Hey all, I've been unable to fight off urge to try out eve after reading a few posts about still being able to "do things" with out a 2+ year wait lol.

I just have a quick couple of questions (and I have looked high and low but couldn't find the exact answers) any help would be appreciated! =)

My style of play that I'm most interested in is:
-Drone combat (is it effective when compared to other ships in PvP and PvE? )
-Are Drone ships so expensive that I'm going to be devastated should I lose one?
-Are they big slow sitting ducks that need escorts all the time?
-Am I going to be spending 8+ months getting the skills needed to get a worth while drone ship?

--------- Sniping / Hit n Run ---------

-Other interest is sniping and/or hit and run type combat (big damage low-mid range shields and hits)
-Anything that will get me usefully involved in PvP within 2 - 3 months

Honestly I've always wanted to fly a good sized ship that had decent close range fire power and butt kicking drones.

If that role is really expensive / risky, I'd happily take a smaller role doing hit and run stuff as long as I could serve a truely useful role to a corp in a PvP sense.

--------- Getting Started ---------

Lastly, if you can recomend a rough setup for the character I'd greatly appreciate it! (soon as I get a character started I'll try and figure out how to get setup with the eve university folks)

(I have invested in eve-mon and found a few sites listed in the guides that let me plan a character out, however I don't know where to put what points hehe).

Thanks for your time folks, any info is appreciated and will help me get my foot in the door.

Originally posted by Soujyo

Hey all, I've been unable to fight off urge to try out eve after reading a few posts about still being able to "do things" with out a 2+ year wait lol.

I just have a quick couple of questions (and I have looked high and low but couldn't find the exact answers) any help would be appreciated! =)

My style of play that I'm most interested in is:
-Drone combat (is it effective when compared to other ships in PvP and PvE? )
-Are Drone ships so expensive that I'm going to be devastated should I lose one?
-Are they big slow sitting ducks that need escorts all the time?
-Am I going to be spending 8+ months getting the skills needed to get a worth while drone ship?

--------- Sniping / Hit n Run ---------

-Other interest is sniping and/or hit and run type combat (big damage low-mid range shields and hits)
-Anything that will get me usefully involved in PvP within 2 - 3 months

Honestly I've always wanted to fly a good sized ship that had decent close range fire power and butt kicking drones.

If that role is really expensive / risky, I'd happily take a smaller role doing hit and run stuff as long as I could serve a truely useful role to a corp in a PvP sense.

--------- Getting Started ---------

Lastly, if you can recomend a rough setup for the character I'd greatly appreciate it! (soon as I get a character started I'll try and figure out how to get setup with the eve university folks)

(I have invested in eve-mon and found a few sites listed in the guides that let me plan a character out, however I don't know where to put what points hehe).

Thanks for your time folks, any info is appreciated and will help me get my foot in the door.

Hello Soujyo,

Glad to hear you've decided to try out Eve.

Firstly I thought I'd just make sure you know most ships in Eve have drone bays and can use drones, however some ships have special bonuses to drones to make them especially effective.

Drone combat is effective in PvP, but like everything it has it's advantages and disadvantages.
For example, if you get your sensors jammed by ECM your drones will still be damaging you opponent whereas a ship with all guns on it would be unable to fire.. However if you fly a low-dps drone ship (like a curse) they can decide to shoot your drones instead of you, and if they can manage last long enough you may end up missing all your drones and hence most of your DPS.

In PVE drones are also effective but they have travel time associated with thier DPS.  Combat drones have relativley short range and must move from target to target.  The alternative is to use Sentry drones which have extreme ranges (most effective when used with railguns loaded with long range ammo), but they cannot move at all and their tracking is quite poor.

Drone ships are typically no more expensive and no larger than others of the same type. (the dominix is the cheapest battleship for example and the Ishtar is one of the fastest HACs)

Your first ship as Gallente (more known than others for it's drone ships, the only real exeption is Amarr's Arbitrator hull) is a rookie ship than can use drones.  None of the other rookie ships have this ability.  There is also a gallente frigate with drone range bonuses that you should be able to fly straight away called the Imicus.

The first really effective drone boat you can fly will be the Vexor which is a cruiser sized ship.  The Vexor is IMO one of the best cruisers and won't take long to fly at all.  As they don't really take that much SP to be able to fly you will be able to fly one long before you can actually afford one with your own money.  They are still one of the cheaper cruisers, though.

If you specialise for drones you will be very effective with them early on, however your gunnery missiles may lack a bit.  Some drone ship setups make do just fine without any guns at all.

If you like sniping them you will most likley need to be in a gang for PvP or have someone help you as you cannot tackle your target from long range and they will be able to warp out... however hit and run is a different story all together.  Basically you, or someone else needs to be within 24 KM to disable the warp drive on a ship you want to kill with a few exeptions (Interdictors and Gallente Recons).

In PvE the most effective ships are long range (as you don't waste time trying to get into optimal range).

You can do all this with low SP in gangs, taking smaller roles as a tackler, etc. but like anything if you specialise you can do well it quite quickly.

I would reccomend you start as Gallente Jin-Mei and train the gallente line of combat ships and decide how you want to distribute your SP between drones and guns.

I'll post up the way I would do it personally in a minute.

After a quick look at the starting attributes:
Out of the Gallente bloodlines, Gallente Jin-Mei are overall fairly rounded and the better of the three for a combat character.  Gallente Gallente have the highest base charisma (undesirable) and Gallente Intaki have the lowest base Perception (very undesireable).
 
If you go Caldari Achura you may get a little bit more SP in the long run but IMO it's not worth it as it will hamper your early days making starting difficult and you'd have wasted SP sitting redundant missiles, active shield tanking and caldari ships which you normally would never have trained.

So I would go

Gallente Jin-Mei
King Ko Caste (+4 base perception)
+3 Intelligence
+2 Memory

Military (You sound like you're interested in combat)
Special Forces (Better drone starting skills and no wasted sp in missiles)

Resulting in
10 perception (1st most important stat)
8 Intelligence (2nd)
7 Willpower (3rd)
7 Memory (4th)
7 Charisma (5th)


From there I'd work on my learning skills ASAP (get one training as soon as you enter the game), while you work out the ins and outs of the eve universe, Complete all of the tutorials and do some missions from your starting agent. Buy/steal/beg/borrow a light combat drone to make your starting missions considerably easier (the velator with a combat drone is awsome as far as rookie ships go) and get in touch with Eve-University who can take you from there.

Wow that was way more detail then I was expecting to get asking as much as I did with nothing in return! Thank you very much Jeratan! that cleared up quite a bit of my concerns and biggest hold up in starting out within eve =)

The game seems really well put together from all aspects, but it was a little daunting to try and figure out how to not screw up my character from the get go (read quite a few guides that suggested re-rolling if you misplaced some starter stats/skills).

I think I will for sure give Drones a run for the money and hopefully end up with a happy setup. By the way excellent post about the "newbie myth" that is pretty much what sold me on giving it a go.

I'm a long time mmo player and have a bit of a knack for picking up things on my own once I've gotten pointed in the right general direction but I may have a question or two later on and will for sure be back to post on how things go.