Skills and learning: Difference between revisions

There are around 400 different skills in EVE, and every character can potentially learn every skill (provided that they have an [[Clone States|Omega clone]]; Alpha clone characters are limited in what skills they can train). It would be easy to get lost, but thankfully skills are divided into groups:

It would not be practical to go into detail describing all these skills on one page; there is therefore a separate page for each section of skills (linked above). Furthermore some of these sections have corresponding [[Skill Tree Maps]].

{{update|This information possibly dates back to the Odyssey expansion and should be checked.}}

Another method to decide on which skills to learn is to use [[Certificates]].

To learn a skill (unless it's part of your [[Starting Skills|starting skills]]), you need to acquire and inject the relevant skillbook.  

If you did the starter missions from the [[Tutorial_and_Career_Agents_in_Eve|tutorial agents]] (and if you didn't, they're highly recommended) you will have been given some useful skillbooks.

If you are a member of E-Uni, the University can [[The Skillbook Program|reimburse the cost]] of any skill which is NPC-seeded and costs no more than 1 million ISK.

Once you have acquired a skillbook, you can "inject" a skillbook.  

Injecting is useful if you've bought a skill which you have the intent to train, but don't actually want to start training it right away or have yet to meet the requirements to train: once it's injected, you don't need to worry about keeping the skillbook with you, and there's no risk that you'll lose the skillbook if you fly into dangerous space and lose your ship. The same is true and useful for [[Jump_Clones|jump clones]] -- you can jump to a clone in hisec or a trade hub, acquire and inject the skill there, and then (after the jumpclone waiting period) jump back to your main clone somewhere in more dangerous space, where you can train the skill at your leisure. Note that you can inject a skillbook without knowing all the prerequisites to actually start training the skill.

You can train a skill by dragging and dropping it into the training queue, or by right-clicking on it in your Skills list.

So, how is the time it takes you to train a particular skill calculated? The number of skill points necessary to train a skill is determined by the skill's '''rank''', also known as its '''training time multiplier''', while the rate at which you get new skill points is determined by your '''attributes'''.

  SP = 250 * multiplier * sqrt(32)^(level-1)

Every EVE character has five attributes. These are:  

By default, your character has a score of 20 in all attributes (except Charisma, with a score of 19).  

Every skill has a primary and a secondary attribute: {{sk|Navigation}}, for example, lists Intelligence as its primary attribute and Perception as its secondary attribute. When you start training a skill, you can calculate the time needed (in minutes) thus:

It should be obvious that raising your attribute scores, particularly for skill groups you intend to spend lots of time training, is a very good idea. Ways to do this are discussed in later in this guide.

===EVEMon===

[[3rd Party Tools#EVEMon|EVEMon]] is a third party software tool that allows you to make plans on your characters skill training (as well as monitor and plan many other things).

When you first start playing EVE, you may have little idea on what skills you will be needing next week, let alone next month. But after your first few weeks, you will start to form a picture in your mind on what sorts of things you want your character to be able to do, and consequently which skills you'll need. The specific training strategies listed elsewhere in this guide work much better when used together with a long term strategy.

Effectively, all of the methods discussed below improve your training times by boosting your character's attributes. This boosting usually comes at a cost of something else; other attributes, money, or time.

Another way to increase your character's attributes is through plugging [[Implants|implants]] into your head. The first five numbered slots on your character sheet's Augmentations window are for [[Implants#Attribute_Enhancers|attribute enhancers]], implants which each give a bonus (from +1 to +5) to one of your five attributes. Unfortunately, if your pod is destroyed all your implants in the clone piloting it are destroyed as well.

The advantage of implants is that they require minimal training time (Cybernetics only), giving you an immediate boost to training time which can quickly add up to months of time saved. The disadvantage is their cost, coupled with the fact that they are lost if your pod is killed.

Neural remapping doesn't let you boost your attributes overall, but it lets you take points away from one base attribute score and add them to another. The remap interface can be accessed through the Attributes tab of your Character Sheet.

If you create a long skill plan in [[3rd_Party_Tools#EVEMon|EveMon]], you can use one of the options of its 'Optimize Attributes' function to calculate which arrangement of attributes would be best for the first year of your plan. However, if you're new to the game your future career plans are quite likely to change as you explore the game, so making a year long plan after a few weeks isn't very realistic. Be frugal with your remaps for a little while until you get an idea for what you want to do.

Occasionally there are in game events like the [[Crimson Harvest]] that yield cerebral accelerators, which are consumed like [[Combat Booster|boosters]] and give temporary bonuses to all five of a character's attributes. These only last a short time, and have a cut off date some time after the in game event after which they will no longer have any effect.

If you look at these skills you'll see that two attributes crop up more than any others: Intelligence and Perception. Willpower and Memory are secondary attributes for several things (with the exception of Drones) and Charisma isn't required for any major skill groups unless you're a trader. Note that Willpower is the primary attribute for several skills in the Spaceship Command tree, but only for ''advanced'' ship skills, which at this point you'll be training rarely compared to the basic ship skills. As such, a good strategy is to keep your initial remap for a few weeks and train basic skills in all of the main skill groups you need, including Social and Trade. Unless you're going to be a hardcore trader (in which case stop reading here and consult a more detailed guide for traders), you should then spend a remap to place all of your attributes in Intelligence and Perception. More combat oriented pilots should put a few more points in to Perception and more industrial pilots should invest a little more in Intelligence. This remap should serve you well for most of your first year, at which point you should have seen enough of the game to reliably make your own long term skill plans.

While training lots of skills to level III will give you many bonuses and a lot of options in a short time, being mediocre at many things is fun, but not very efficient. You can only have one ship in space at a time, so while being able to fly a [[Retriever]] and a [[Hurricane]] is nice, you can't mine and do level 3 missions at the same time, meaning that whichever you're currently doing you're not using a lot of your skill points. On the other hand, if you'd focused fully on mining or combat, you could be flying a [[Hulk]] or a [[Maelstrom]] instead and making a lot more ISK at your chosen activity (at the expense of not being able to do the other at all). This principle also applies within professions - having mediocre skills in a [[Drake]] and [[Hurricane]] is nice, but you can only fly one at a time. Variety is the spice of life, and being able to play several aspects of the game makes it much more fun, but be aware that when joining a non-training corporation, they will probably want you to have a "specialization" of some sort, be it EWAR, damage dealing in a particular ship, logistics, mining or manufacturing.

Another aspect of specialization is training all of the skills to use a ship effectively, and to high levels. Let's take the [[Drake]] for example. The minimum requirements to fly one and shoot missiles out of it is {{sk|Caldari Cruiser|III}}, {{sk|Caldari Battlecruiser|I}}, {{sk|Missile Launcher Operation|III}} and {{sk|Heavy Missiles|I}}. However, if you train only these skills and try to fly a Drake, it will perform abysmally. Many extra skills are required to fly a ship effectively, such as fitting and capacitor skills, tanking skills, weapon skills, drone skills and the specific ship skill (in this case {{sk|Caldari Battlecruiser}}). Even with all of these trained to level III, you will still frequently be beaten in PvP by a pilot who has properly specialized in the ship and trained these skills to IV or V and trained for Tech 2 modules and weapons.

Here are three ways to organise your skill training around a particular focus or goal. These are certainly not the only ways to plan skill training - they're offered here only as examples.  

The second and third methods are more useful for older players who have a clear and fixed idea of what they want to do. The third method in particular is very boring, and is best suited to alts which are being skilled for a specific purpose (such as piloting supercapital ships) or to older characters who already have a good grounding in support skills and skills that let you do entertaining things while you chew through a list of month-long level V trains.

* The [[Skill_Tree_Maps|skill tree maps]] page to get a visual representation of the skill trees

* The [[Support Skills|support skills]] page for a discussion of particular skillsets

* The [[Skill_trading|Skill trading]] page on the usage for skill injectors and extractors

* The [[The_Magic_14|Magic 14]] page lists fourteen fundamental skills which apply to every single ship that a player can pilot in Eve