Odyssey Skill Reminder

Just a quick reminder, although it might me a bit late or irrelevant to you.  Skills for flying a lot of ships are changing come June 4, and you should be ready by doing a few things:

• If you have Destroyers V and Battlecruisers V update your clone to hold about 6-7 million more skill points.
• If you don't have those skill trained, that sucks, but train them as far as you can.
• If you have BC V, train all the racial cruisers to at least III, and inject Command Ships so as to get the racial Command Ship skills receive ranks in the skill (Edited based on comment 5/18/13).
• Look at the links posted further down in this post to see if there are other ships that you can essentially skill into come patch day.

Here is a nice picture that illustrates some of the changes, stolen from a very useful Eve University forum post:

This dev blog has more details.

If you are a player who is fairly well along the way to a lot of T2 ships, command ships, or who remembered to train Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V, but forgot about the other requirements, you should troll through both the posts I linked to make sure you get the most out of the skill changes.  I just double checked everything, and I'm glad I did.  My industry character had a few skills I needed to put in my queue so as to benefit from all the changes.  He will retain the ability to fly an awful lot of ships come Odyssey.  Even if he can't fit any of the weapons that would make them useful...

The most important thing is to get all your racial frigate skills to IV, racial cruisers to III, and Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V. 

Guide: Skill Planning

Given some of the recent posts around the skill system in Eve, and some discussions in game with Corp members, I am going to propose a boring, but highly useful initial skill plan for new players who have no real idea what they want to do.  This list also focuses on Flying in Space skills for a basic combat oriented pilot.  I am assuming a new player is not going to immediately decide to go the industry or science based career paths.

I'll list these in a general order of training.  A key note:  Training to your racial frigate and gun type of choice is always a good first day of Eve approach, as it will let you actually do something in game.  It may also be worth training a few levels in the racial cruiser and medium turret or missile  too, but that is by no means an absolute.  It just gives you a few more ships to play with early on.  Also, playing through the tutorial missions will get you many of these skillbooks for free, so it is worth sending a day or three doing those missions!

Core Fitting Skills
These are horribly boring, but are highly useful as you start trying to actually fit your ships.

Electronics - Targeting, EWAR, and CPU based skills

• Electronics 5 - 5% CPU per level
• Electronic Upgrades 3 - Opens up a wide variety of useful modules for fitting
• Targeting 5 - You can never target too many things
• Multitasking 4 - See above
• Signature Analysis 4 - Target faster
• Long Range Targeting 4 - Target further

Engineering - Powergrid, Capacitor and Shield skills

• Engineering 5 - 5% powergrid per level, opens up shield tanking skills
• Energy Management 4 -  5% capacitor per level
• Energy Systems Operation 4 - 5% capacitor recharge per level
• Energy Grid Upgrades 4 - reduces CPU need of many fitting modules

Mechanics - Armor, Hull, and Rigging skills

• Mechanics 5 - 5% hull hp increase per level, opens up many other skills
• Hull Upgrades 5 - 5% armor increase per level, opens up armor tanking abilities
• Jury Rigging 3 - Opens up most other rigging skills

Navigation - Speed and Agility

• All of the skills in this division that do not start with "Jump" are extremely useful and should go to 3, probably 4.  These all make you move faster, turning faster, and useless capacitor while doing so.  Moving faster is always better!

Gunnery

• Weapon Upgrades 4 - Somewhat mysteriously placed in the Gunnery tree, this skill reduces CPU requirements of almost all weapons in the game, and as such it is useful to all pilots.

Training the above skills as a start will make it easier to fit and fly almost every ship in the game!  The results are not readily apparent when you queue them up, but getting those done sooner than later makes using every hull you sit in better!  What you train next will in large part depend on what weapon platform you are leaning towards, Turrets or Missiles, and what tanking style you will use, Shield or Armor.  I recommend tanking skills first, but that is a personal preference.  Listed below are the core tanking skills in each subset.  I recommend taking all these skills to 4 in roughly the order shown.

Shield Tanking - In Engineering

• Shield Management - More raw shield
• Shield Operation - Faster shield recharge time
• Shield Compensation - Reduces cap need of Shield Boosters
• Shield Upgrades - Reduces powergrid need of most shield modules
• <Damage Type> Shield Compensation - there are four of these, for each damage type, and they improve your resists.
• Tactical Shield Manipulation - While not mandatory, stops some damage from leaking into armor when you shields are low

Armor Tanking - In Mechanics

• Repair Systems - faster Armor Repair cycle times.  Mandatory, take it to 5 if you can wait that long
• <Damage Type> Armor Compensation - Works the same as shield compensation skills.

You may notice that shield tanking seems to have more skills.  You are somewhat right!  Armor tanking is in large part dependent on your capacitor and fitting skills, and Hull Upgrades, which you already trained, opens up armor plates.  Also, armor tanking uses low slots, and often negates the use of damage upgrades, so my theory is that there are less skills to offset that "penalty".  Also, shield tanking allows passive setups that still regenerate hitpoints, while passive armor tanking does not.  For a very nice guide to tanking, and to skills and Eve in general, I highly recommend you check out Isk: The Guide.

If you have trained this far, you are probably already learning what you want to train next.  Past these basics, which I consider the core skills of Eve, you desired play style will influence the ships, weapon skills, and other support skills you will want to train.  I'll probably cover the weapons skills in the future, but for it will suffice to say Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar pilots will want to focus on Gunnery for turrets, while Caldari and some Minmatar pilots will want to focus on Missiles for... missiles.

Failing at (Internet Spaceship) Life

I saved up and trained up over the last month or so, and finally got myself into the ship I wanted to fly since I saw one in action, the Tengu.  My fit was a rather standard mission running fit, as I recently moved to a new section of Empire and have been grinding standing for various characters and stocking up on the isk while I decide on my next move in Eve.  My fit ran along these lines:


[Tengu, Mission]

Tengu Defensive - Amplification Node
Tengu Electronics - Dissolution Sequencer
Tengu Engineering - Augmented Capacitor Reservoir
Tengu Offensive - Accelerated Ejection Bay
Tengu Propulsion - Fuel Catalyst

Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile

Republic Fleet 10MN Afterburner
Caldari Navy Shield Boost Amplifier
Pithum C-Type Medium Shield Booster
Invulnerability Field II
Invulnerability Field II
Photon Scattering Field II

Caldari Navy Ballistic Control System
Caldari Navy Ballistic Control System
Caldari Navy Ballistic Control System
Power Diagnostic System II

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit II
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit II
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I

As far as Tengus go, this is not a terribly expensive fit, coming in around the 1.2 B mark when I got the whole thing together.  I have a few things to say about the 'Gu.  First, it is an amazing ship in the role I built it for.  Fast, agile, and deft at handling most PvE encounters.  The DPS is very nice, about 450 or so, depending on what missiles I load into the launchers.  The tank is half speed, and three quarters shield booster.  Yes, that adds up to over 100% for those inclined to math.  The range is about 110 km, which is further than all but the farthest mission spawns.  The 'Gu is also aesthetically pleasing in a odd, inherently Caldari way.

There are some downsides to the 'Gu.  It makes most level 4 missions trivial to the point of boredom.  It's a bit of a panic to fly the first few days, due to the enormous value of the ship.  I found myself much more likely to warp off encounters when seeing the shield tank take a few hits, and I really watch gates and local while flying it.  But most of all, the 'Gu is so mind numbingly effective at most things in Empire that it lulls you into a false sense of security after a week or so.  You probably saw this coming:  I lost my Tengu not too long after I built it, because I was an idiot.

The details of this death are very simple, and in hindsight the cause of death was hubris.  I had been pulling missions like candy, and while puttering around wiping out fleets of Sansha, I started to build a nice little Manticore on an alt.  Side note - Grimmash is a very capable stealth bomber pilot with most missile skills hanging out in the 4s and 5s, so targeting a frigate with a torpedo, while not the most efficient using of isk, will result in space debris within a few shots.  The pilot I made the Manticore for does not have such nice support skills, and I forgot this fact. So I built the Manty, pulled a Worlds Collide, looked at the Eve-Survival report, and made a series of mistakes which I shall elucidate for you, dear reader.

1. The most vital mistake:  Angels use webs AND scram, not just webs.  I misread the mission report and saw "5 webs" not "5 webs/scrams".
2. The 'Gu, although decent at taking out frigates, will not atomize 5 elite NPC frigates faster than a small fleet of cruisers and battleships will break a medium shield booster, even if it is deadspace gear.
3. A SB is not the suitable suport ship to take out said elite NPC frigates.
4. A speed tank is absolutely useless when you something like 4-6 active webs hindering propulsion.
5. Use of kiting and good transversal is the difference between tanking with ease and slowly watching something burn with you in it.

And not so much a mistake but a fun fact:  45 seconds is about how long it takes to go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance when watching your tank break in the most expensive ship you own.  Oddly, I skipped depression unti la few days later when I saw a friend flying her Muninn and wanted to flex my DPS muscles, only to remember that I was now back in my Drake/Raven combo team.

The most interesting part of the whole thing was how much I didn't rage.  I always figured losing a ship that expensive would sting more, but overall I think having had, and lost, the 'Gu reinvigorated Eve for  me.  I've been trying more approaches to mission running instead of just grinding things out, and it lead to me undergoing a rather profitable scanning run in order to avoid missions.  It made me remember that unpredictability is more interesting than stasis, and that sometime a big loss is actually a good thing.