Skills and learning

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This is a guide to learning in-game skills. It explains the mechanics that govern skill training, and makes some suggestions for training strategies. If you want detailed coverage of individual skills, you can start here. This page will occasionally refer to Evemon, a widely-used third-party program which lets you track and plan your character's training, and you can learn more about Evemon here.

How Skill Training Works

Acquiring Skillbooks

To learn a skill, you need the relevant skillbook. If you did the starter missions from the tutorial agents (and if you didn't, they're highly recommended) you will have been given some useful skillbooks.

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.

The NPC sell orders are easily spotted: they have a uniform price and they have nearly a year's worth of time listed in the 'Expires In' column. (The maximum amount of time a player can put a sell order up for, by contrast, is 90 days.)

You may see player sell orders for NPC seeded skillbooks too. If they're below the NPC price they're probably selling off books they bought in error; if they're above the NPC price they're probably hoping to trick someone into buying. Make sure you check the NPC price before buying an NPC-seeded skill from a player!

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 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 less than 1 million ISK -- see the reimbursement page for more details.

Training Skills

(injecting/beginning learning; controlling the queue)

Training Time

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.

Training Time Multipliers

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

• Level I: 250
• Level II: 1,414
• Level III: 8,000
• Level IV: 45,255
• Level V: 256,000

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, 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. Amarr Titan, for example, has a x16 training multiplier -- you need to accumulate 4,096,000 SP to train it to V.

Attributes

Every skill has a primary and a secondary attribute: 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 ) )

It's not necessary to know the mathematics involved here, but the important thing to note is that your score for a skill's primary attribute will affect its training time twice as much as your score for its secondary attribute. You can find your attribute scores on your character sheet in the Attributes section, though the figures there are rounded to the nearest whole number (EveMon can give you decimal points, if you really want them).

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

Skill Groups and Associated Attributes

Group	Attributes (Primary, Secondary)
Corp Management	Memory, Charisma
Drones	Memory, Perception
Electronics	Intelligence, Memory
Engineering	Intelligence, Memory
Gunnery	Perception, Willpower
Industry	Memory, Intelligence
Leadership	Willpower, Charisma/Charisma, Willpower
Learning	Memory, Intelligence
Mechanic	Intelligence, Memory
Missiles	Perception, Willpower
Navigation	Intelligence, Perception
Science	All except Perception
Social	Charisma, Intelligence
Spaceship Command	Perception, Willpower/Willpower, Perception
Subsystems	Intelligence, Memory
Trade	Willpower, Charisma/Charisma, Memory

As a rough summary:

• 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.
• Memory and Intelligence are very important for industrialists, and still quite important for combat pilots (they're useful for drone skills, fitting skills and tanking skills).
• 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 part 2, Training Strategies, below.

Your Medical Clone

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! 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.

You should therefore regularly check that your medical clone preserves more SP than you have, and upgrade it if necessary.

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.

Training Strategies

(Subtitles to follow)

Boosting Your Attributes

Learning Skills

(most efficient way to learn learning skills; make sure you have/are learning enough other skills to have fun if this is your first and primary character though)

Implants

(brief explanation, link implants page)

Remaps

(Using remaps effectively)

How Many Levels?

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

Surgical Strike, for example, gives you a 3% bonus to all turret damage per level -- very useful for anyone who uses 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!

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.

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:

• it has a low training time multiplier (1x)
• it affects a very fundamental aspect of your ship's performance (speed)
• with a substantial bonus (5%)

(TODO: expand on this point, talk about 'blackmail' prerequisites)

Making Skill Plans

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

(Remapping appropriately)

(Example long-term goals)

See Also

• The general skills page for information on particular skills
• The support skills page for a discussion of particular skillsets