The road to new shinies

Now that I’ve finished up most of the support skills that are of immediate interest to me, I’ve been thinking of what goals to start training for next. Something that looked interesting was naturally the T3 Strategic Cruisers, being one of the newest and shiniest class of ships. Prices for these have come down a lot as well since more and more people have become very proficient at running wormholes for the Sleeper components needed.

So, what skills do I need to train up for a Strategic Cruiser? I have revised my previously low opinion of missile ships after seeing how effective my wife’s 3 week old character is in her Drake. The only downside is that she chews through piles of Scourge Heavy Missiles like Cookie Monster demolishing a plate of chocolate chip cookies, and she has left packs of orphaned drones throughout space due to forgetting to recall them.

In any case, back to the T3 skills. So my choices were either the Tengu or Proteus since my training has mainly focused on missiles/drones. The training times for the Proteus are shorter due to having already finished Drones V. Unfortunately Sleepers love snacking on drones, so the Proteus seems to be not such a great idea for wormhole ops, which is one job I had in mind for the T3. So, let’s look at Tengu skills…

Caldari Cruiser V – 24 days 12 hours, ouch 😦
Shield Operation V – 4 days 4 hours
Electronics V – done
Engineering V – done
Missile Launcher Operation V – 4 days 4 hours
Navigation V – 3 days 18 hours

Hey, not too shabby! Cloaking IV is needed to mount a Covert Ops cloak, which would come in handy, but I’ve already been training that and it’s due to complete in 2 days 11 hours. That means the rest comes up to… 36 days 14 hours. Hmm.

However, the vast majority of that is in getting Caldari Cruiser V. I then took a look at all the other ship types that I could possibly have an interest in and found that things didn’t look too bad.

After finishing Cloaking IV, I could train Caldari Frigate V, which would let me pilot assault ships! That’s 8 days 8 hours.

If I follow that with Electronic Upgrades V (8 days 8 hours again…), that gives me access to Covert Ops ships and Electronic Attack Frigates. Somehow the idea of flying a stealth bomber has always appealed to me despite the likelihood being that I’ll just end up bombing myself or splatted in 2 seconds by a Rifter.

Bombing a pirate gate camp

Speaking of Rifters, training Evasive Maneuvering V would then let me fly Interceptors, the tech 2 super speedy versions of frigates. Caldari version, though.

So all in all, I’m actually closer to a lot of tech 2 hulls than I thought. Granted this is just the skills to be able to undock and fly around, not use each ship to their peak effectiveness. But still, it doesn’t seem that long until an operational Tengu leaves Jita.

One thing I’ve been struggling with though was whether to finish the tier 1 Learning skills to V. According to EVEMon it would take something like 200+ days for me to recoup the 4 days of training time for each attribute. But this plan would already be a sizable chunk of that 200 days…