Support Skills

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Support skills are those skills which affect how well you can fit and fly ships, without necessarily being directly required to use modules or sit in ships. For example, you don't need to train Controlled Bursts, Energy Management and Energy Systems Operation to put large lasers on an Amarr battleship -- but if you do so without training them you will find you swiftly run out of capacitor.

Contents

'Good Support Skills'

The need for 'good support skills' is often emphasized in discussions within the Uni, and in EvE generally, because a skilled character can double the damage and defense of an unskilled one flying exactly the same ship.

This can seem counter-intuitive -- in many other MMORPGs most of the value of expensive equipment is in the power of its inherent bonuses, after all. But in Eve most of the value of expensive equipment is in its potential power in the hands of a character with enough skill training to get the best out of it.

Tech 1 frigates and cruisers are much more forgiving, and can actually have a bigger impact than more expensive ships if you don't have many skillpoints (as anyone who's been jammed by a two-week old character in a Griffin can testify).

Since new pilots are often told they need 'good support skills' to fly such-and-such an expensive ship without being told exactly what those skills are, this page attempts to suggest what training qualifies as 'good' in different circumstances. (Wish us luck!) This page also lists some particular categories of support skills for ease of reference, and contains links to other lists of support skills on this wiki.

Expectations

As a rule of thumb, any skill which you use regularly deserves to be trained to level IV in the short/medium term. Training some skills to level V can take a very long time and you can often leave them as long-term goals or only train them when they're required as prerequisites (for T2 ships, for example). However, some key skills with low training time multipliers give you such significant benefits that they're well worth training all the way to V -- Drones, Energy Systems Operation and Navigation are three examples.

When someone says they have 'good' skills in a certain category they most commonly mean that they have most if not all of those skills trained to IV or V.

PvE vs. PvP

Before looking at specific ship classes it's worth noting that PvE combat usually requires lower support skills than PvP.

PvE combat emphasizes your knowledge of missions, and your ability to tank incoming DPS for long periods. While doing more damage will help you do missions faster (getting more ISK every hour), you can get by with sub-par damage-dealing skills. In PvP combat you want to have the best tank possible (usually, unless you're solo or in a very small gang, a buffer tank or a spider tank) and deal good damage for your ship's size.

This is not to say you shouldn't consider which supports you need for PvE, but it does mean that even if you do L4 missions quite effectively in a battleship, you may not have optimal support skills for PvP battleship combat.

Most of the advice below is directed primarily at PvP.

Battlecruisers

A battlecruiser is a nice step up from a cruiser in firepower and tank. In fact, it's the first hull you're likely to get into where fitting a tank has real meaning. The cost of the fitted ship is also a lot lower than a battleship (1/3 to 1/4 the price), and you don't have to have large weapons trained. All of this means you don't need to be overly timid about moving up from a cruiser.

Support skills you'll want to work towards are:

If you have medium gun/missile skills to IV, and can fit a T2 tank, don't hesitate to step into a battlecruiser.

You can use rigs without having the rigging skills trained, but you'll need someone to install the rigs for you, which is a pain (see the section on rigging below) -- so you may want to train rigging skills for whatever kinds of rig you're fitting. Also remember that buffer and resist rigs for both shield and armor tanking create significant drawbacks that can hurt your PvP performance in some situations, so skilled pilots have often trained Armor Rigging V or Shield Rigging V, depending on how they are usually tanked. Rig drawbacks can only be reduced by your skills, not by the skills of the pilot who installed the rig.

You should be able to fit a T2 tank to fly a battlecruiser when the standard wartime rules are in force.

Battleships

Battleships are potentially very powerful ships, but without good supports they're slow, expensive coffins. It's good to have the following (some of which you will hopefully have trained while flying battlecruisers):

T2 guns on battleships are great, but the training time for T2 turrets is on the order of 70 days, from basic T1 large gun skills -- making them a long-term goal. T2 missiles take less time to train but still aren't exactly one weekend's training. Most pilots initially invest in high meta-level Tech 1 weapons, though the cost of Meta 4 large lasers and the attraction of Scorch crystals may encourage Amarr BS pilots to head for T2 guns earlier than others.

You should be able to fit a T2 tank to fly a battleship when the standard wartime rules are in force.

T2 Frigates

T2 frigates are specialized for a wide range of different tasks, and so the optimal skillset varies widely. As an extreme example, you can fly a covops ship without putting a covops cloak on it, but you'll be missing the point completely!

However, all T2 frigates benefit greatly from most of the skills in the Navigation category, because as frigates they usually rely on speed and agility for part of their tank against larger enemies. You should also definitely aim to fit T2 modules for at least the key functions of your ship -- interceptors deserve T2 MWD skills and T2 tackling modules, assault ships deserve T2 weapons and tanks, and so on. And a full T2 fit is a good goal.

T2 Cruisers

In general, at this level you should be able to fully T2 fit your ship. T2 cruisers are small, fast, and powerful, but tend to have limited CPU and/or powergrid, and limited capacitor as well. In practice, you'll really want excellent fitting skills including Weapon Upgrades V and Advanced Weapon Upgrades III or IV, or you'll be very frustrated when you try to fit guns. You'll want your cap skills to be nearly maxed-out before flying one of these, too.

As with T2 frigates, you will want other supports which will vary depending on your ship's specialization -- a Falcon deserves ewar supports that don't help a Vagabond at all.

Skills

Note that there is some overlap between these lists.

Capacitor

Ignoring skills relevant only to capital ships, there are seventeen skills which can help your capacitor. You don't necessarily have to train all of these, since some of them only apply to very specific sets of modules (Sensor Linking, for example, won't help you if you never use sensor dampeners or remote sensor boosters). But some of these skills are vital for every pilot, and many of the rest are quite important.

Fitting

These all either reduce the CPU or powergrid requirements of modules, or just give you more raw CPU or powergrid to play with. Having decent fitting skills is very useful. T2 modules, which have higher CPU and grid demands, and T2 ships, which tend to have quite tight amounts of CPU and grid in the first place, really demand good fitting skills.

Mobility

There are relatively few skills that directly help you become nimbler and faster, compared to the variety of fitting and capacitor skills available. Those that are available, however, are very helpful for any ship (and extremely helpful to small ships).

Since your ability to move around often depends on keeping your propulsion module running, capacitor skills are indirectly very important for mobility too.

Tanking

The Full T2 Tank page linked previously is a good one-stop summary of the required skills for fitting a T2 armor or shield tank.

In the long run many characters wind up training for both kinds of tanking, even if they only fly one race's ships, partly because many tanking skills will increase your EHP (5% more shields is a smidgen more survival time even if you're armor-tanking) and partly because every race has some ships which can be tanked both ways.

As with mobility, if you mount an active tank (usually for PvE or for solo/very small gang PvP) then your capacitor skills will be key to your tank.

There are three skills which boost raw hitpoint totals:

Besides these three, there are a number of other significant skills for armor tanking:

And there are a number of other significant skills for shield tanking:

Rigging

Most (but not all) rigs come with a drawback (a 10% penalty to something) as well as a benefit. Each subset of rigs has an associated skill which lets you fit them, and that skill itself reduces the drawback effect of those rigs by 10% per level out of the original penalty, so you lower the penalty by 1%/level to 5% with max skills. You can use a ship which has rigs on it which you don't have the skills to fit -- you have to get someone else (someone that you trust) to rig the ship for you beforehand, and you'll get the full, unreduced drawback.

Training to Fit Rigs

In practice getting other people to rig your ships for you is a pain, since you can't always be sure someone will always be (a) free, (b) willing and (c) near where you are. Furthermore, when you start flying battleships and specialized T2 ships, you'll find the pool of people who have the skills to pilot the ship you want to rig (you need to get into the ship to open the fitting screen and fit the rigs) gets much smaller.

It is, therefore, a good idea to train a few levels in the fitting skills required for any rigs you plan to use at all regularly. You'll need Jury Rigging level III as a prerequisite for other rigging skills, though it appears to give you no other real benefits. Electronic and Energy Grid rigs however only requires Jury Rigging level 1 (or 4 for T2 rigs) since they do not have a specific rigging skill dedicated to them.

Training to Reduce Drawbacks

In some circumctances, training specific rigging skills to high levels may not be a very efficient use of your time. The amelioration of the drawbacks doesn't hurt, but it can be a very minor reduction in what is usually a minor penalty in the first place. You need the relevant rigging skill at IV to fit T2 rigs, but almost all T2 rigs are -- at the time of writing -- much too expensive to use wisely on most ship fittings.

However, for PvP combat pilots, reducing the drawbacks to armor and shield rigs can be the difference between winning and losing a battle. For example, the Armor Rigging skill reduces the drawback of Trimark Armor Pumps (armor buffer rigs), which is a drawback to speed. The reason is each rig compounds the drawback penalty, and all T1 ships can fit up to three buffer and/or resists rigs to improve effective hit points. While one rig may not create much of a penalty, three rigs can.

To continue the example, an armor-tanked Hurricane using a 10MN Microwarpdrive II, fitting one 1600mm plate and flown by a pilot with all relevant navigation skills at Level V, has a max speed of 1161 m/s. Add three Trimark Armor Pump I rigs with Armor Rigging only trained to Level 1, and his max speed is reduced to 924 m/s, a more than 20% reduction in velocity. Increasing training to Armor Rigging V increases max speed back up to 1025 m/s, which is 11% faster than having the skill trained to Level 1. Is it worth training a skill like Armor Rigging from Level IV to Level V? With Armor Rigging IV, this hurricane will have a max speed of 999 m/s; it some PvP situations, that 2.5% extra speed will make a big difference.

Getting the weapon rigging skills up a few levels is usually a good idea, too. A few percent lower penalty to your guns' powergrid use can make a big difference: every two levels of the rigging skill is roughly equivalent to training Advanced Weapon Upgrades one extra level, multiplied by the number of weapon rigs you have fitted.

Overheating

In a sense, Thermodynamics is the ultimate PvP support skill: it lets you overheat modules beyond their design specs, at the risk of temporarily burning them out. You need at least one level in Thermodynamics to overheat modules; getting this skill to level 4 doesn't take long and is well worth it, as each level reduces the damage your modules take from overheating. The prerequisites for Thermodynamics were reduced in the Dominion expansion.

There's a more detailed guide to overheating's mechanics here.

See Also

There are a number of other useful lists of support skills on this wiki:

Retrieved from "http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Support_Skills"
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