Road to flying recon?

New Citizens Q&A
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Hello, I started playing a few days ago and I’m enjoying the game so far. I’ve been looking into flying recon ships like stealth bombers because I usually play Rogue classes in MMO games. What are some skills I should start with on that road and is there anything I should know about before I spend all my time perusing this one goal?

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Stealth bombers will generally attack as a group and there will be a fleet doctrine to make sure ships can fly and strike as a group for maximum effect.
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Stealth_Bombers

Recons are a bit different. They are based on EW platforms with different stealth techniques - Combat recons have d-scan immunity while force recons can fit a covert cloak.
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Recon_Ships_101

With any ship, you can right click, show info and check the requirements tab - which shows the skills needed to sit in the ship and how long it will take you to train them. The mastery tab shows recommended support skills. For T2 hulls, I recommend aiming for level 3 mastery before you deliberately put one in harms way. Fly cheap stuff until you have your core skills to a reasonable level.

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There are no solo pwn ships in EVE. Each ship has some big weakness that can be countered by other ships.

Recons are a combination stealth-travel + jamming (crowd control) ship. They are NOT equivalent to rogues (stealth + burst DPS). Recons are usually group ships; you pop out of stealth and disable (jam) some key enemy, then the rest of your group takes the enemy fleet out. Recons are the nemeses of Remote-Repair Logistics ships (healers), because the remote repair relies on being able to target your friends to assist them, and the jamming can interfere with targeting or with the capacitor energy needed for repairs. Recons are vulnerable to heavy DPS ships; with all the jamming equipment, there may not be much room for shields / armor plates for defense.

To figure out what you need to train, open the market (market can be used as an encyclopedia) or the Ship Chart in-game and show info on the recon cruisers. You need to train:

  • the skills listed in the info sheet for the recon cruisers you want
  • the skills required to use Covert Ops Cloaking Device II (the stealth module)
  • the skills required to use the electronic warfare jammers that Recons use (stasis webifier, warp disruptor, warp scrambler, energy neutralizer, ECM, etc.)
  • the skills required to unlock the medium-sized weaponry cruisers usually use (each race has its own preferences for various types of guns, missiles, or drones, so train the specific weapons for the ship(s) you pick)
  • support skills (Engineering, Navigation, Armor, Shields, Targeting, Rigs, Electronics, etc.) so you can install proper defenses and various modules on your ship

I recommend joining a PVP group and participating in PVP, so you have experience, by the time you get to Recons. You need to understand the general behavior and strengths/weaknesses of the various classes of ships, you need to understand what the various jamming modules do, and you need to make good decisions when targeting enemies and when flying your (expensive) Recon so you don’t get killed, and more importantly so you are EFFECTIVE with the ship, and a force multiplier in your fleet (rather than a liability).

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Cloak
MWD
Any ship that has enough CPU & PG to fit both.
That’s really about it for the minimum ‘stealth meta’ in eve.

There is no ‘Rogue Class’ in eve, most of what you learned in other MMO’s … can be safely forgotten or unlearned.

Find a corp that’s willing to teach/train you
for SB fleet, you’ll be looking at nul-sec corps mostly
you will need comms (discord mostly)
you will need patience

your reward will be pretty explosions

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The only thing you need to know before pursing this one goal, is that if youre going recon, youre going to have a pretty shitty time if youre alone.

Youre gonna have to join a corp or group that will fly with you and teach you stuff, otherwise theres not really much you can do alone.

Good news is, stealh bombers are always in good demand, so you can get into that and find a group really easily.

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