By “ships above frigate class” I mean destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships. I understand that these are combat-oriented ships, but is there any useful purpose they can be put to beyond combat, and would it be worthwhile doing that instead of just sticking with a frigate?
Asking because there’s no point in me sinking skill points into learning how to fly these classes of ships if I can just stick to using a frigate instead.
Destroyers are still the defacto cheap salvage barge.
Stratios is a premier ship for armed exploration and requires a couple racial cruiser skills.
There’s also Logistics ships too.
Tbh, if you are going for utter optimisation, thats more or less it though ofc there is also being able to move a ship from one place to another without a transport if you need to.
I mean, any ship that can fit the modules for a task can do that task.
And Arbitrator still gets mining bonus to its drones iirc
Thanks for your help!
There are a good number of non-combat activities in EVE of which the main options are exploration, salvage, hauling, mining, industry and market trading.
For industry and market trading you need no ships at all (although a quick frigate to move from station to station or structure will be helpful).
For exploration of relic and data sites your best choice is a frigate, although there are good cruiser options for this as well.
For salvage the ‘best’ ship for this purpose is the Noctis, which is a medium-size ship like cruisers, although destroyers or t1 exploration frigates are great at the role too.
For mining you have a few specialised cloaky mining frigates that can do the job well, but have lesser yield than the barges, which are medium-sized ships.
For hauling you’re very limited in volume if you stick to frigates. For low volume high value items you could use the frigate-class Interceptors to quickly haul items, but for most hauling jobs you will need industrials, which are medium-sized ships, or freighters, which are capital-sized.
You can stick to flying only frigates and you can do a lot if you only fly frigates. Especially as new player it’s nice to have a training focus (there are just too many interesting skills to train otherwise 
) but don’t let it limit you: many other ship classes are easily trained to a basic level if you need them.
OK thanks for your help. I deliberately excluded cloaky frigates, barges, freighter and capital ships, since I’m an Alpha clone.
You should train into them when you need them or plan to use them. If your current activities have you fly around in frigates, just sink the SP into getting better at whatever you are doing.
Many people fly mostly or exclusively frigates their whole eve career, the necessity of your ship type is based on your activities and your corp’s activities. There is no progression, as in you should feel some overall need to train into a “bigger” ship just because it’s bigger.
Thanks for the advice!
Almost every ship has a purpose. What makes eve great is you can fit a ship for anything. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Destroyers are awesome at pvp and structure bashing. Cruisers at some pve and fleet pvp. BC’s are great pve and fleet fights. Tech 2 variants are same but more specialized.
All ships have a role where they are the best choice, or among the best choices. Skill decisions should be made based on what you want to do, and what tool (aka ship) is the best or the one you want to use for it. If you are happy with frigate compatible content, you can stick to frigates.
Depending on what you are doing, some battleships make “good” alpha miners, at the expense of ore hold.
The rokh is a great mining ship.
A properly fit Machariel can be used to play space ping-pong. 
The Rokh can mine about as good as a mining barge. Relive the experience of 2010 eve
I’m more of a fan of the old Salvage hurricane, but yeah, anything with a lot of high slots and enough low slots to slap on some cargo expanders is a good alternative salvage boat.
As for battleships, some of those things can get absolutely stupid tanks on them, can fit a lot of propulsion options, and have enough cargo they can make viable alternative haulers for small volume, high value cargo.
Cruisers you can make do anything and everything, from impromptu miners, jack of trades haulers, tolerable scanners, all kinds of things.
One of the great things about Eve as opposed to most MMOs is you’re not bound to a certain role by whatever your class is. You can be a frigate pilot this second, dock, and a dread pilot the next. Same with your ship fits. Your creativity, and a little luck, is the only real limiting factor.
What Alphas can fly now is more than what any player had access to when I started. So just about every profession in the game can be done by Alpha ships.
Back before SoE Exploration ships were implemented, I was using a Cov Ops Frigate for exploration. It worked great for scanning but it’s not a combat ship so I either had to swap ships or form fleet with others.
Since I needed a combat exploration ship, I trained into a T2 Force Recon Cruiser since T3 Cruisers were too expensive. I already had max scanning skills and was using SoE Launcher and Probes so to get max scanning stats on the ship, I fit my clone with a Poteque ‘Prospector’ Astrometric Rangefinding AR-806 - slot 8 implant and also fit the ship with 1x Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II rig for increased probe scan strength.
That set up worked great for quite a while. I was able to quickly scan signatures as well as run low / mid level sites with no issues at all. And thanks to the Cov Ops Cloak, I was able to also chase expeditions into Low sec space. Eventually I was able to afford a T3 Cruiser which became my ‘All In One’ exploration ship.
Anyway, my point is that most ships can be buffed to perform a specific task that’s usually not associated with that ship just by using Implants, Rigs and Modules.
T3 Destroyers really are the best. I can’t say it often enough, but you will never regret training into the class of ship.
Alpha clone, couldn’t fly a T3 if my life depended on it
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