Inspired by the greats

Just a quick post to direct anyone reading to a fellow blog of a rather famous EVE capsuleer, Azual Skoll's The Altruist. A short time ago I was asking for advice from experienced players on the E-Uni forums, the great thing is past Unistas are able to help out those of us still in our EVE playing infancy and I got a fantastic response which Azual Skoll has polished up and re-posted to his own blog.

So if you want to have a look, and perhaps follow him if you don't already, then head on over to www.evealtruist.com/

For the record, I'll be trying out the Enyo first based upon the responses given, more on that in the future though :)

Essential Support for you and others

So its been a while since my last blog update mainly due to the flu, thankfully I'm feeling much better now. As I approach two months with EVE University I've been trying out a few other roles within my limited skill set and this brings me onto this weeks topic, that of support skills and how much of a difference they can make.

In many forum posts and other blogs the general consensus is that unless a skill is a low skill multiplier or unlocks a future skill you want you generally only need to take it to Level 4, one thing I've found though is that a number of new players seem to do this with many skills in an effort to fly bigger and better ships at the expense of being able to fly them effectively. So what skills am I talking about, for starters the core fitting skills such as Hull Upgrades (for armour tanking), Shield Upgrades (for shield tanking), Mechanics, Electronics, Engineering and Weapons Upgrades, all of which provide excellent bonuses in their own right but also unlock further skills such as Advanced Weapons Upgrades and perhaps more importantly allow the use of more advanced modules such as Tech 2 armour tank modules etc. Beyond this the other core skills that everyone should consider essential no matter what ship you fly are Warp Drive Operation, Energy Management and Energy Systems Operations, thankfully these have already been trained to at least Level 4 however taking these to 5 along with those above is definitely something that will happen in the short to medium term.

To this end I've made January fitting skills month, granted this means I've put off being able to fly some very shiny Tech 2 ships just as the Enyo, Taranis and Ares as well as being able to fit Tech 2 guns. Doesn't sound like much fun does it but after looking at a number of fits I've made for all of these ships as well as some suggested by fellow Unistas and Alumni I decided that while I could sit in these ships with no great issue fitting them would be virtually impossible.

All in I expect to take less than a month to train up many of these essential skills so while I still have a neutral skill remap I'm going to take the time to train up my Leadership skills, at the moment I have Leadership to Level 4 and the support skills Armored Warfare, Information Warfare, Siege Warfare and Skirmish Warfare all to Level 2, again by the end of the month I want to get Leadership to Level 5 and the supports to Level 3. So what you may ask, well the good thing about this is that while leading a squad you also get these bonuses and if part of the fleet if anyone higher than you in the chain of command has the support skills higher than you it allows you to use that bonus and pass it on to your squad.

One other area of support getting a little training this month is that of Logistics in the form of the Remote Armour Repair Systems skill, I'm a firm believer in trying out everything at least once, within reason, and with my decent frigate and cruiser skills I'm hoping to try out a Tech 1 Logi Cruiser or failing that Frigate which should be fun.

So I sign off for another week and hopefully regular blogging will recommence :)

Mia