Skills and learning
(All skill links should be rewritten to point at UniWiki pages instead of off-site pages)
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
Ever 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).
It should be obvious that raising your attribute scores is a very good idea. Ways to do this are discussed in part 2, Training Strategies, below.
Your Medical Clone
(medical clone)
Training Strategies
(Subtitles to follow)
(Observations: diminishing returns: implications, 'blackmail' prerequisite 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)
(Focusing your training on particular roles/ships/fits/occupations)
(Using remaps effectively)
(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
