Skill Training Complete...

I'd wager there's few more satisfying moments in EVE than when you're sitting in station updating orders, and you hear the magic words "skill training complete" chime from your other client.

When I first started EVE, I made the assumption that bigger = better, and that a fleet of battleships would tear apart a frigate fleet. It just makes good sense right? I mean, some of the guns on battleships are the same size as several of the frigates! So of course the battleships would win... Except in EVE, a fleet of frigates would be a nightmare for a battleship group, as they would have to rely on their drones to fight for them due to piss poor tracking vs smaller targets.That's one of the reasons I love EVE. Few ships are utterly useless, no matter how easy it is to get into them. If flown well, they can still be used to great effect. (Although no frigate fleet would have the DPS to break the tank of a decent battleship fleet, assuming both sides have logis. It'd be a draw)

But anyway, I was chugging my CNR through an Incursion the other day and I realised how bored I was of battleships in general. Yes they look awesome. Yes they have firepower that would devastate an entire city. Yes they can take a hell of a beating and take on multiple ships at once. 

But they're so slow. Speed is the new cool, and Battleships are the obese people of the spacelanes. So I started looking at other options for PvP. While battleship combat sounds awesome, I wouldn't be able to stand the time it would take for my ship to react in fight. I wanted my ship to be fast, sleek, and sexy. Obviously, I found my way towards interceptors. More precisely, the Amarr Malediction.

She's beautiful...

This ship seems to be everything I want. Fast, missile based and hot as hell. (Khanid designs are my guilty pleasure. Amarr style with the laziness of Caldari missiles. What's not to like?) I started training for it immediately, planning on picking up Assault Frigates along the way due to the Vengeance, which appears to be built like a Punisher, but with a bigger tank and rockets. Sweet.

I could train Assault Frigates in a matter of days, but the skills I needed for an Interceptor were far more navigation based. I tend to ignore navigation skills (who needs speed when I can have moar firepower?). So it was with some horror that I contemplated a 60 day skill plan for one ship. While alot of the skills would be useful in the future, I still couldn't believe I would have to spend two months to have decent support skills for this wonderful design. But I wanted it. Badly. Gritting my teeth, I started to train Evasive Maneuvers V, and bought the Interceptors skill book.

This is one of the few things I dislike about EVE. Sure I could fly an Interceptor by the end of the week. But flying it, and flying it well, are two entirely different things. 53 days different. If you start using a ship without support skills, you have no right to complain when it gets shot out from under you ;)

U MAD BATTLESHIP? U MAD?

But 10 days into my plan and I'm pretty glad I started. I can sit in my Malediction and fly it around, but it's still got alot of training left before I decide to risk it on a corp roam. But in the meantime, atleast I look cool to all those battleship-flying chumps hanging around Amarr...