Fifteen Million Skill Points

One of the things I like about Wilhelm’s posts at the Ancient Gaming Noob is that they work very well for historical reference. For EVE, he has posted for years his skill point distribution at every 10-million milestone.

When I picked up EVE again 4 months ago, I was above the 10 million mark, and I didn’t even think of logging my skill points either. On the other hand, even at optimum training speed, it will take more than another two months before I hit the 20 million mark. So I’ll do an intermediate step and look at my skill point distribution when I hit 15 million skill points three weeks ago. Here we go, in decreasing order of points:

Engineering                  2,924,345
Spaceship Command            2,637,897
Missile Launcher Operation   1,664,365
Gunnery                      1,599,645
Trade                        1,338,235
Navigation                   1,117,391
Drones                         774,741
Electronics                    756,776
Industry                       690,204
Mechanics                      659,598
Leadership                     421,824
Science                        213,770
Social                         198,435
Corporation Management           1,000
Total                      ~15,000,000

A look at my current skills

The first thing you might notice is the large amount spent in Engineering, even more than Spaceship Command. This is mostly due to shield tanking skills that I trained mostly without playing during one of the previous 2-months-for-the-price-of-1 offers. It ties in really well with one of my favorite ships, the Drake, which I like to fly both in PvE and PvP. Another hefty contributor are capacitor skills – the “Core Capacitor” certificate is the only one I have at Elite level, actually.

The Harpy is the most recent ship I learned to fly on my way to 15 million SP. It’s a tough assault frigate (and the first T2 combat ship I can fly!). I really like flying Harpies, they can take a beating and dish them out. If only they were a bit faster… I can also fly their sister ship, the Hawks, but I don’t have appropriate rocket skills to make them worth it.

Next up, Spaceship command. Not a big surprise here. I’m still mostly invested into Caldari, which means I can fly everything T1 up to battleships, and currently branching into T2 frigates. At the point of that snapshot, I could fly Caldari assault frigates and was just about to finish training for interceptors. The odd-non-Caldari-out is Gallente Industrial, which I trained to V early on during my aborted industrial career. At least it means I can fly the largest T1 hauler there is.

Missile Launcher Operations: also not a big surprise, considering I was exclusively a PvEer until a short while ago. Most of these are missile support skills and the training for T2 heavy missiles. (for my Drake – maybe the fact that I have all the cool skills for it is the reason I like that ship so much?)

Gunnery would’ve been really interesting to watch since the 10 million mark. I’ll go out on a limb and claim that of the 5 million difference from 10 to 15, I spent half my skill points in gunnery. (Nevermind that this isn’t even possible because then I would’ve started at -900,000 skill points in that category. Details!) Until I joined the uni, I was all about missiles. There was no motivation for me to train guns, because missiles are just so much better in PvE. I started investing in gunnery support skills quite heavily recently though, and now can use T2 small hybrid weapons, and am now working towards T2 medium hybrids.

Trade: Of the 1.34 million skill points, 1.28 million are spent in Accounting and Broker Relations V. I trained those very early on, because I was looking into an industrial and trade career, and these meant more money made on trading. They are still kinda useful… I guess. I don’t expect to see any changes in that category any time soon.

Navigation: This is mostly support skills. Until I start using jump drives (read: not any time soon, potentially never), I don’t expect to invest a lot more points here. I got almost everything I want, except High Speed Maneuvering V. Oh. Right. Yeah. This one is really nice, but the train is soooooo long. I’ll get back to that at some point.

Drones: I can fly T2 light and medium drones of every race now, and I don’t have any plans to train up to T2 heavies any time soon. Takes so long. I really should get to work on my support skills in that category at some point, though. I’ve been very negligent there.

Electronics: I’m surprised how few points I have in that category, even though it felt to me like I trained many different things there. It’s probably because I trained almost nothing to level V, which is where the skill points ramp up.

Industry: Mostly from my early industrial days. Skills to get to perfect refining of minerals, which my alt would mine and I would pick up in my Iteron V.

Mechanics: Even though I know that my armor tanking skills suck, I’m still shocked at the low number of points invested here. I will really need to work on that soon. Only being able to fly shield tanked ships and no armor tanked ships restricts me a lot when fleets go out, because they often ask for a specific tank type.

Leadership: These were trained up in two surges. The first one occurred when I trained this character to become a competent mining foreman two years ago. The second time I touched skills in this category was recently, to be able to be a squad commander for Uni fleets, and pass on bonuses properly.

Science: I guess I’m not gud with ze science. Maybe I should reconsider my real-world occupation? I am very thankful I at least have an alt with all those scanning skills that I know I will need at some point.

Social: So not only am I too dumb for science, I’m also antisocial. Go me!

Corporation Management: I’m not even sure why I trained that. I guess I needed that one skill to anchor containers in space?

The Mandatory Titan Test

Every post with meaningless statistics needs an equally meaningless goal to measure progress to. Thankfully, Wilhelm already came up with one: How long does it take me, from my current point in time, to gather the skills to fly a Caldari Titan? EVEMon tells me it’s 118 days. So if I wanted, I could fly around in a Titan by Christmas. Well, and if I had the money. And a nullsec alliance that would allow me to fly around in a multi-billion ship without proper support skills.

Future Plans

A short while ago, I used my first neural remap ever. I’m now set up with very high Perception and Willpower skills. This means that I am very fast at training Spaceship Command and Gunnery skills, but slower at a lot of other things. Most notably, training armor tanking skills will take longer than before. Maybe I should’ve thought of that before. Oh well. But with the remap the way it is, I expect to pick up skills for a lot more guns and ships in the next few million skill points. By the end of the year, I should be a competent pilot in several races’ ships and their preferred weapons. Though, it’s hard to plan that far ahead. If I decide to join a corp, they will probably ask me to train skills that benefit them or fit with their fleet doctrines. Which hopefully should still mean mostly Perc/Will skills, so I’m not too worried. My prediction for the 20 million skill point mark: Gunnery and Spaceship Command will see the most development, with Mechanics (for armor tanking) coming third. The rest will be a smattering here and there to round off stuff.

We’ll see how right or wrong I am in about 2-3 months.

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