Skill training commences

As a pilot in Eve Online, there's lots and lots of ships to fly. Frigates, cruisers, destroyers, battleships; miners, transport vessels and many more. They all come in several flavors and there are specific types for each race in New Eden: A Gallente pilot can't just hop into an Amarr frigate, and a Caldari can't fly anything Minmatar, unless they train for it.

That really never bothered me, until recently. A corp member offered a Caldari ship up for sale, and I really liked it - but I had to pass as I couldn't fly it. Shortly thereafter, an alliance member loaned me his salvaging frigate, which was fitted with many handy modules I couldn't use.

That's when I decided to spend some serious money on skillbooks (in game skillbooks, game items necessary to train the skills) and train up. Until now I mostly focused my skill training time on typical Gallente stuff: armor tanking, drone skills.. but there are dozens of very usefull skills I neglected, and it's high time I make up for that. I need to branch out, broaden the scope of my skillset!

So how do I determine which new skills to buy and train? Most pilots automatically turn to EveMon, which is a great tool indeed. But so far, the in game certificate planner has been helpful enough; it has pointed me to many skills I didn't know existed, but should have trained long ago.

So I am training frigates for Caldari, Minmatar and Amarr to level 3, and shield hardening and upgrade skills, gunnery, energy systems, engineering, missiles and rocketry, warfare and more to at least level 2. Many of these skills will save energy usage on certain modules, which is very useful. When you're tanking a lot of damage and you need to run repair modules and afterburner, you tend to run out of energy pretty quick. Saving 5, 10% here or 20% there (fuel conservation skill, level 2) should help a lot! The next step is to get these all up to level 3, and the most important ones to 4, but that's going to take some time.

Training that many new skills, by the way, would have been very hard to do, if it weren't for the skill training queue implemented with the latest expansion. Really a great addition! It allows me to train many skills to level 1 or 2 in one day, as this snapshot shows.