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. This guide explains the mechanics that govern skill training, and makes suggestions for training strategies.

In EVE your skills are a significant part of what defines your character and what they can do. If you want to fly a ship, you'll need skills for that. If you want to use modules on that ship, you'll need skills. And if you want to do mining or trading, yep you've guessed it, you'll need skills for that.

There are many, many, many skills, but thankfully they are divided into several groups:

|[[Skills:Armor|Armor]]  

|[[Skills:Corporation_Management|Corporation Management]]  

|[[Skills:Drones|Drones]]  

|[[Skills:Electronic_Systems|Electronic Systems]]  

|-

|[[Skills:Engineering|Engineering]]  

|[[Skills:Gunnery|Gunnery]]  

|[[Skills:Leadership|Leadership]]  

|[[Skills:Missiles|Missiles]]  

|-

|[[Skills:Navigation|Navigation]]  

|[[Skills:Neural_Enhancement|Neural Enhancement]]  

|[[Skills:Planet_Management|Planet Management]]  

|[[Skills:Production|Production]]  

|-

|[[Skills:Resource_Processing|Resource Processing]]  

|[[Skills:Rigging|Rigging]]  

|[[Skills:Scanning|Scanning]]  

|[[Skills:Science|Science]]  

|[[Skills:Shields|Shields]]  

|[[Skills:Social|Social]]  

|[[Skills:Spaceship_Command|Spaceship Command]]  

|[[Skills:Subsystems|Subsystems]]  

|[[Skills:Targeting|Targeting]]  

|[[Skills:Trade|Trade]]  

 

Most of these sections are self explanatory: skills in the Drones section deal with drones and skills in the Planet Management affect planetary interaction. However others are less clear: electronics, engineering and mechanics particularly. Sections such as these can affect several different areas.

''These have to be updated to Odyssey 1.1''

The main way to acquire other new skillbooks is from the market. You can browse the available skillbooks under 'Skills' in the Browse tab, or just search for a particular skill. Currently most skillbooks are sold by NPC corporations for a fixed price -- this is effectively CCP seeding them on the market.

Some skillbooks are not directly seeded onto the market. Instead they're acquired through the Loyalty Point stores of NPC corporations or from exploration sites. These tend to be more advanced skills, such as [[Skills:Gunnery#Small_Autocannon_Specialization|Small AC Specialization]], which lets you use T2 small autocannon. Some players trade in these skills by finding them or buying them from LP stores where they have LP and then putting them up on the regular market for a profit. Depending on how hard it is for you to get these skills any other way, you may find that buying them from players selling them on the regular market is your simplest option.

If you are a member of E-Uni the university can reimburse the cost of any skill which is NPC-seeded and costs no more than 1 million ISK -- see the [[The_Skillbook_Program|reimbursement page]] for more details.

The base numbers of skill points required to train a skill with a training time multiplier of 1x (like [[Skills:Navigation#Navigation|Navigation]], for example) go like this:  

When training from one level to the next you start with the skill points you accumulated training the previous level -- so, for example, if you start training Navigation IV, you will already have 8,000 SP in the skill and will need to train 37,255 more SP to move from III to IV.

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, [[Skills:Navigation#Evasive_Maneuvering|Evasive Maneuvering]] has a training time multiplier of 2x, and you need to accumulate 500 SP to train it to I, 2,828 SP to train it to II and so forth.

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:

   ( SP_Needed - Current_SP ) / ( Pri_Attrib + ( Sec_Attrib / 2 ) )

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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.

'''N.B.''' Do not confuse medical clones with [[Jump_Clones|jump clones]]! Although they have similar names they perform different functions.

Medical clones come in different 'grades', and each grade preserves a different number of skill points. If you are podded and you have more SP than your medical clone can preserve -- say you have two million SP and you still only have the basic medical clone which stores 900,000 SP -- you will '''lose skill points'''.

[[Skills:Gunnery#Surgical_Strike|Surgical Strike]], for example, gives you a 3% bonus to all turret damage per level -- very useful for anyone who uses [[Turrets|turrets]] as their primary weapon system -- and has a 4x training time multiplier. You can get your first 3% bonus in a trivially short amount of time: even with basic attribute scores, training Surgical Strike to Level I takes 40 minutes or so. However, with the same basic attribute scores training Surgical Strike from Level IV to V would take nearly 25 days -- and you would still only get 3% more turret damage for your trouble!

When your character is older you may well reach a point where you have fewer things you want or need to train -- at this point, it may be worth revisiting some skills you left at IV and taking them to V.

There are, however, some skills which it's worth training to V quite early on in your capsuleer career. For combat pilots Navigation, which we used as an example previously on this page, is one such because:

Another class of skill which you may find yourself training to V are the so-called 'blackmail' skills which are prerequisites for particularly desirable equipment. On the way to training to fly the [[Wolf]], for example, you would need to train Minmatar Frigate V, Mechanic V and Engineering V. Similarly, on the way to deploying [http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Hammerhead_II T2 Hammerhead drones] you would need to train Scout Drone Operation V and Drones V.

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.