Don't Read This. Read That.

You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize.  Hmmm.  So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh.  Well, business as usual , I suppose.
--Douglas Adams

A quick post out of my usual schedule to get you to go take a look at Taurean Eltanin's blog Flight of Dragons.  He has a poll up right now and is looking for some advice, so go vote...and then come back and read this.



I was just going to vote myself and be done with it, but then I started to leave a comment.  Then my comment became increasingly long and I decided to move it over here as to not Wall of Text someone else's blog.  I've already posted on the topic of my skill plan for the future, but thought I'd throw out some advice on what I'd do knowing now what I didn't know then.

If I had it all to do over again, the single goal I would recommend for any new PvP pilot is the Battlecruiser.  Taking a look at my own skill plan for the first year, you may notice that I won't be flying a Battlecruiser by my one year anniversary.  Yeah, that was dumb.  Don't get me wrong, the Frigate is still your number one first priority for learning game mechanics and generally getting your head around the whole Piracy thing, but you can't stay there forever.

The question you really need to ask yourself is "What is going to be the workhorse of my hangar?"  While it's nice to have fancy T2 toys, from an ISK to Power ratio they're really not worth it for daily use.  A Heavy Assault Ship may be nice to have for certain occasions, and can certainly wreck a T1 Battlecruiser, but it also costs three times as much and can't take on three Battlecruisers at once.

Alright then, so if you understand that you're going to need a relatively dependable/expendable daily flyer, why go for a BC?  Looking first at going larger, I'd say the Battleship is out for soloing with an outlaw status.  You'll get caught in the first gate camp you jump into and all the tank in the world won't prevent your inevitable slow death once tackled.   Looking at the smaller options of a Cruiser or below hull, you'll just be giving up a lot of targets.  While a PvP fit BC can solo a mission runner in a BS, you're going to be hard pressed to do the same in a smaller ship.  If you decide someday to start doing gang work, you'll also appreciate being able to bring DPS while leaving younger pilots to tackling in a smaller ship.

There's another big reason why Battlecruisers are a top choice for solo PvP which can be summed up in a word; Versatility.  Not only do the Battlecruisers offer enough slots to fit them in different ways to keep you from getting bored with a single hull, they're also one of only two* non-racial specific Tech 1 ship skills.  What does that mean you ask?  Training the Battlecruiser skill means you're training to use any of the eight Battlecruisers in the game.  With Medium gunnery skills and drones trained, you'd be able to get into any Battlecruiser by training its Racial Cruiser skill to III, which takes about 13 hours.  If you've worried about investing so much time into a hull and then getting bored with it, you can't go wrong with the ease of cross-training that Battlecruisers can offer.

So there you have my two cents on the subject of a medium term goal for Piracy.  Like I said at the beginning of this post, I won't have the ability to fly any Battlecruisers by the end of my first year's plan, but it will be the first thing on my list after that.  Thankfully, with training heavily into both Drones and Missiles, I'm not too far off from grabbing a Myrmidon and a Drake pretty quickly.

Regarrrds,

FNG

*For those curious, the other is Destroyers, which aren't really something I'd say is useful for a medium to long-term goal, for obvious reasons.