some doing to fit a proper-sized MWD on a T1 industrial.

I've been practicing with a Badger I and a 1mn MWD. It's doable and it fits pretty easily. You might be able to squeeze a 10mn MWD onto a Badger II with good fitting skills, since it has three lows and a lot of CPU for powergrid mods, but I can't run EVE fit on a Mac so I can't test it. Either way, if you screw up, it's a lot cheaper to lose than a blockade runner. Practice it in highsec until you can consistently do it well.

PS: Ebil piwates whining about the MWD/cloak trick are great fun. Pirate tears really are the best tears.

One thing though: with something as clumsy as a Badger, you ideally want to align to something as close to dead ahead as possible. You're not going to heel around 180 degrees in the time it takes your MWD and cloak to cycle once, even with intertia stabilizers in the lows. If you're doing it in a Curse, of course, you have a lot more choices. The only things harder to catch in lowsec than a MWD/cloak frigate are covops and Dramiels.

[Steven Snyder]

Not to me. To me PVP is three guys trying to make my Probe* slow down enough that they can blow it up and steal my stuff, while I'm flying at Ludicrous Speed towards a gate screaming "Not meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" at my monitor.


*(I'm a Caldari/Amarr pilot, and it's still my favourite Trader Ship for Poor People, screw T1 Industrials, which have the life expectancy of a leaf and attract pirates like flies.)

You might want to push for a SB or Cov-Ops, they are about the same size and catching one is nigh-impossible if your careful.

[White Haven]

If you're doing it in a Curse, then the biggest question is why you're not doing it in a Pilgrim for that extra fuck you to gatecamps.

[RedImperator]

Not to me. To me PVP is three guys trying to make my Probe* slow down enough that they can blow it up and steal my stuff, while I'm flying at Ludicrous Speed towards a gate screaming "Not meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" at my monitor.


*(I'm a Caldari/Amarr pilot, and it's still my favourite Trader Ship for Poor People, screw T1 Industrials, which have the life expectancy of a leaf and attract pirates like flies.)

You might want to push for a SB or Cov-Ops, they are about the same size and catching one is nigh-impossible if your careful.

If you manage to lose a covops or SB to a gatecamp anywhere in Empire--high or lowsec--for any reason besides lag, you fail at EVE. Even in a bubble camp, they're bastards to catch unless your interceptor pilots know what they're doing.

[White Haven]

My Covops losses amount to 1) warping uncloaked to a hostile station when two-thirds asleep and not noticing, 2) Being warped to at zero while cloaked at a Sleeper site, and 3) emerging from a jump inside a HIC bubble and within 1 kilometer of a Vagabond. In other words, you either need to fuck up by the numbers, get fucked by your own people (by the way, I still haven't forgiven you, Flagg!), or have the kind of bad luck that indicates having smashed a mirror using a black cat as a club while standing under a ladder. So yeah.

[charlemagne]

One thing though: with something as clumsy as a Badger, you ideally want to align to something as close to dead ahead as possible. You're not going to heel around 180 degrees in the time it takes your MWD and cloak to cycle once, even with intertia stabilizers in the lows.

This only applies when your ship is moving, though. From a complete standstill your boat aligns in every direction equally fast, no matter if it's dead ahead or behind you from the perspective of the ship model. The ship turning is just cosmetic, from a standstill thrust is applied instantly in the chosen heading.

[RedImperator]

My Covops losses amount to 1) warping uncloaked to a hostile station when two-thirds asleep and not noticing, 2) Being warped to at zero while cloaked at a Sleeper site, and 3) emerging from a jump inside a HIC bubble and within 1 kilometer of a Vagabond. In other words, you either need to fuck up by the numbers, get fucked by your own people (by the way, I still haven't forgiven you, Flagg!), or have the kind of bad luck that indicates having smashed a mirror using a black cat as a club while standing under a ladder. So yeah.

I've seen them caught in bubble camps. The key is to have everybody assign their drones to assist the interceptors, so the inty pilots are surrounded by clouds of drones, effectively increasing their decloaking "footprint". They can then lock, scram, and web the covops quickly and unleash that cloud of drones on them; I'll be sitting in the same camp in a non-sebo'd Harbinger and I won't even get a chance to lock these guys before they die. One of these days I'm going to bring a bugzapper Cormorant to a camp and just killmail whore for hours.

[Lagmonster]

Not to me. To me PVP is three guys trying to make my Probe* slow down enough that they can blow it up and steal my stuff, while I'm flying at Ludicrous Speed towards a gate screaming "Not meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" at my monitor.

You might want to push for a SB or Cov-Ops, they are about the same size and catching one is nigh-impossible if your careful.

I'd love to. I have the skills; what I do not have, is the *money*. I'm trying to get some regular customers going with my planned trade route, but that's mostly nickel and dime stuff; sooner or later I'm going to have to sign on with a corp just to get access to the kind of opportunities that will allow me to eventually fly jump freighters.

[Steven Snyder]

Lagmonster

Signing on with a good alliance is pretty much mandatory in Eve...

If you are new to the game Eve University comes pretty highly rated.

[Lagmonster]

Eventually, just because it'll take me years to expand on my own.

But being a small-time trader is actually fun to me. I don't get to blow anyone up, but I fill some useful niches for a few folk in low places and I've never had an unhappy customer. I couldn't ever see myself camping a gate, or hunting NPC ships, or endlessly churning through asteroid belts. But buying, transporting, and selling goods in various ventures lets me go all over the place and meet people from one end of the game to the other. I only wish I had more capital to invest; that would mean bigger ships, bigger hauls, and more glee at supplying cheap arms and ammunition so that I can watch other people crotch-punch each other with them.

[RedImperator]

I'll tell you guys this: if you're looking for someone who can find a deal, Lagmonster's your guy. He supplied me ~10,000 faction torpedoes at sub-Jita prices in three days, and the only reason he didn't get me more is because I only fly a stealth bomber, not a torp Raven, and I didn't need any more.

[Dartzap]

Anyone else enjoying the free skill points? Got me my Dominix about three days ahead of schedule, hehe

[Prannon]

Yup, I sure enjoyed mine. It put me up three days ahead on my medium blaster specialization training. Talk about a pick-me-up!

[RedImperator]

I'm actually thinking of putting mine towards a Charisma-heavy skill, like Leadership, since I (like everyone else) have crummy Charisma and I don't feel like buying a +4 implant for it.

[charlemagne]

It got me a bit closer to finishing Cybernetics V... I've put that skill off for the longest time, getting a jump-start for it made me finally put it in the queue

[White Haven]

Hacked 3 days off my industrial alt's Command Center Upgrades V. Charisma skills AHOY!

[RedImperator]

After saying I'd spend them on a charisma skill, I actually spread them around several armor tanking skills I've been meaning to bump up without having to interrupt Hull Upgrades V.

[Jaevric]

I downloaded the EVE 14-day trial over the weekend and am currently having a blast with the Amarr. Still not 100% sure I want to start a subscription, but that's what trial periods are for.

Before I sink too much time into my Amarr character, though, I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm mostly interested in mission-running (so far) and maybe some PvP (though I realize I'll need to find a Corporation for the latter). I read earlier in the thread that the Caldari are the best choice for missions due to the Drake. Are there any good short-range brawler/drone ships for the Amarr? I'm mostly interested in fairly cheap, "disposable" options -- destroyers and maybe cruisers once I get my skills up. My gut instinct is to go for a short-ranged brawler/drone ship, but I'm not sure how effective that would actually be in-game.

I'm also a fairly casual MMO player these days. How accessible is the game for someone who can only play an hour or two a day (or less)? I haven't had any trouble thus far but apparently the tutorial missions are extremely generous, and they don't take long at all.

[White Haven]

Race is absolutely irrelevant. It'll tweak the tiny amount of skills you start with a bit, it'll change your starting location, and it'll change which (totally useless) newbie ship you get handed if you dock in a station while driving a pod. You are by no means constrained by the race of your birth.

[Steven Snyder]

Before I sink too much time into my Amarr character, though, I wanted to ask for some advice.

You went with the Pro-Slavery religious nutbags? Ouch...

I'm mostly interested in mission-running (so far) and maybe some PvP (though I realize I'll need to find a Corporation for the latter).

Mission running isn't a bad way to make money, but it will get repetitive. Mission running, rattings, whatever, are ultimately used to fund PvP.

I read earlier in the thread that the Caldari are the best choice for missions due to the Drake.

Drakes and the Raven are often used for Mission running, but are by no means the only ships that can do it.

Are there any good short-range brawler/drone ships for the Amarr?

The Arbitrator is cruiser with good drone bonuses, a fairly unusual design for the Amarr as it employs missiles and drones but it's a good ship.
The Harbinger Battlecruiser and any of their battleships can be fitted with pulse lasers for close range havoc.

As far as the rest of their cruisers and frigates, I am not very impressed with them.

I'm mostly interested in fairly cheap, "disposable" options -- destroyers and maybe cruisers once I get my skills up. My gut instinct is to go for a short-ranged brawler/drone ship, but I'm not sure how effective that would actually be in-game.

Aside from Capital ships, all ships in Eve are disposable, any ship you buy for pvp purposes should be expected to be destroyed sooner or later. But it really sounds like you are pushing for Gallente, they are the main users of drones.

I'm also a fairly casual MMO player these days. How accessible is the game for someone who can only play an hour or two a day (or less)? I haven't had any trouble thus far but apparently the tutorial missions are extremely generous, and they don't take long at all.

Well you have an advantage there with Eve, the training is done online or offline, as you know it is based on real time and not how much time you spend in the game.

Unfortunately you could do well spending a nice good chunk of time training up your learning skills so that you have a strong foundation of attributes to work on training for the rest of your career. I spent 6 weeks with my current character getting all the learning skills to 5/4 except of course charisma. They are likely going to change this soon, but until then this is the real suck part of starting Eve.

Oh and a word of advice...after you get a character past this initial phase, do not reroll. If you don't like the direction, change it, a new character is the wrong direction. So get the name and portrait right the first time because you are going to be with that a long time.

[RedImperator]

No. No, no, no, no, no. Do not spend 6 weeks training learning skills to 5/4. Fuck that noise. You're paying money to have fun, not watch your skill points tick up while you fart around in a noob ship for a month and a half. Get your rank 1 skills to 2 or 3, depending on how patient you are, train some basic combat skills and have fun pewing rats (you'll need to run missions to afford to buy the rank 3 skillbooks anyway). Get the rank 1 skills to 4 and then train the rank 3 skills to 3, in between training other stuff.

Is it the most efficient way in the world to train? Probably not. Does it really matter that you might have lost 12 hours of training time somewhere because you didn't min/max your skill training? No, not in the slightest. Shit, I'm pretty sure the tutorial missions even give away cheap +1 implants to boost your training rate, so you're not even missing out that much.

Incidentally, I have my learning skills at 4/3, and for anything other than a few year-long plans, EVEmon never suggests training a learning skill. Pushing learning skills to 5/4 will almost never pay off.

Incidentally, what's EVEmon? It's this. It's an indispensable tool if you want to focus your skill training and become a good pilot. Focusing is good. It's true that because of the way skill training works in EVE, you'll never catch up to older characters. However, once you've maxed out all the skills you need for any given ship, your skills will be as good as it's possible to be when you're flying it--a 2003 character will have no advantage over you (experience is another matter, but honestly, EVE isn't that hard as long as you practice). The more you focus, the faster you'll become really good at flying one ship. Once that happens, you can start to branch out and become really good at other ships.

I downloaded the EVE 14-day trial over the weekend and am currently having a blast with the Amarr. Still not 100% sure I want to start a subscription, but that's what trial periods are for.

Before I sink too much time into my Amarr character, though, I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm mostly interested in mission-running (so far) and maybe some PvP (though I realize I'll need to find a Corporation for the latter). I read earlier in the thread that the Caldari are the best choice for missions due to the Drake. Are there any good short-range brawler/drone ships for the Amarr? I'm mostly interested in fairly cheap, "disposable" options -- destroyers and maybe cruisers once I get my skills up. My gut instinct is to go for a short-ranged brawler/drone ship, but I'm not sure how effective that would actually be in-game.

The problem with Amarr is that they don't have many good ships at the low end. The Punisher is a decent frigate, but it's slow and doesn't get any damage bonuses to lasers. Ironically for a frigate, I think it's a lot more rewarding for high-skilled characters--I have a Punisher fit that gets more than 11,000 EHP with my skills, and would get to nearly 12,000 with a character with all relevant skills at level 5. But you couldn't fly it yet. The one thing I will say about it is that even with low skills, you can fit a pretty forgiving tank for level 1 missions that will let you survive a few mistakes.

The Amarr destroyer is the Coercer. It has a lot of potential with 7 turret hardpoints, but only one midslot is brutal. It does have four lows for a decent armor tank, but you'll almost certainly have to spend one of them on a powergrid mod to actually take advantage of those 7 turret hardpoints.

A lot of people will tell you destroyers, as a class, are useless for anything but salvage. I don't think this is true, but they are limited. Properly fitted, they can pump out serious DPS for their size and price, but you have to find the right situation for them. Unfortunately for the Coercer, only one midslot really hampers it and rules out certain roles that other dessies can perform. For mission running, of course, it's fine for L1s, since you'll be facing nothing but frigs and the one thing all dessies are really really good at is nuking frigs.

The cruiser situation is...bad. A review:

Omen: It has the slot layout for an okay tank and solid damage, but it doesn't have the power grid or CPU to actually fit both, even with max skills. Honestly, it can barely fit either. It works okay as a nano-fit glass cannon, but newbs can't afford to fly ships with no tank.

Maller: Can fit a monstrous armor tank--with dual 1600mm plates, it can out-tank many battlecruisers. Unfortunately, if you actually take advantage of its tanking abilities, you can only fit frigate guns. Sacrifice the tank to fit cruiser guns, and you have a mediocre gunboat (no laser damage bonuses, again) that costs twice as much as an Omen. No drone bay, either, unlike the Omen.

Arbitrator: Actually, a really nice boat. However, it's a drone/energy neutralizer/tracking disruptor platform, which 1) takes it off the beaten path for Amarr, and 2) requires more pilot skill to fly properly.

Auguror: Useless. Do not fly an Auguror.

Once you hit battlecruisers, the Amarr start to shine. The Prophecy is pretty useless (same problem as the Maller; CCP needs to stop making Amarr gunboats with no bonuses to laser damage), but the Harbinger is a great ship that can tank, gank, and keep operating for a long time thanks to a generous cap. The battleship lineup is solid, and the T2 cruisers pwn your face. The only T2 frigate I've flown is the Purifier, but it's a fine ship.

The Harby is the low-cost tank'n'gank brawler you're probably looking for (it can even carry a full flight of medium combat drones), but for a newcomer, it's way out of your price range. You can chose to muddle through until you can fly one, or you can train someone else's frigs and cruisers and then mission in them while you're training Amarr. Fortunately, three of the four races use armor tanks and turrets, so any points you put towards general gunnery skills will pay off later for Amarr; the only race-specific skills you'll need are Amarr [Shiptype] and lasers. You might want to look into Gallente; they're really strong in frigates and T1 cruisers, and a blasters are nothing if not close range. They tank the same way Amarr do (as opposed to Minmatar, who sometimes armor tank and sometimes shield), so your tanking skills are directly transferable.

Caldari are generally best at PVE, but they shield tank and use missiles as their primary weapon. Totally different set of skills. I eventually made the investment because I was fighting Guristas rats, against whom Caldari outperform Amarr so badly it's not even funny, but that runs counter to the advice I gave you to focus.

Incidentally, anyone who tells you Caldari are useless at PVP is wrong. Caldari have the most powerful EWAR by far, their ships tank like bricks, and missile boats don't use capacitor to fire their weapons. Yeah, in giant blob fleets you miss out on killmails because the primary is dead before your missiles arrive, but giant blob fleets aren't the only kind of PVP there is (and even in them, you can always shoot the secondary).

I'm also a fairly casual MMO player these days. How accessible is the game for someone who can only play an hour or two a day (or less)? I haven't had any trouble thus far but apparently the tutorial missions are extremely generous, and they don't take long at all.

For mission running and ratting, this is no problem. If you're looking to start a career as an industrialist, consider planetary interaction, which only takes a few minutes' work each day. Mining will never pay off at that rate, though, and most PVP takes longer--have to gather a fleet, have to fly around looking for targets or camping gates, have to fly 20, 30 jumps home sometime.

[Stofsk]

What benefit does belonging to a race confer? None of the races look all that appealing from the RP side of things. Usually races have some kind of stat bonuses or something.