FoH guide to EVE Online

[FoghornDeadhorn]

I would add to the list of recommendations btw that if you're going to train a BC for missioning take the time and just get the damned BC skill up to 4 quickly, you'll have it for the rest of your life no matter what race you play and it makes a big difference on all BCs.

[Vorph]

Alright, sounds like Myrm is definitely the way to go then. Thanks.

Originally Posted by Tirinal

A cyclone is fine for most all exploration sites in npc nullsec, though this assumes decent-ish skills. Though I'm unsure why you'd need to clear the site first so the Cheetah can get in there; you can hack containers in your BC. In fact, you'll need its cargobay.

Yea, brain fart/info overload there. I assume it would actually be: find the site with the Cheetah, then switch to the Myrm to clear and loot it?

Mining is retarded and if you ever tak like this again I'll find out where you live.

It's not that I actually enjoy mining, but it's not that much more boring than running L1's. Get "Break Their Will" mission (free scordite field with almost zero chance of another player stumbling upon), log in a miner with a Scythe or Osprey on my POS machine, and watch TV/movies/read comics. All I have to do is drag ore to a can every minute or two and bring out the indy once an hour, and the money is at least as good as running missions even with full salvaging. Especially since there's a good chance that when rats spawn they will include a Domination Gistii.

Boring, sure... but also effective for a newb. I made enough to buy all my second tier learning books just testing things out in a Bantam on a trial account to see if mining was my thing. (It's not)

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Oh damn, I didn't notice that was scordite. Nice :P

[Khorum]

Missioning will make you hate EVE only a little slower than mining. Very little.

But if you're gonna go with a myrmidon, keep some of your minmatar gun skills. Myrmidon + autocannons is great, if a little FOTM. Myrmidons.

[WillzZz]

Eh, I struggled with the whole "Can my Myrm run L4's?" when I was graduating from L3's, and I opted for the Domi. It's very fire and forget, with so much less risk. It's also a lot less frustrating. I can't tell you how lame disconnecting in a Myrm can be. Atleast in a Domi you scoop what you can and send out 5 Ogres everytime. Also higher DPS (Since instead of Nos you can fit hybrids with bonuses if you do a cap rig setup)

Is it possible? Sure. I'd love to try some L4's in my Myrm now that I have BC V, t2 blasters etc. It'll definitely be a lot more exciting than flying the space turd.

PS <3 my OP'd Myrmi

[Dildo Faggins]

Originally Posted by Tolanin

Problem most people have with AFs is they dont have a distinct role that other ships dont do better like most every other T2 ship.. recons and hacs are both better than the AF at anti support.. where intys and dictors are useful to the fleet and each is needed thats not true of an AF, no one ever holds the fleet up because they dont have enough AFs. Theres a few exceptions to that but not many, the ishkur almost does enough dps on its own to be worth it, but the enyo annd most other races AFs dont do much more dmg than a ranis, and you give up a huge amount of other utilities to get that small dmg increase over the inty.

PS myrm is a sick BC and owns all the other BCs. It can get you through a lvl4 at about the same speed as a domi or raven if you have the skills for it... its only real weakness is its drone bay is smaller than the domis so it cant have light/med drones to compliment its heavies.

entirely true. The biggest ace in the hole that a AF has is that fitted for absolute gank, a wolf can put out sickening amounts of dps that no other frigate sized ship can honestly compete with. Recons are far better at disabling incoming ships, but with medium weapons they can sometimes be very slow at killing inti sized vessels, and they will often be one of the first ships a inti blob will go after since they see the danger. Hacs usually have better things to do than try to chase down intis and dictors. AFs are good at one thing- kicking ships off your BS snipers or being 'that little bastard ship' in a messy engagement.

When i hop into an af, i dont think of myself as flying a interdictor or interceptor like some people do. I think of myself as flying a cruiser with a tiny ass sig radius. An AB AF goes as fast as a cruiser with mwd, does nearly as much damage, locks like it has free sensor boosters, and has a sig the grain of a sand next to a MWD'ing cruiser, and can tank nearly as well when you consider resists. Expecting your AF to be an inti with tank is just silly, and will lead to you looking stupid as the interceptors cruise by like your going in reverse. If you exploit the advantages of a AF, they can really be cheap effective fleet support.

No, nobody needs them, but they are fun to fly, and are fairly good at some jobs. They arent bad ships at all, and are well worth the 8 day decoy from a hac path to get them.

[Khorum]

Well yeah. The whole L4's in a Myrmidon thing was some kind of ironman thing anyway, which wasn't too ironman-y when it turned out anyone with halfway decent skills can do L4s in a myrmidon. A well fitted and rigged out Domi can sleep through L4s. I'm even thinking of trying out something I saw a corpmate mission with: he uses a domi on his hauler account. It's got cargo expanders and cargo rigs, a couple remote reppers, tractors and salvagers on hi and he just uses its hvy repair drones on his DPS domi.

[Antarius]

Originally Posted by Fog

I would start by training drone skills. That will help your Drake out a whole whole lot (as well as a future raven) and suddenly once you're done you will be ready to fly Gallente drone ships. Once you're flying those, you'll probably eventually want to try out rails and blasters on your Gallente ships, and then all of a sudden all you need to train is projectiles/energy turrets and you can fly Amarr or Minmatar if you want.

I have to 2nd Fog's recommendation. Not too long ago (not even 2 weeks ago) I had been ignoring my Drone skills pretty heavily. I thought, meh, why bother with drone skills when 90% of my damage is coming from my 7 Heavy Missile Launcher IIs.

But after getting Drones 4-5, Drone Interfacing 1-3, and pumping my scout drone operation from 2 to 4, it's a night and day difference. Instead of being pretty much useless on level 4s, my 5 drones can now reach out to 65km (most battleships orbit 40-60km) and they now do a fairly significant portion of my overall dps. I went from not being able to break the tank of the 2.5 million battleships in DEDspace level 4s to doing them with ease. And the time for a kill on the normal 500k-1mil battleships that populate most level 4s really dropped dramatically.

I originally wanted to train and fly battlecruisers because my eventual plan was to get into a Command Ship. That has kind of lost it's appeal now.

Personally, I'd recommend you train up Battleships instead of Battlecruisers, BCs are great at level 3s, but people do Level 4s in a BS with significantly less skillpoints required. And Level 4s are just so much higher ISK/hour than Level 3s are, even at the slow pace of a battlecruiser.

And with the price of a Dominix these days, you can't go wrong cross training drone skills and armor tanking.

edit: To clarify, I fly a Drake, and while rigs make BCs capable of doing level 4s, rigs make Battleships capable of sleeping through level 4s while doing way more damage against the other battleships.

[Bizanich]

Originally Posted by Vorph

Yea, brain fart/info overload there. I assume it would actually be: find the site with the Cheetah, then switch to the Myrm to clear and loot it?

Err, just make sure it's not a site that disappears when the guards die.

I THINK they disappear if a container or two is hacked/accessed and then everyone leaves, but not if just the guard ships die.

I can't remember.

[Tirinal]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

Err, just make sure it's not a site that disappears when the guards die.

I THINK they disappear if a container or two is hacked/accessed and then everyone leaves, but not if just the guard ships die.

I can't remember.

They despawn after you first access a container.

Or! They may not. Who knows. I've had ones that stuck around, for some reason.

But yeah. Killing guards has no effect.

[Kazgrim]

The biggest ace in the hole that a AF has is that fitted for absolute gank, a wolf can put out sickening amounts of dps that no other frigate sized ship can honestly compete with.

Not sure how accurate quickfit is so take this with a grain of salt, but the wolf build you posted a page or so back is hitting 233 DPS with max skills at optimal conditions (1000m away, dead stop shootout), my Taranis under the same shows 219. I may not know how to fit out a wolf for max gank so could be my error (i've got 4 200mm ac IIs with Hail S loaded, arb missile launcher with therm missiles, seems to be the max dps of all the configs i've tried) or it could be quickfit's dps calculations are wonky. I don't really dispute your knowledge on the matter cus 99% of the time I agree with whatever you are saying and the other 1% I usually turn out to be wrong, but would like to hear your opinion on the matter. Ship for ship its no contest, but those damn gallente, even the Taranis has a drone bay to fit 2x Hobgoblin IIs.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Tirinal

Finally, keep in mind that for the ships you listed once you train small projectile turret V (5-10 days) you're effectively "done" in the dps department. Everything else you have in gunnery carries over. So don't stress about which turret type you grab in the meantime.

Yea, I started with the Military/Soldier setup so I was using tier 2 guns within a few hours.

Sounds about right. The social skills are essential if you interact with npcs.

I may be wrong though, I've yet to run a single mission in 1.2 years of playing EvE.

I just trained Connections to II and it does indeed work. IMO that should be one of the first things you train if you have any intention of doing missions. I wasted many hours already working on getting a high quality L1 agent in lowsec, when Connections would have let me go directly to her.

[Saban]

if you plan on doing any missions, get connections to at least 3 first.

[NolwenSolRo]

Definitely agree w/ dildo on the AF's role. Enoy's, Wolfs, and Harpys are amazing for popping support in fleets. A full gank setup w/ any of those ships will 2 volley a ceptor no problem. Another excellent anti support ship is the artillery Muninn (1 volley ceptors, 2 volley dictors from 100k away no problem) or Rapier (already mentioned)

Not sure how accurate quickfit is so take this with a grain of salt, but the wolf build you posted a page or so back is hitting 233 DPS with max skills at optimal conditions (1000m away, dead stop shootout), my Taranis under the same shows 219. I may not know how to fit out a wolf for max gank so could be my error (i've got 4 200mm ac IIs with Hail S loaded, arb missile launcher with therm missiles, seems to be the max dps of all the configs i've tried) or it could be quickfit's dps calculations are wonky. I don't really dispute your knowledge on the matter cus 99% of the time I agree with whatever you are saying and the other 1% I usually turn out to be wrong, but would like to hear your opinion on the matter. Ship for ship its no contest, but those damn gallente, even the Taranis has a drone bay to fit 2x Hobgoblin IIs.

For fleets as an assault frigate you are better off going range over pure damage. The wolf is an excellent AC platform no doubt, but it is a better artillery platform for fleet engagements. For small gang stuff its a good AC boat, but a cruiser does the job better IMO.

Wolf

280mm Howitzer Artillery II [14xNuclear S]
280mm Howitzer Artillery II [14xNuclear S]
280mm Howitzer Artillery II [14xNuclear S]
280mm Howitzer Artillery II [14xNuclear S]
Launcher Slot

Sensor Booster II
1MN Afterburner II

Gyrostabilizer II
Gyrostabilizer II
Beta Reactor Control: Diagnostic System I
Fourier Transform I Tracking Program

Rigs : Empty Slot \ Empty Slot \

530 shield, 2.89/s, E/T/K/Ex=75/59/39/59
878 armor, E/T/K/Ex=92/67/25/10
345.83999276161194 cap, +6.16/s, -1.6/s
754.0 m/s
61.8 DPS

[Bizanich]

Those new starbase arrays are going to really change things. A system wide cyno jammer? All the POS weapon systems outside the POS?

It'll give something for the small ships to do, at least.