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, explaining the mechanics that govern skill training, and making suggestions for training strategies.

Skills are a significant part of what defines a character and what they can do. If you want to fly a ship, use modules on that ship, mine, trade, and so much more, you'll need to have trained specific skills for that. Additionally, training skills improves your performance (your ships will fly faster, your guns will do more damage, you will pay lower taxes, and so on). Some skills affect multiple areas of the game, but most are specialized. This has two major effects:  

* It doesn't take too much time to become proficient in ''one'' area of the game (say, flying missile frigates), as there is a finite number of skills which improve your performance in that particular area. This also means that young characters (who have not been playing for as long) can quickly "catch up" to older characters in specific areas of the game.

Right-clicking on a skill in a hangar or cargohold, also gives you an 'Inject skill' option. Injecting a skill shunts the skill from the skillbook into the Skills list on your Character Sheet (and destroys the skillbook), but doesn't actually start it training -- effectively it stores the skill at 'level 0'.  

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]] -- 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.

If a skill has a training multiplier higher than 1, the numbers of SP required for each level are multiplied by that number. So, for example, {{sk|Evasive Maneuvering}} has a training time multiplier of 2x, and you need to accumulate 500 SP (250 x 2) to train it to I, 2,828 SP to train it to II and so forth.

In general the skillpoints accumulate at rate equal to

Each attribute is associated with skills for particular spheres of activity. Generally the groups of skills are associated with particular attributes as follows - with some exceptions:

* '''Perception''' and '''Willpower''' are very important for combat pilots, since they help you train skills which let you use better ships and weapons, and use your ships and weapons better.

* '''Charisma''' is important for traders and mission-runners, and anyone who's training the Leadership skills.

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]] 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.

For a new character, it is therefore often most efficient to train a useful skill which has a high training multiplier to III or IV and then move on rather than taking it to V straight away. As a rule of thumb, if you use a skill at all it's probably worth training it to III, and if you use a skill regularly it's worth training it to IV.

Another way to increase your character's attributes is through plugging [[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.

Do note that there are also slot 1-5 implants (sometimes known as Pirate Implants) that also provide other bonuses, in addition to attribute increases.  While these are usually more expensive, do check the markets carefully, as sometimes some "Low-Grade" ones, which are +2 to an attribute, are occasionally less expensive than the equivalent +2 implant ("Limited ''<type>'' - Beta").  See [[Implants#Advanced_Attribute_Enhancer_Reference|the list here]].

Since the more powerful +4 and +5 implants can be quite expensive, particularly for a newer pilot, one common trick is to arrange your skill plan so that you're only training skills which rely on the same two attributes, and then only plug in attribute enhancers for those two attributes. This way you only have to pay for two implants rather than four or five.

# You start with a 20 points for Intelligence, Perception, Willpower and Memory; You start with a 19 points for Charisma.

The common strategy for remapping is to put together a long-term skill plan which majors on skills which use a particular two attributes, and then remap so that you denude all your other attribute scores and pump up those two attributes.

If you create a long skill plan in [[EVEMon]], you can use one of the options of its 'Attributes Optimizer' function (available via the Skill Planner) 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.

Neural remapping, is essential for mid- or long-term planning (compiling mid or long term skill plans can be made using external tools such as [[EVEMon]]) and can help you cut several days or weeks of the training time needed to finish such a plan. Please remember that a fresh character is given only '''two chances''' to remap and after you used both remaps, the next remap will only be available after '''one year''' of playtime, so use them carefully.

After you know what you are planning for, and can make at least a mid- or long-term plans for things you want to do in EVE (which would probably be a several months or a year skill plan), you can begin to calculate an appropriate remap for the plan, this can be done using the help of EVEMon's attribute optimizer or by common sense. You can try to experiment changing the remaps on the EVEMon attribute simulator and see which skills are affected positively (trained quicker) and which skills will took longer to train using that remap, skills that took longer to train (because of a higher multiplier or if you are training these skills to higher levels) would be affected much more by appropriate remaps in long term rather than skills in which can be trained quickly.Several things you need to know before you decide to remap your attributes (since later on, you will only have the chance to do this once a year):

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.

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.

#* This method will make you a more reliable pilot, but requires more patience and dedication, and research to find out which support skills you need.

The first method is good for new players since it offers the interest of regularly being able to use new equipment. Avoiding long-term planning when you're new can actually be a good thing, since you may change your mind about your long-term career goals in Eve. Deciding that actually you want to be a small ship, Gallente-flying manufacturer and explorer just after you've remapped for a two-year long Amarr-focused battleship fleet PvP skillplan is very inconvenient!

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 trading]] article on the usage for skill injectors and extractors