Months pass and the skill points continue to add up until, suddenly, it is time for another milestone post. The skill point milestone story so far:
- Ten million – November 2007
- Twenty million – June 2008
- Thirty million – January 2009
- Forty million – August 2009
- Fifty million – March 2010
- Sixty million – November 2010
- Seventy million – August 2011
- Eighty million – June 2012
- Ninety million – December 2012
- One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
- One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
- One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
The ongoing attempt to have it all on one character continues. I keep telling myself there will come a point where I will switch over and start training an alt, Wilhelm having finally trained up all of the skills he could possibly need.
Still not there yet, that’s for sure.
Spaceship Cmd 36,330,616 (42 of 71)* Gunnery 13,915,745 (36 of 39) Leadership 12,803,000 (14 of 14)* Missiles 10,572,290 (21 of 24)* Drones 9,884,163 (19 of 21)* Navigation 9,660,314 (13 of 13)* Armor 6,899,137 (14 of 14) Engineering 5,974,395 (14 of 14)* Shields 5,645,390 (11 of 12)* Resc Processing 4,569,908 (22 of 28) Science 4,408,426 (21 of 39) Trade 3,271,765 (9 of 14) Electronic Sys 2,900,285 (6 of 15)* Targeting 2,306,195 (8 of 8)* Scanning 2,045,230 (7 of 7)* Neural Enhance. 1,770,275 (5 of 8)* Subsystems 1,320,000 (10 of 20) Rigging 1,312,395 (10 of 10)* Social 1,130,040 (5 of 9)* Production 1,157,986 (5 of 12) Corp Mgmt 1,108,784 (4 of 7) Planet Mgmt 769,335 (5 of 5) Total ~140,000,000 (295 of 398)
My focus over the last 10 month or so has been to get my character able to be a booster, either on or off grid, for fleet ops. That is why there has been a big boost in skill points under Leadership.
Dreams of being an on-grid boost…
Last April, at the 120 million skill point mark, I sat at just over 2.4 million points in Leadership. Now I am way up to 12.8 million skill points in that category. I also trained up command ships for the on-grid boosting role in addition to already having all my Tengu skills up to 5 for off-grid boosting. So I must be a totally excellent fleet booster and sign up for that role in every fleet possible, right?
Um, no.
I have yet to actually fly in the booster role for a number of reasons. While I sort-of know how to fly the role, the only time they have been asking for boosters have been for important ops, and I’d like a practice run before an op is counting on me. You also have to invest in the ship and some expensive implants up front and be in that clone with that ship handy and ready to go at the right location. And, while command ships and on-grid boosting was still a thing when I started down this path, off-grid boost is now all there is. You go to a safe spot, turn on your links, and keep hitting the directional scanner looking for probes, in case the enemy is trying to scan you down to kill you. That sounds dull. I like to be with the fleet so I can at least see what is going on. Ever the tourist.
Having Wing Command trained up to 5 has helped out a few times at least. There tends to be a need for that so fleets can be the full 255 pilots.
Otherwise I have spent my training time rounding out my skills, getting things that affect my ships up to level 5. I got the two missing racial frigates, Minmatar and Gallente, up to level 5, so I can fly all the stealth bombers now. I am currently training up the sensor compensation skills for each of the races, which explains why targeting got a boost in points this time around. Targeting may be the first category where I have all the skills to 5, though it is admittedly a small category.
I do have quite a few skills at level 5 at this point. My skill breakdown is now:
Level 1 - 3 Level 2 - 22 Level 3 - 41 Level 4 - 82 Level 5 - 158
Meanwhile, I have been quite enjoying the fact that losing your pod is now pretty much a no-cost issue for me. Aside from the potential fleet booster role and my training clone, my clones are all implant free, so there is no loss potential on that front.
I have a neural re-map coming up in June. The last one I did I flattened out all my skills so that anything I trained would be equally fast… or slow. This time around I think I will go back to being biased towards training ship and weapon skills at the expense of the social and leadership. I am not sure I need to train into Fleet Command V, which would be all I have left under Leadership.
And then there is the final silly metric that I have been using throughout this series of posts, which is how long it would take me to train to fly a titan. By the 130 million skill point post, simply flying one was down to two skills, so I changed that up to what it would take to fly a fully fit titan, specifically the Minmatar Ragnarok.
Free wheeling Ragnarok
When I looked at that I was 130 days and 17 hours away from being able to lock myself away forever in a rusty, angular space coffin. Super caps are like the Hotel California; you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Not that I will ever opt for that. I am not yet that much of a bitter vet.
I did not expect that number to change, but then I found I had actually trained a few of the of the skills. Astrometrics 5 was a big one, though I don’t remember exactly why I trained it. And then I trained up Jump Portal Generation to 4 so I could operate a black ops battleship, in case we needed one out on a Reavers op. That seemed important after our misadventure with hot dropping. Those two skills combined pushed the titan timeline more than 17 days, knocking the number down to 113 days and 12 hours. The biggest skill in that is still Capital Ships 5, which is close to 70 on its own.
Anyway, my skill training online adventure continues. The next stop will be 150 million skill points, which I ought to hit around the new year.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 