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EVE Evolved: Fitting a brawler frigate for PvP
EVE Online's PvP usually has more in common with a game of chess than a dogfight; it helps to have more pieces on the board than the other guys, and tactics usually play a more important role than the size or cost of your ship. You can't automatically win by bringing a gun to a knife fight in EVE, but you can win by being better with a knife than the other guy or by bringing a dozen knives and just flinging them all over the place. The lowly tech 1 frigate may not seem so ferocious on its own, but a hundred frigates can smash even capital ships to bits. Despite the advantage of bringing more pilots to a fight, the frigate is also one of the best ships for soliciting solo PvP. Its superior speed and maneuverability will help you avoid groups of enemy ships and pursue individual targets. It's most common to find lone players in faction warfare areas and the borders of nullsec, and there are even dedicated wardec corps that will let you find solo PvP in highsec. Frigate duels can provide a fun and much more twitch-based style of combat than you'll find elsewhere in EVE, and a well-designed frigate can punch far above its own weight. The Rifter has always been the ship of choice for close-range frigate PvP, but Inferno 1.1 gave all four races an equivalent option. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give close-range PvP setups for the Minmatar Rifter, Amarr Punisher, Gallente Incursus and Caldari Merlin that make full use of the Inferno 1.1 overhaul.
EVE Evolved: Getting into your first PvP frigate
In last week's EVE Evolved, I encouraged new players to grab a few friends and charge head-first into PvP with guns blazing from day one. Whether you join a faction warfare militia, form a corp to declare war on other corporations or head out to lowsec or nullsec, starting your PvP journey is an important part of enjoying EVE. Several readers requested help with picking a ship, putting together a viable ship fitting and finding the funding for it. So many players asked for help that this week's column is entirely dedicated to the messy business of putting together your first PvP frigate and learning to fly it. Although the ship of choice for most newbies is the agile Minmatar Rifter, each race has a range of frigates that can perform well in PvP groups with minimal skills. In this article, I'll suggest fittings for two frigates from each race that new players with as little as one day of trained skills will be able to fly. One of the core concepts of EVE Online's PvP that often discourages new players is the idea that your ship is irreversibly destroyed when you die. While this may seem like an extremely harsh death penalty, deciding how much you risk in PvP is part of the game's tactical gameplay and even the best active PvP enthusiasts lose at least one ship per week. Death in EVE is essentially a financial loss followed by the inconvenience of having to buy and fit a new ship. Most of the financial penalty can be countered by using cheap and effective tech 1 equipment and insuring your ship, and the inconvenience of death can by bypassed by building up a stockpile of disposable PvP ships. With that in mind, this week's absolutely massive EVE Evolved is dedicated to getting you and a few friends into your first PvP frigates after as little as one day in the game and helping you mitigate the financial loss of death.
EVE Evolved: Getting into PvP from day one
Although it has significant PvE elements, EVE Online has always at its core been a heavily PvP-oriented game. Players wanting to get into PvP are often advised to train months' worth of skills and build up significant ISK reserves before even trying it, but this is something I strongly discourage. As I've said in several previous articles, a new player can be a useful and effective part of a PvP squad with very little training time. This is something I personally put to the test when a few real life friends and I started completely new characters and started engaging in PvP with less than 12 hours of skills trained. Although we had significant PvP experience under our belts, the exercise proved to me that skill training and ISK weren't the absolute minimum requirement they were thought to be. I firmly believe that all it takes to successfully PvP from the outset is some patient direction from older players and perhaps a little generosity to help you afford some early ship losses. In my experience with introducing new players to EVE, I've always found the EVE community to be more than willing to provide both of these in abundance. I'd say that not only is it possible to try out PvP within the 14-day trial period, it's highly recommended. In this opinion piece, I explain some key things you can do as a new player to get into PvP right from day one of the EVE free trial.
