Returning to Eve after a lengthy hiatus (my last kill was in 2010). I’m bringing with me a small group of friends that will be new to the game, looking for very casual PvE; however, I played almost exclusively 0.0 PvP previously, so I’m looking for some ideas / information on how to best begin.
My thought was to seed everyone in the group with some skillbooks, injectors, and pre-fitted ships so that they can basically just log in, do some tutorials to get used to the interface, and then fleet up for some PvE.
Some light reading leads me to think that perhaps Incursions are not likely to be a good fit until they’re a little more experienced - does that just leave Agents or is there some other mechanic for group PvE available?
The corp I joined as a new player had a “mission Monday” event where several experienced players would run L4 missions and the new players would orbit them in T1 frigates - shooting at rats that got close enough. A Noctis came behind us to cleanup.
Bounties were split equally, the corp bought the loot & salvage at Jita buy -10% and that was also split equally. Good income for a new player and the Angel Extravaganza bonus room is a pretty spectacular site when you’re a month old!
You really have a ton more options then back in 2010 and some (but not all) of the ones that were available back then have been refined.
I highly recommend you check out Abyssal space, since now you can do it in groups of 3 in frigates and tier 1 / tier 2 filaments are designed for new players and alphas, the rewards from the low tiers are of course not very good, but they can be fun.
You have security missions just like before.
You have anomalies, same as before.
You have burner missions, which can also be done in frigates, yield relatively high rewards but require relatively advanced fits and play to complete solo, but since you can do them in group then divide the difficulty and fit requirements among the group.
then there are events, they come and go every few weeks ( like a month, month and a half apart) but they are hit and miss. They used to be newbie firendly and good but lately have been very crappy, especially for new players. So you might or might not be able to do / complete some of them as they come up.
If you want to start on PvE stay away from branching them out into mining / indy / explo, because its much better to stay focused.
PvE meta is shield / drones / missles and best all around PvE ships are the Worm (frigate), Gila (cruiser), Rattlesnake (battleship). Other ships are of course situationally better but these do well or at least OK everywhere, so training / skilling for them just can’t go wrong and the skills you get while training for them you can apply and branch out later on for other purposes, ships, systems.
Check out the various different threads (here and on reddit) and watch some videos of Abyss and burners so you have an idea of everything that is involved before you jump in. I should note that vast majority of the AByss stuff you’ll find will be focused on Tier 5 and Tier 4, where you’ll be doing tier 1 and tier 2 which can be done in tech 1 ships and fits. Tech 2 helps of course.
The burners will be all T2 / Blinged, but that is because they will all focus on solo play for reward farming, whereas liek I said you will be in a group so you will not have those requirements, though it will take you some losses to find a sweet spot of what works for you guys.
For PvP, you can make some super cheap fits and do some FW, its been a kinda bot infested lately now and then but you can still find plenty of space to play in. Also, if your friends join FW corps then they won’t be able to interact normally with all the agents etc. So seperate characters are recommended, don’t screw up the main ones with most SP on them.
There are few branches you could try if they are just starting out try doing missions as a group there are also easy DED sites in highsec if you can go probe for them and rewards can be awesome for some new guys lastly give abyssal deadspace a try once you trained the skills for frigates up a bit.