Skills and learning: Difference between revisions

[[Skills]] in EVE govern the abilities of your character. They determine which ships you can fly, what modules you can use, the effectiveness to which you can use those ships/modules, and much more. This is a guide to learning those in-game [[Skills|skills]]. This guide explains the mechanics that govern skill training, and makes suggestions for training strategies.

To learn a skill, you need to acquire 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 reimburse the cost of any skill which is NPC-seeded and costs less than 1 million ISK -- see the [[The_Skillbook_Program|reimbursement page]] for more details.

Once you have acquired a skillbook (and assuming you have already learnt the prerequisites), you can "inject" a skillbook.

Injecting is useful if you've bought a skill which you have the prerequisites to train, but don't actually want to start training it right away: 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.

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'''.

The better the benefits of a skill or the equipment it lets you use, the higher its training time multiplier, or 'rank' as it's sometimes called, tends to be. [[Skills:Spaceship_Command#Amarr_Titan|Amarr Titan]], for example, has a x16 training multiplier -- you need to accumulate 4,096,000 SP to train it to V.

Every skill has a primary and a secondary attribute: [[Skills:Navigation#Navigation|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.

When you die -- which is to say, when you are 'podded', when your capsule is destroyed -- you wake up in your medical clone. Everyone has a medical clone, and you can open up a menu that lets you control your medical clone using the medical bay button in any station which has a medical bay.

When you die and wake up in your medical clone, you are automatically given a new backup medical clone to replace the one you are now in. The new medical clone is, however, only the basic one, so the first thing you should do after being podded is upgrade your medical clone.

[[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.

As you train higher and higher levels in a skill, you get less benefit for the time invested.

Some skills are worth training to V because of a combination of several of the above reasons. Drones V for example lets you use a full flight of five drones, which is useful on any ship with a drone bay of 25m3 or more -- and it's a prerequisite for the excellent T2 drones.

This section of this guide deals with strategies to help you train skills ''faster''.

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.

All the skills in the [[Skills:Learning|Learning]] category actually increase your attributes when you train them. Training these skills therefore increases the rate at which you train other skills. This means that learning "how to learn" first, can save your character time in the long run.

If you're training up a new alt character and you already have a main character to have fun with, you should of course go straight for the learning skills first. Though if the alt has a limited training plan (if, for example, you will train the alt to fly covops ships as a scout/courier for you, and then stop training it) you may not need to train all the learning skills very high at all.

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.

The advantage of implants is that they require minimal training time (Cybernetics only), giving you an immediate boost. The disadvantage is obviously their cost.

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.

However, if you're new to the game your future career plans are quite likely to change so doing this on your first and main character may lock you into an attribute profile which you don't really want. It's probably better to keep this strategy for alts, which you will be training for a specific purpose from day one.

'''[Don't lose heart, postpone fun or feel you have to 'catch up' with older players -- explain reasons why]'''

'''(Remapping appropriately, importance of a year)'''

'''(Focusing your training on particular roles/ships/fits/occupations)'''

'''(Example long-term goals)'''

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 general [[Skills|skills]] page for information on particular skills

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