Support skills are those skills which affect your proficiency at fitting and flying ships.  While not necessarily being directly required to use particular modules or sit in certain ships, they are invaluable and can give you the edge you need to get the kill or survive the mission.  For example, you don't need to train Controlled Bursts, Energy Management and Capacitor Systems Operation to put large lasers on an Amarr battleship, but, if you do so without training them you will find you swiftly run out of capacitor. 

Beyond this guide, one may also want to check out the certificates system within Eve.  It serves as a handy reference for if you want to train for a specific task or role.  Note that completing a certificate does not give any boosts or bonuses, they are merely suggestions.  They may be accessed in-game on your character sheet, in the "Certificates" tab of the "Skills" section.  Also, while the certificates are a good general outline on what skills are good to get they should not be taken as a definite benchmark on what skills are needed for a certain ship or role. 

'Good' Support Skills

The need for 'good' support skills is often emphasized because a skilled pilot can easily be twice as effective as an unskilled pilot flying exactly the same ship. 

This concept can seem counter-intuitive.  In many MMORPGs the value of expensive equipment comes from its inherent bonuses.  For example, a +5 sword of slashing will be just as effective for anyone who can wield it.  However, in EVE most of the value of an expensive ship is dependent on the skill allocation of the pilot operating it.  This allows for significantly increased power in the hands of a well trained character, while simultaneously offering very little advantage over a cheaper alternative in the hands of a poorly trained pilot. 

Tech 1 frigates and cruisers are more forgiving of poor skills, and often have a bigger impact than more expensive ships if you lack skillpoints (as anyone who's been jammed by a two-week old character in a Griffin can testify) provided those skillpoints are distributed into 'good' support skills and not concentrated in a misguided attempt to sit in a Tech 2 ship. 

Since good support skills are so important, both to fly Tech 1 ships well and often crucial to flying Tech 2 ships effectively, this page attempts to suggest what training qualifies as 'good' in different circumstances.  This page also lists some particular categories of support skills for ease of reference, and contains links to other lists of skills on this wiki. 

The 80/20 Rule of Skill Training

Of particular importance to new characters is the concept of the 80/20 rule, which is as follows:

"You will receive 80% of the benefit, while taking 20% of the time, by training only the first IV levels of a skill." 

This is due to the exponential increase of training time as you train a skill. 

Because of this, it is well worth it to train skills that affect many of the ships you pilot to level IV in the short to medium term.  Training some skills to level V can take a long time and is often best left as a longer term goal or only worth training when they are required as prerequisites (for T2 ships, for example).  However, some key skills with low training time multipliers (1x) give you such significant benefits that they're well worth training all the way to V -- Drones, Capacitor Systems Operation and Navigation are three good examples, but are by no means the only ones. 

When someone says they have 'good' skills in a certain category, they most commonly mean that they have most if not all of those skills trained to IV or V.

Skills

Note that there is some overlap between these lists. 

Overall, these are similar to some in-game certificates, as mentioned above. 

Drones -> All Combat Drones

Engineering -> Core Ship Operation

Engineering -> Core Weapons Fitting

Navigation -> Navigation

Fitting

These all either reduce the CPU or powergrid requirements of modules, or just give you more raw CPU or powergrid to play with.  Having decent fitting skills is very useful.  T2 modules, which have higher CPU and grid demands, and T2 ships, which tend to have quite tight amounts of CPU and grid in the first place, really demand good fitting skills. 

Capacitor

Ignoring skills relevant only to capital ships, there are seventeen skills which can help your capacitor.  You don't necessarily have to train all of these, since many of them only apply to specific sets of modules (Sensor Linking, for example, won't help you if you never use sensor dampeners or remote sensor boosters).  But some of these skills are vital for every pilot, and many of the rest are quite important. 

Mobility

There are relatively few skills that directly help you become nimbler and faster, compared to the variety of fitting and capacitor skills available.  Those that are available, however, are very helpful for any ship (and extremely helpful for small ships). 

Since your ability to move around often depends on keeping your propulsion module running, capacitor skills are indirectly very important for mobility too. 

Tanking

The Tanking page is a good one-stop summary of the required skills for fitting both T1 and T2 armor and shield tanks. 

In the long run many characters wind up training for both kinds of tanking, even if they only fly one race's ships, partly because many tanking skills will increase your EHP (5% more shields is a smidgen more survival time even if you're armor-tanking) and partly because every race has some ships which can be tanked both ways. 

As with mobility, if you mount an active tank (usually for PvE or for solo/very small gang PvP) then your capacitor skills will be key to your tank. 

Raw hit point skills - These skills boost your ships hp, and are the basic skills of tanking Mechanics Hull Upgrades Shield Management

- These skills boost your ships hp, and are the basic skills of tanking

Armor tanking skills - These skills are more relevant to ships that focus on armor: Repair Systems increase an active armor tank's load on your capacitor!)  The four 'X Armor Compensation' skills: EM Armor Compensation Explosive Armor Compensation Kinetic Armor Compensation Thermal Armor Compensation Each of these increases the armor resistance bonuses of passive armor hardeners by 5% per level.  Their bonuses to active armor hardeners only apply when the active armor hardeners are turned off, and are therefore irrelevant in most scenarios.  They are, however, a nice backup if you are being neuted heavily enough to turn off your hardeners, but that is rare.  Since there is no omni-resist active armor hardener module (an armor equivalent to the Multispectrum Shield Hardener), the passive omni-resist platings (Adaptive Nano Plating and Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane) see a lot of use in armor buffer and armor RR fits, and these benefit from the armor compensation skills.  So it's a good idea to get these to III fairly quickly, and perhaps to IV in the long term, if you ever have reasons to fit resistance plating. 

- These skills are more relevant to ships that focus on armor:

Shield tanking skills - These skills are more relevant to ships that focus on shields for their survivability: Shield Operation passive shield tank Tactical Shield Manipulation Tactical Shield Manipulation's usefulness is disputed, but level IV is required to use the very useful T2 active shield hardeners, so most people train it to IV and then forget about it.  Level V is required to use the Pulse Activated Nexus Invulnerability Core (PANIC) module for the Rorqual, but this is a very specific requirement and the skill level is not required for anything else.  Like the armor compensation skills, there are four 'X Shield Compensation' skills (not to be confused with Shield Compensation per se !):  EM Shield Compensation Explosive Shield Compensation Kinetic Shield Compensation Thermal Shield Compensation Like the armor compensation skills these grant a 5% bonus to the resistance increase to one damage type that you get from passive Shield Resistance Amplifiers per level.  Unlike armor tankers, shield tankers do not have a passive omni-resist module like the Adaptive Nano Plating or Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane.  So, passive shield resistance amplifiers are very rarely used.  Instead, most shield tanks will make use of the active omni-resist module, the Multispectrum Shield Hardener.  Consequently you can probably get away with ignoring these, only training a few levels in each one, or only training levels in the EM and Thermal ones as those are the most commonly used. 

- These skills are more relevant to ships that focus on shields for their survivability:

Drones

If you are going to be using drones at all then other than getting Drones to V you should consider adding some of the things that Drones V opens up to you.  Drones are really fast and they can pull quite a range, plus they are target-able which means that they more often then not end up tanking for you.  This makes them ideal for ratters as well as a fairly strong choice for fleets

Rigging

Most (but not all) rigs come with a drawback (a 10% penalty to something) as well as a benefit.  Each subset of rigs has an associated skill which reduces the drawback effect of those rigs by 10% per level out of the original penalty, so you lower the penalty by 1%/level to 5% with max skills. 

Training to Reduce Drawbacks

In some circumstances, training specific rigging skills to high levels may not be a very efficient use of your time.  The amelioration of the drawbacks doesn't hurt, but it can be a very minor reduction in what is usually a minor penalty in the first place. 

You'll need Jury Rigging III as a prerequisite for other rigging skills, though it appears to give you no other real benefits. 

For PvP combat pilots, reducing the drawbacks to armor and shield rigs can be the difference between winning and losing a battle.  For example, the Armor Rigging skill reduces the drawback of Trimark Armor Pumps (armor buffer rigs), which is a drawback to speed.  The reason is each rig compounds the drawback penalty, and all T1 ships can fit up to three buffer and/or resists rigs to improve effective hit points.  While one rig may not create much of a penalty, three rigs can. 

To continue the example, an armor-tanked Hurricane using a 10MN Microwarpdrive II, fitting one 1600mm plate and flown by a pilot with all relevant navigation skills at Level V, has a max speed of 1161 m/s. Add three Trimark Armor Pump I rigs with Armor Rigging only trained to Level 1, and his max speed is reduced to 924 m/s, a more than 20% reduction in velocity.  Increasing training to Armor Rigging V increases max speed back up to 1025 m/s, which is 11% faster than having the skill trained to Level 1.  Is it worth training a skill like Armor Rigging from Level IV to Level V?  With Armor Rigging IV, this hurricane will have a max speed of 999 m/s; it some PvP situations, that 2.5% extra speed will make a big difference. 

Getting the weapon rigging skills (Energy Weapon Rigging, Hybrid Weapon Rigging, Launcher Rigging, Projectile Weapon Rigging) up a few levels is usually a good idea.  A few percent lower penalty to your guns' powergrid usage can make a big difference: every two levels of the rigging skill is roughly equivalent to training Advanced Weapon Upgrades one extra level, multiplied by the number of weapon rigs you have fitted. 

If you're a drone user, and fit any of the Drones rigs, then training Drones Rigging gives you a 10% reduction in the CPU penalty that these drone rigs have. 

Overheating

In a sense, Thermodynamics is the ultimate PvP support skill.  It lets you overheat modules beyond their design specs, at the risk of temporarily burning them out.  Each level reduces the damage your modules take from overheating, so while level I is all you need, IV is well worth the train. 

There's a more detailed guide to overheating's mechanics here. 

PvE vs. PvP

Before looking at specific ship classes it's worth noting that PvE combat usually requires lower support skills than PvP.

PvE combat emphasizes your knowledge of missions and your ability to tank incoming DPS for long periods.  While doing more damage will help you do missions faster (getting more ISK every hour), you can often get by with sub-par damage-dealing skills.  In PvP combat you want to have the best tank possible (usually, unless you're solo or in a very small gang, a buffer tank or a spider tank) and deal good damage for your ship's size. 

For this reason most of the advice below is directed primarily at PvP.

Battlecruisers

A battlecruiser is a nice step up from a cruiser in firepower and tank.  The cost of the fitted ship is also a lot lower than a battleship (1/4 to 1/3 the price) meaning they deliver the best gank and tank for the ISK in the game.  An added benefit is that large guns (which are a long train) are not necessary.  However, cruisers are also very powerful. 

Support skills you'll want to work towards are:

If you have medium gun/missile skills to IV, can fit a T2 tank and a full rack of weapons, don't hesitate to step into a battlecruiser. 

You can fit and use any rigs without having the rigging skills trained.  But remember that buffer and resist rigs for both shield and armor tanking create significant drawbacks that can hurt your PvP performance in some situations, so skilled pilots have often trained Armor Rigging V or Shield Rigging V, depending on how they are usually tanked. 

Battleships

Battleships are potentially very powerful ships, but without good supports they're slow, expensive coffins.  It's very highly recommended to have the following (most of which you will hopefully have trained while flying battlecruisers):

Full T2 shield or armor tank. 

Sufficient fitting skills to fit that tank, and a propulsion module, and fill the turret/launcher hardpoints for your primary weapon. 

Full flights of T2 light and medium drones.  or, if your battleship is one of the few with 125Mbit/sec drone bandwidth, T2 light and medium drones and at least T1 heavy or sentry drones. 



T2 guns on battleships are great, but the training time for T2 turrets is on the order of 70 days, from basic T1 large gun skills -- making them a long-term goal.  T2 missiles take less time to train but still aren't exactly one weekend's training.  Most pilots initially invest in high meta-level Tech 1 weapons, though the cost of Meta 4 large lasers and the attraction of Scorch crystals may encourage Amarr BS pilots to head for T2 guns earlier than others. 

T2 Frigates

T2 frigates are specialized for a wide range of different tasks, and so the optimal skillset varies widely.  As an extreme example, you can fly a covops ship without putting a covops cloak on it, but you'll be missing the point completely! 

However, all T2 frigates benefit greatly from most of the skills in the Navigation category, because as frigates they usually rely on speed and agility for a significant part of their tank against larger enemies.  You should also definitely aim to fit T2 modules for at least the key functions of your ship -- interceptors deserve T2 MWD skills and T2 tackling modules, assault frigates deserve T2 weapons and tanks, and so on.  A full T2 fit is a good goal for T2 frigates but not strictly necessary. 

T2 Cruisers

In general, at this level you should be able to fully T2 fit your ship.  T2 cruisers are small, fast, and powerful, but tend to have limited CPU and/or powergrid, and limited capacitor as well.  In practice, you'll really want excellent fitting skills including Weapon Upgrades V and Advanced Weapon Upgrades III or IV, or you'll be very frustrated when you try to fit guns.  You'll want your cap skills to be nearly maxed-out before flying one of these, too. 

As with T2 frigates, you will want other supports which will vary depending on your ship's specialization -- a Falcon deserves EWAR support that doesn't help a Vagabond at all.  Just as with frigates, a T2 cruiser deserves T2 modules wherever possible. 

See Also

There are a number of other useful lists of support skills on this wiki: