Advanced: starting careers

A wonderful pilot, Tiberyya Za, has charted all the career choices you can make when starting a new character. It is copied here for eternity. Click the pictures to zoom in.

Military
Industry


Business



Notes
  • All military and business professions start with Mining 1 and Learning 1 so I didn't include those.
  • The star means all pre-requisites are met so you can get the skill right away. I only looked this up for the skills which are grey.

Observations
  • Be sure to look at this pages' comments (bottom of page) for some useful analysis.
  • Almost everyone gets two Level V skills, but some skills give you more. Compare Tech 2 guns vs. 10% more missile range. Not a hard choice (Tech 2 is better). Amarr and Caldari special forces only get one Level V.
  • Gallente Entrepeneur is probably the best NPC mission runner while Minmatar is the best start for trading with players.
  • Engineer professions are very nice - very defensive builds useful even as combat builds, you just need to train up some actual damage skills for solo play. If you're inclined to cooperate with other pilots vs NPCs, engineers can be the "tanks" while the military types come in afterwards and kill everything.
  • All soldiers have Gunnery 5 and Small (Racial) Turret, while all Special Forces can get cruisers and all sorts of special goodies. (Amarr and Minmatar can get both cruisers and medium turrets.)
  • Prospectors give you a whole heck of a lot of skills, Mining V, Refining V, Mining Foreman IV and three Processing skills right out of the gate. One of the races can train Astrogeology and Metallurgy from the start -- yep you guessed it, Minmatar. They don't get Refining V though.
  • Minmatar Engineer can train a Procuror in 2 days 15 hours, and mine for about three times what a Special Forces with a cruiser could with his Osprey, in an equivalent amount of time. Plus you can mine ice. Over time, I'm not sure which is a better economic choice, barge ASAP then skills, or taking any of the Mining professions: skills first then barge somewhat later.
  • Assault Ships require three skills to V, Mechanic, Engineering, and Racial Frigate. Amarr and Gallente Engineers get two of the three, leaving just Frigate (Rank 2) from I to V and Spaceship Command I to III. Should take around 13-15 days. You do of course need Tech 2 guns and other assorted modules, but its still cool.
  • Caldari Engineers get Laboratory Operation at 5, so you can install 10 research jobs fairly soon.
  • Military get Destroyers and Industrials.
  • Minmatar Soldiers can go straight to the store and be in Destroyers with Tech 2 Artillery the same day.
  • Minmatar Special Forces get both a MWD and Shield Hardeners.
  • Amarr Soldiers get Armor Hardeners.
  • Gallente Special Forces get five drones right out of the gate.
  • The Revelations skill trees give new players a VERY good start, compared to the old days.

New Character Skills, All -- Excel and PDF formats

The original thread announcing the work is here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn, you find some nice resources!

Let me try to translate some of those findings into more 'newbie-friendly' terms:

Military carerrs:
If you want to get into PVP or high-level missions without too much delay, take a military career.

- Soldiers will start with lots of gunnery, and a minor emphasis on their race's preferred skills. Gunnery is the only universally useful category of weapon skill: all races have ships that emphasise gunnery. Soldier is therefore a very good choice for newbies who want to shoot things and don't want to invest heavily in a technique that they might not like as they get to know the game. I'd go so far as to say, if in doubt, create a soldier.

- Special Forces pilots are very heavily biased towards their racial specialty, and towards supporting roles in combat. If you love the idea of fighting using a particular race's special technique, then special forces is the career to take.


Industry:
For those who want to be able to build things early in their EVE career.
- Engineers are quite a strong defensive combat skillset, with some industrial skills thrown in. This is a character that is pretty well balanced across careers, who can run missions, program a factory, operate a lab and mine asteroids effectively.

- Miners don't get the combat skills that engineers get, and tend to be slightly weaker in science skills. But they get great mining and refining skills, and this means that they can make money faster than any other starting build. If you enjoy mining *shudder*, this is a great career.

Business careers:
Both of the business careers come with an array of support skills that can be really helpful, if you know how to use them. I wouldn't recommend either build to a new player, they're practically useless without other people to back them up. If you've already got an organization that has players experienced enough to make use of those skills, they'll be able to explain what the character does and why you should take it.

Unknown said...

All of this info is now defunct with the release of the Apocrypha expansion. THere is no more loading your character with racial and military/industrial preferences.

Now you build your character, pick his picture and get tossed into the game with basically NO skills and the desperate need to train them ALL from almost zero.

If CCP was looking to discourage new players, they have succeeded quite well. )=-(

Lindyien said...

I am a new player and so far I like the open format of the game. I have been following the certificate and ship requirements. I don't know if this work out in the long run, but it is fun exploring everything. I have probably trained in some eventually useless skills, but at least I get to find out.

James Cooper said...

I agree that the new system is better. As a before Apocrypha, I didn't realize the implications of choosing a profession early on. In my case, engineering didn't mean quite what I thought it would mean (Engineers mine? Not this real-life engineer). By the time I realized the effect of my choice (about a week later), I found myself with little choice but to start a new character from scratch, and I still found picking the "right" profession difficult.

Coming back months later to try again, I found the new certificate system to be a great guide. If you don't know what you want, there are essentially full builds ready to take on -- just train everything that it takes to get that certificate. It greatly simplifies the myriad choices of skills available. On the other hand, if you want to tweak your skills just so, you get an almost blank slate to start with and you can still pick your skills in detail.

It really is the best of both worlds: detailed choices for the skilled, coarser choices for the less-familiar, and no life-or-death choices during the earliest part of the game.