One Hundred and Ten Million Skill Points

The beat goes on, as does my obsession with nice round numbers.

It is time again to talk about where I stand with skill points in EVE Online.  Another milestone, another post tracking my skill point progression in New Eden.

The story so far:

• Ten million – November 2, 2007
• Twenty million – June 18, 2008
• Thirty million – January 13, 2009
• Forty million – August 5, 2009
• Fifty million – March 22, 2010
• Sixty million – November 11, 2010
• Seventy million – August 4, 2011
• Eighty million – June 12, 2012
• Ninety million – December 10, 2012

You will note that there is no entry for one hundred million skill points.  I was sitting at just about 99 million skill points when the Odyssey expansion dropped.  One of the big changes in that was breaking out battlecruisers and destroyers into  racial skills.  So before Odyssey there were just the skills Destroyers and Battlecruisers, afterwards there were those two skills for each of the major factions, Amarr, Minmatar, Caldari, and Gallente.

The new path with Odyssey

In order to preserve the concept that no update will keep you from flying what you could already fly, players were given credit in each of the eight new skills relative to how many points they had in the two old skills and prerequisites.  Since I had both skills trained up to V, I got the maximum skill point boost, which sent me from ~99 million to ~105 million skill points in a single patch.

So, technically, I have never had exactly 100 million skill points.  And that is how CCP saved you from at least one of these posts.

And, just to mess up my ability to track my progress even further, Odyssey 1.1 just dropped the other day, and it included a re-organization of skill point categories, along with some renaming of skills.  The categories are probably more understandable.  They just don’t nicely map to what has come before.  So we have something of a reboot of the category chart this time around.  Here are are the skill points laid out by category:

Spaceship Cmd   33,008,465 (37 of 67)
Gunnery         12,075,111 (30 of 39)
Missiles        10,278,191 (20 of 24)
Drones           9,053,104 (16 of 20)
Navigation       7,566,399 (11 of 13)
Shields          5,632,000 (10 of 12)
Engineering      4,834,275 (10 of 14)
Science          4,408,426 (21 of 39)
Resc Processing  4,291,323 (21 of 28)
Trade            3,271,765 (9 of 13)
Electronic Sys   2,458,519 (6 of 15)
Leadership       2,447,530 (9 of 14)
Armor            1,871,530 (10 of 14)
Subsystems       1,320,000 (10 of 20)
Scanning         1,301,230 (7 of 7)
Targeting        1,159,765 (4 of 8)
Production       1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Neural Enhance.  1,154,510 (4 of 8)
Corp Mgmt        1,108,784 (4 of 7)
Social             943,765 (5 of 9)
Planet Mgmt        769,335 (5 of 5)
Rigging            188,494 (6 of 10)

Total         ~110,000,000 (260 of 398)

This time around I appended the number of skills in that category I have trained versus how many there are in the category total.  That gives a sense of how many total skill points there are available in a category.  A category that only has five skills, like Planetary Management, is never going to be high on the list because there just aren’t that many skill points to train in it.  I have trained almost half (48.87%) of the current skills in EVE Online.

EVEMon also shows the percentage of skill points for a given category I have actually trained.  Those numbers are surprisingly small.  This is because, for any given skill, the level 5 version of the skill requires 5-8 times as many skill points as levels 1 through 4 combined. (Multiplier pulled out of my ass based on glancing quickly at some level 4 vs 5 training times.  Feel free to correct me.)  So you go to level 5 skills only when you need to or when you think a skill is important enough to your operations to refine it that extra bit.  Generally, the benefit from levels increase in a linear fashion, unlike the skill points required.

At the top there is, as always, Spaceship Command.  It has the most skills, it is the category that holds the keys to the basic ships across the board.  That gives you a sense of how many ships there are in EVE Online.  Yes, some of the skills like, say, Amarr Titan, unlock exactly one ship.  But the frigate skill for any of the factions unlocks, as you can see in that chart embedded above, unlocks a good six different ships and sends you on the path to more.

There there are the “shoot things” skill.  I have spent a lot of time training gunnery of late.  I had a lot invested in missiles and drones already.  Then it goes into flying ships (navigation) defenses (shields) and the ability to operate modules (engineering).

After that we start to drop into the “Wilhelm is all over the board” skill points.  Resource Processing is a mining thing, and I haven’t mined in ages.  Subsystems is for strategic cruisers.  I can fly a Tengu or a Loki.  I just never do.

I don’t even own a Loki

I also threw in some time to train Planetary Management at one point with an eye to getting some semi-passive income going.  I trained all the skills up to 4 and then haven’t done anything with it.  My usual method of operation.  I have a lot of skills trained up that I have never used.

Meanwhile, if I am going to continue to fly in armor tanked fleets, I need to invest some time in the Armor category.  I have a lot of points in shields, but not so many in armor at this point.

As noted above, I have trained 260 skills in total.  That is up 37 skills since the 90 million skill point check-in.  Of course, I got six new level 5 trained skills for free as part of Odyssey.  My 260 skills map out as follows:

Level 1  -   4
Level 2  -  15
Level 3  -  51
Level 4  -  61
Level 5  - 129

Nearly half of my skills are trained up to level 5.  That is 17 more level 5 skills than there were at the 90 million skill point mark.  I suppose that shows commitment or some other mental defect.  Level 4 skills are up 10, level 3 skills up 7, level 2 skills remained the same, and somewhere I picked up 3 more level 1 skills.  Checking EVEMon, those three skills were all gunnery specialization skills so I could mount tech II guns of various types.  I guess I didn’t think they were worth training beyond that at the time.

Finally, there is the metric I have used for every one of these updates.  How much training time until I can fly a titan?

The total currently stands at just shy of 62 days, which is a 4 day drop over the last update.

That does not seem like much, given that I have been investing in capital ship related skills.  I will have finished jump drive calibration V by this coming weekend… unless I change to something else.

Basically, only four skills stand between me and flying a completely unfit titan at this point.  They are:

• Factional Titan Skill I (I could choose any one): 1 hour, 36 minutes
• Jump Portal Generation I: 1 hour, 38 minutes
• Astrometrics V: 12 days, 8 hours, 49 minutes
• Capital Ships V:  49 days, 8 hours, 54 minutes

Which gets us to 61.87 days.  And that is with my high sec clone with the +4 implants.

I probably won’t get much closer than that, unless feel the need to get capital ships V trained at some point.  While flying a titan makes a nice theoretical goal, my character Wilhelm is a generalist, with skill points spread all over hell and back.  Turning him into a super capital ship pilot would be a waste, as once you are in a super you are pretty much stuck there.  You cannot dock up and swap ships.

Avatar and Ragnarok Titans

If I was going to create a titan pilot,  would start a fresh character from scratch and train him up with only the skills he needed for the job.  Plans for another time.

So that is where I stand on the skill point front.  As long as I keep that training queue filled, the total just keeps growing.