1. Requires two tanks.
2. Two Trons will be active at all times. The one that just became active will be unshielded (DPS this one), the one that has been active will be shielded (no DPS).
3. Never DPS a shielded tron. Arcanotron may be be interrupted while shielded, but must immediately stop DPS after the interrupt.
4. Power Generator (Arcanotron) – A large cyan-magenta vortex on the ground. Gives whoever is standing in it a big boost to damage and mana regeneration. Stand in the whirlpool, but make sure the boss isn’t.
5. Chemical Bomb (Toxitron) – A large green cloud on the floor. Causes anyone standing in it to gain a de-buff that increases all damage taken by 50%, including the boss. Do NOT stand in the cloud, but make sure the boss does, and kite the Poison Bombs through it.
6. Acquiring Target (Magmatron) – Targets one raid member and, after a few seconds, shoots a huge jet of flame straight at them.
7. Electrical Discharge (Electron) – Moderate damage, jumps to allies. When Electron is active, stay spread out 8yrds unless you’re in a Power Generator.
8. Arcane Annihilator (Arcanotron) – Short cast time, interrupt-able, does a lot of damage to one target. Buffed by Power Conversion & Poison Cloud.
9. Poison Protocol – Summons 3 Poison Bomb (slow moving slimes) that crawl towards a chosen target. Kill the slimes! If the slimes reach their target, they explode for about 100k and leave a pool of poison. Don’t stand in that, and don’t let a slime hit you; if you are being chased, kite it. Slimes are un-tauntable. Warning this can target the tanks, in this case ALL DPS must switch to kill that one first.
10. Lightning Conductor (Arcanotron) – Puts a de-buff on one target that hits all nearby raid members for big damage. If you get this de-buff as a healer or DPS, run away from the group. If a tank gets the de-buff, pay attention and move away from the tank.

Priorities

Tanks

1. Don’t stand in poison clouds. Position the boss in the cloud.
2. Don’t let the boss stand in Power Generators, position the boss to that the raid can stand in the Power Generator.
3. Interrupt Arcanotron every chance you get.
4. Stop DPS once your tron’s shield goes up.
5. A “stream” from the back wall to the next golem will show you which one is spawning next. Get ready to pick that one up once your golem reaches about 3 or 4 energy.

Healers

1. Always stand in Power Generators.
2. Do not stand in Poison clouds.
3. When you see “Acquiring Target” go off, Magmatron’s target is about to take a lot of damage.
4. Incineration Security Measure will require massive raid heals.

DPS

1. Always Prioritize Killing Poison Bombs over DPS on the active Tron.
2. Always stand in Power Generators.
3. Do not stand in Poison clouds (Chemical Bomb).
4. Interrupt Arcanotron every chance you get.
5. Never hit a shielded Tron.
6. Get AWAY from an Acquired Target.

Common Mistakes Made

• Melee DPS think they can’t kill the Poison Bombs. This is because they have attempted it in the past, the bomb blew up, and they died. The ONLY reason a bomb ever blows up is because it reached it’s target. A dead bomb can NOT reach it’s target. ALL DPS, including Melee, who are not being chased by a bomb need to kill the bombs.
• Arcanotron does not get interrupted. EVERYONE (save the other tank) in the raid is responsible for attempting to interrupt him when his shield is down. Most DPS and Heals will complain that they “have too much else to do“, or “my interrupt is on a long cool down“. If Arcanotron gets his Annihilator spell off, and YOUR interrupt is NOT on cool-down, you are the reason the raid is failing. Learn to interrupt, and don’t wait for your “current cast” to finish, stop casting and interrupt.
• Magmatrons “Acquired Target” decides to run around, instead of standing still. The rest of the raid then doesn’t know where to go, and the “Acquired Target” gets people killed. Just stand still if you are an Acquired Target, everyone else will react.
• People don’t stand in the Power Generators. Most fights, all the healers are ALWAYS in the Power Generators, and few (if any) of the DPS are in the Power Generators. It is a priority to get yourself in the Power Generators, don’t just stand over there doing less DPS, the Return on Investment for moving into the Power Generators is too great.
• People (or their pets) continue hitting a tron w/it’s shield up. Seriously, it keeps happening. Switch targets.

Miscellaneous

This is one very long fight. Doing the math, you can see how easily we are talking about a 10 minute battle.

• 32Million hit points shared between the trons
• 50Kdps = 5 DPS, doing 10Kdps
• It takes 10.5 minutes for 50Kdps to do 32Million hit-points of damage.
• This does not take into account time needed to kite adds, kill adds, switch targets, move, etc..

There is also an absurd amount of Raid Damage occurring for the duration of the fight. The three healers are having to put out and sustain near 8K heals-per-second for 10 minutes.

I would consider this fight to be a “Ready Check” for raid healers – a healer might succeed in healing Magmaw, Baradin Hold, or even the Conclave of Wind without having the heals to do this fight. However, once you have successfully healed through this and seen the boss dead, you can be utterly confident that the healer has both the gear and the skills to heal a raid.

As a side note, there really isn’t any point in attempting this (other than getting a look at the general mechanics) if you don’t have three healers who can sustain 8K heals per second. However, if you DO have three healers, sustaining 8Khps, and people in the raid are dead, then everyone else is failing to avoid damages that should be avoided or they are not following mechanics that would help reduce the damage they are taking.

This fight (much like Magmaw) also greatly favors Ranged DPS over Melee DPS. Eight points in particular support this statement:

• Ranged DPS can Kite & Kill the Poison Protocol trivially.
• Ranged DPS can “always” take advantage of the Power Generators.
• Ranged DPS have little downtime in switching targets between bosses/adds.
• Ranged DPS have Ranged Interrupts! They can DPS one boss or adds, while interrupting Arcanotron!
• Melee DPS have to move all over the room, w/out doing DPS, in order to switch targets.
• Melee DPS can rarely take advantage of the Power Generators.
• Melee DPS can either Kite or Kill the Poison Protocol, rarely can they successfully do both.
• Melee DPS have Melee Range Interrupts. If the boss is moving out of melee range, they miss. If they are on another boss or adds, they can’t help with interrupts.

Unlike Magmaw, you can certainly do this fight with only a handful of ranged DPS (assuming you have the heals for the raid); however, the optimal configuration would have no melee DPS in it at all. I realize that isn’t popular with melee DPS, but it is not reasonable to ignore the fact that melee DPS is at a disadvantage. For what it is worth, every time we’ve killed Omnitron with have had 2-3 melee DPS in the group. As long as the Bombs go down, and the heals can keep up, Omnitron will die.

If you play EVE long enough, eventually someone is going to ask  that you light a Cyno (Cynosural Beacon) for them to jump to. If you are in a Corporation that is heavy with Capitol ships, there tends to be a constant need to have someone jumping somewhere and this means the Cyno Pilots need to be spread out all over the Universe. To this end, most people will train a Cynosural Field Theory on a couple of alternate characters, and then park those characters in systems (typically a logistical route) that tend toward requiring a regular Cyno’s to be lit.

I found some interesting write-ups on training Cyno Alts via Google, but the majority of them were old and outdated. So, I’ve determined to come up with my own formula, and stick it here so that I can get back to it easily enough. As I am primarily a Minmatar Pilot, the only real constraint I put on my approach is that all Cyno Alts must be skilled to fly a Probe (Minmitar Frigate).

Step 1 – Birth of an Alt

Create a toon! I start with a Minmatar because they already come with the basic frigate skills, and I like that all my toons have the same ethnic look. For the sake of this article, we will call our new toon Bubba_Cyno_Alt.

Step 2 – The Inheritance

Log into one of your rich toons and send Bubba_Cyno_Alt 18,121,500 ISK. Then log back in as Bubba_Cyno_Alt and purchase the following skill books (All books will/should be available at your starting station):

1. Instant Recall (45,000 isk)
2. Analytical Mind (45,000 isk)
3. Learning (31,500 isk)
4. Eidetic Memory (4,500,000 isk)
5. Logic (4,500,000 isk)
6. Cynosural Field Theory (9,000,000 isk)

Go ahead and inject Instant Recall, Analytical Mind, and Learning.

Step 3 – Recalibrate the Brain

Remaping the attributes! You will want to set the brain pattern to:

• Intelligence: 15
• Perception: 5
• Charisma: 5
• WIllpower: 5
• Memory: 9

Step 4 – The Lesson Plan

I took the snapshot prior to updating the Attributes, so you will see some slight differences on the training plan yourself at this point.

Step 5 – Graduation

This process takes less than eight days to complete and costs less than 20M isk to implement. Many people might look at those eight days and think of many other things that they could train and ultimately put off creating the Cyno Alt; however, if you are in a Capitol heavy corporation or alliance, you should view it as your responsibility to your community to have at least one Cyno Alt trained and available, even if you do not fly capitol ships yourself.

This list was posted to the Eve Forums by Akita T back in 2007 and continues to be extremely relevant. I perhaps did some minimal editing to correct spelling and things like that, but it is mostly a copy and paste.

1. You are not safe in 1.0 security space. CONCORD is there to punish, not to protect. Get used to the idea.
2. In most cases, the only way to be 100% safe from aggression inside the game is to be docked in a station. Being cloaked in a secret safe spot could work too.
3. Never fly something (or with something in the cargo) you can’t afford to lose. Yes, not even in high-sec.
4. Never grant corporation rights to stuff you can’t afford to lose either. No exceptions.
5. People offering free stuff ? Probably traps. Use caution.
6. Free stuff usually isn’t. Not even minerals you mine yourself.
7. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Paranoia pays off here. Double-check everything.
8. Scamming and unethical behavior some would consider griefing is not only allowed, it is encouraged and rewarded by the game mechanics.
9. Harassment or real-life threats however aren’t, and you can get a shiny ban for them. Learn the difference.
10. If you lose stuff, it’s ALMOST ALWAYS YOUR FAULT. Really, only yours.
11. More expensive stuff is not always better stuff.
12. Slightly better stuff usually costs many times more as slightly worse stuff. Choose wisely.
13. T2 is usually cheaper and better as best named, but harder to fit. Sometimes it’s not better. Other times it’s not cheaper. And occasionally, neither cheaper nor better.
14. Showinfo and Variants->Compare are your best friends. Use it on all stuff you can.
15. There is always heavy lag in Jita and other trade hubs. But then again, you almost always find what you might need there, and can get better prices for the stuff you want to sell fast. So, it might be worth the lag.
16. Just HAVING ISK doesn’t matter all that much, it’s MAKING ISK that’s important. If you BOUGHT your ISK (either “illegally” from some site, or from a valid GTC trade), expect to soon be parted with all of them.
17. Total skill-points count doesn’t matter much either, it’s level of relevant skills to the current situation that does. Yes, that does mean a 2 mil SP combat-oriented newbie could badly beat up a 60 mil SP industry-oriented veteran.
18. ALWAYS check your clone before you undock.
19. ALWAYS check your ship insurance before you undock. If it’s a T2 ship however… not THAT important.
20. There are no “solopwnmobiles” in EVE. Everything you can fly blows up if it’s shot hard enough.
21. All other things being equal (experience, skills), superior numbers more often win a fight rather than superior ship value. However, things are hardly ever equal.
22. There is no such thing as “a fair fight” or “an unfair fight”. There’s only “a fight”. Circumstances are irrelevant.
23. Somebody, somewhere has better skills than you have, more experience than you have, is smarter than you, has more friends than you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he’s not out to get you.
24. Just because you CAN fly something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
25. With enough skills and experience, ship size really doesn’t matter all that much.
26. If you logoff in space without a PvP timer, you’re only safe after 2 minutes… and then only until you log back in. If you logoff with a PvP timer, it’s at least 15 minutes. Bottom line, once a fight started, don’t logoff. You’ll only die anyway.
27. If you PvP long enough, you WILL lose your ship. It’s only a matter of where and when.
28. Just because some character is just a few minutes old doesn’t mean he’s a newbie. Many people have alts. The reverse is also possible, people come back after very long breaks, and characters are sold. You could see year-old newbies around too.
29. Skills that take less than 1 day to train are short skills. Over one week is long.
30. You’re in this game for the LONG HAUL. Don’t expect to do something meaningful in the grand scheme of things in the first day of your first trial account ever.

All fun and games aside though, this is a very difficult question to answer, many opinions abound and a number of those opinions are backed with a lot of number crunching to “prove” themselves. Akita T has perhaps one of the best known answers to the question in her post Guide & FAQ : New character creation. While her post is pushing two years old, it remains a standard. However, that standard is beginning to show it’s age. The introduction of Factional Warfare encourages much more of a “role playing” element than ever before, and while you could theoretically see a Minmatar fighting for the Amarr Empires Militia, it just isn’t reasonable (from a role playing perspective) to think that a Minmatar would actually do such a thing. Certainly there are those who would develop a story line and defend the idea, but not us.

We have our own opinions about Eve, Character Creation, and what one should do. Read on if our unscientific, non-number crunching approach, if of interest to you!

Choosing a Race

It is obvious to us, that if there are Rednecks in Space, the Minmatar Race is where they will most likely be found. We think of the Amarr as Celestial Bible Thumpers doing Door to Door Evangalism with a Laser, the Caldari are Socialist Pigs with a chip on their shoulders, and the Gallente are good old boy’s who think everyone would profit from Capitalism, Free Trade, and just want the opportunity to trade to mule with you.

You can probably guess that we would encourage you to stay away from the Caldari and Amarr races! Gallente is ok, heck, one of the best friends of the family is Gallente! But they just ain’t redneck enough. Minmatar is the way to go! And if there are Redneck Engineers in outer-space, then a Sebiestor TInker is just that!

So when you create your Character, go ahead an Choose Minmatar, Sebiestor, Tinker and you are well on your way to creating one of the best all around Eve-Characters possible! On top of that, you aren’t Caldar or Amarr!

Now, you start out with a relatively high Intelligence, and and a nice smooth baseline for all other attributes. There are many folks who will tell you to tank the Charisma, and stack INT/MEM or PER/WIL – bah on them, keep them all “level” and you will have the basis for a fantastically well rounded character.

You do plan on playing for years to come, right? If you simply intend to play for a year or so, then stack up whatever you think is fun wherever you think it should go, but if you are taking the long view, keep the spread as high and even as possible. Perhaps the argument this week is “but most ships and guns use Per/Wil” – that’s fine, until the next update comes out and they introduce a new line of skills that “everyone wants” and suddenly has a massive requirement for CHA/MEM or something like that.

So, you get yourselve a nice Minmatar, spread those stats real even like, give him a name (lets call him Skeeter), and log in!

Do the Tutorial

This ain’t yer teenagers MMO, this is where the Big Boy’s (and Girls) play – that tutorial is going to teach you a bare minimum to get you moving around! Take your time too, because we are going to suggest that you get those learning skills under your belt first thing via The Ideal Learning Schedule!

This would be a good time to head over to http://www.battleclinic.com/ and pick up your own copy of Eve-Mon – a .NET application, written primarily in C#, and Open Source. It will be spectacular for helping you manage your character offline.

So, you are doing the Tutorial, and about half-way through, you pick up the skill Cybernetics. Start training this immediately, and don’t train anything else until you hit level 4 of Cybernetics. What, you can’t train it? Idgit – I told you to go with a Sebiestor Tinker and you didn’t listen, now you are off on your own, good luck!

Ok, once you hit level 4 of Cybernetics (will likely take you about a week) and you can get some nice implants (+4) for your attributes, this will have a drastic effect on your ability to continue learning. As you go through the tutorial you will pick up two more implants, plug them in as soon as your skills allow!

Now you have a problem, you have likely finished the Tutorial, have Cybernetics at level 4, and discovered that you can’t hardly do anything else. Ok, you can blow up rocks (a.k.a. – mining) but even the rocks don’t blow up as fast as you think they should. To top it all off, you realize that you can’t afford those very expensive +4 Implants.

The good news is, if we are friends, Bubba will provide them for you! I have to cash in all those loyalty points at some point anyway! If we aren’t friends, you are on your own. Keep in mind that buying them from swagvault.com would be against the EULA and I can’t condone that! Ok, I’ve given you your level 4 implants, you plug all five in, and suddenly feel incredibly smarter!

Run Some Missions

Now you need/want to run some missions! One of the simplest ways to improve your faction standing, make some money, and otherwise spend your time. But that starter ship you have, and those measly ship skills are just going to get you blown up! What you really want is to get into a Thrasher – the Minmatar Destoyer.

It will take you about two days (now that you have those cool implants) to skill up such that you can fly one outfitted like the link above. Sort out your training plan to fly it (Eve-Mon is your Friend) and just focus on getting into that ship as fast as possible.

Right, the next problem is that you can’t afford the skill books, much less the ship and fittings! Again, if we are friends, you are set – I’ll get you one fully fitted with requisite skill books to begin your Agent Mission Running. If we aren’t friends – you are going to have to sort this one out yourself as well. A few day’s latter, you will have the minimum skills necessary to get this bird in the air and run missions for your NPC Corporation of choice, might I suggest Republic Fleet – I think I will!

Train the Learning Skills

You will now have a lot of Agent Mission grinding to do in order to move up to level 2 missions. While doing this grinding, focus hard on those learning skills as laid out in The Ideal Learning Schedule! Yes, you will be sorely tempted to take an hour here and there to go train up your Gunnery, or Small Projectiles, or pick up Afterburners …. knock yourself out! But stick to that Ideal Learning Schedule until you have it maxed out – you will thank yourself for doing it a few months down the road!

Conclusion

That’s enough to get you started in the right direction! Certainly there is far more to it than this outline; however, all good stories begin with a solid outline – and this is just that. Send me a message in game (Redick) and I’ll come help ya declare war on that Astroid field, run those agent missions, or otherwise get us all podded!

The Overview (pictured left) in Eve is is a vital tool for all Pilots.  Regardless of whether you are a Trader, Miner, or Warrior – when you undock that ship, the Overview tells you more about what is going on around you than anything else. Additionally, it is one of the easiest places to interact with other objects in space.

As such, it’s important to master the configuration of this little beast we call "The Overview”. Unfortunately, it’s not a straightforward nor easy process. Like much of the Eve-Online Interface, it is enveloped in arcane references to technical terms and then hidden behind a shroud of poor user interface mechanics. We will try not to tell you how we “really” feel about the User Interface – let’s just focus on deciphering The Overview for now.

Anitta Blake puts forth an excellent piece in the form of a downloadable PDF that one might use as guidance on setting up the overview for PVP. To date, it is one of the best pieces we’ve seen and well worth taking a peek – although it assumes that you are currently familiar with the mechanics of the overview. Speaking of the mechanics, lets dig into that a bit more.

Required Reading

We could rehash a lot of this; however, Eve has already documented a bit, and others have added their take as well, so it seem prudent to simply stand on their shoulders. That being said, take a few minutes and go read through these links (will be some necessary overlap in information, but trust us, it’s worth reading all of them) so that you are familiar enough that we can, indeed, stand on their shoulders:

1. Eve-Online Support | The Overview and Bracket Settings
2. Evelopedia | Overview Scanner

What They Didn’t Tell You

In the Overview, you get up to five tabs (including DEFAULT). Right Click on the DEFAULT tab, and simply “Add Tab”. However, you may have an unlimited number of Saved Overview Settings and Saved Bracket Settings. The additional tabs are there to simply help you better switch between the various Overview settings you have saved.

Don’t fall into a paradigm of thinking, “I’ve only got five Overview settings because I’ve only got five tabs”. It is only slightly easier to left click a tab than it is to right-click and “Load Overview Profile”. Ok, changing tabs will change both your Overview and your Bracket! To that end, we do suggest using all five tabs, because slightly easier is still easier. We have the following five tabs created, and will refer to them through the rest of this article.

1. DEFAULT
2. V1
3. V2
4. V3
5. V4

You can change the label for any, and we are going to suggest that you label the last four whatever makes the most sense to you, but to leave the first one (DEFAULT) alone. It seems that the DEFAULT tab isn’t necessarily trustworthy. That is, you can assign an overview setting to it, but it appears to “reset” itself without regard to its assignment, and we treat it is as a CCP owned tab. To that end, we just ignore it, or maybe use it for traveling around Empire. If you get better returns on the DEFAULT tab than we do – have fun, we can get by on the other four.

You will also notice that we simply label them V1-V4. The reasoning is that at any given moment we might load different settings into the various tabs. Perhaps we want V1 to show all enemies and neutrals, while V2 shows all enemy battleships, V3 shows all enemy Logistic Ships, and V4 shows all friendly ships. That would be somewhat odd if we had my tabs labeled PVP, MISSIONS, TRAVEL, and MINING respectively.

This does require a bit of discipline in *remembering* where you are loading settings, and we suggest that in various scenarios (PVP, MISSIONS, MINING, Etc) that you form some habits of reusing the same tabs for the same settings. However, as you can see in the screenshot above, when you select a tab, the overview line tells you what settings are being used by that tab. For instance, you can see that we are using the MINING | SCORDITE settings in my V4 tab.

Additionally, the tab overview settings and brackets don’t persist so well across restarts of the client. Yea, we know – that sucks. You would think that once you set a default for each tab, that on reboot it would simply go to the default. Or, better yet, remember the last setting. We said we’d try to lay of the User Interface Design – but …. Oh well, just remember, when you log back in – check your settings are reset as appropriate. The easiest way will be to open the Overview Settings and hit the Overview Tabs to verify/reset.

Filters – Types & States

Types is a rough grained filter for picking the “types” of things you would like to have show up in your Overview/Bracket. States is a fine grained filter that is applied after the Types filter is applied. Let’s say, for example that in Type you turn off Shuttles. That’s the end, you will never see a shuttle again, don’t worry about them.

However, lets say you have Frigates enabled. Pilot A is a good friend whom you have a high standing towards. Pilot B is a bad enemy that you would like to blow out of the water – he either has horrible/neutral standings or is at war with you. Both are in frigates within Overview scan range. The “states” tab will now determine whether they show up on the overview and/or brackets.

For all intents and purposes you don’t need to see your fleet members in the overview OR the brackets. You can target them through the fleet HUD and having them in either your Overview or Brackets can contribute to your client lagging, friendly fire incidents, and Bad Things(tm) happening. So, in our States options, we can de-select Pilot has good standing and Pilot has high standing. This means that even though Pilot A is in a Frigate within scan range, he doesn’t show up because we have set his standings appropriately. Some other “clutter” that should (can) be removed from STATES:

• Pilot is in your alliance
• Pilot is in your corporation
• Pilot is in your fleet
• Pilot is in your militia
• Wreck is Already Viewed (who wants to see a bunch of Wrecks while another fleet is working to blow them up?)
• Wreck is Empty (See above!)

Because Pilot B is at war with us, or is otherwise neutral (as if anyone in Eve is Neutral) or has Horrible Standings. In any of these cases, the States Filter is going to put them on the Overview/Bracket for you.

Color Tags

They don’t tell you that color tags rules get applied to chat channels as well, but they do! Why is that important!? Well, you know that LOCAL is your greatest Intelligence Asset … right? You do know that! Please say, “Yes!”.

Admit it, you didn’t know. Well, the trick is, anyone in the system is in LOCAL. You can not hide from this Chat Channel. Which means, that while the target might not show up on your Overview or Brackets due to their distance from you (perhaps they are docked, or in another asteroid field, or perhaps visiting a moon) – they will show up in LOCAL. A quick scan of the people in LOCAL will tell you how many Friendly’s, Neutrals, and Enemies are in the system – then you can decide whether to hunt them down or run and hide.

Dynamic Add/Remove from Overview

Any Bracket you see in 3D space, you can click on and get a context menu with an option to Add or Remove that object from the overview. Additionally, you can right click on any object in the overview and remove it from the overview. This will change your overview to (NOT SAVED) and will not permanently modify the underlying overview you had loaded. If you want it to be a permanent change, you will need to save the new overview either as a new name, or over writing the old name.

Let’s Create some Overview Settings

Enough theory, lets go about creating some settings and brackets.

PVP

Combat Overview

Click on the white arrow next to the Overview in order to open up the settings window.

Make sure you have the FILTERS tab open, and then click on DESELECT ALL.

Then Expand the SHIPS category, and select all ship types:

This will now allow all ship types to show up in your Overview! Next, select the  CELESTIAL category, and just select BEACON.

The beacon allows you to also see Cynosural Fields! Also note that you will often want to see a Carriers Fighters, for the most part we ignore Drones, but those Fighters are well worth seeing. Just pop into the Drone category and select “Fighter Drone” in order to ensure that you can see then if you expect to go up against a fleet with a Carrier in it – heck, we just suggest you go on and do it.

Finally, we click over on the STATES tab and we we only want the following selected:

At this point, the overview will only show us Neutrals, Reds, and Cyno Fields – a very clean interface for PvP combat. (I also like to add Stargates, so I can always find the exits!) Now, we can go and set up their appearance. Head over to the Appearance tab, and set it up as follows:

Then, select the Background Tab and make it look like the below, because we only want the two blinkies, so we know when we can shoot without repercussion in non-0.0 space!

Finally, hit the EWAR tab and select everything, because if someone is jamming us, we want to know it!

Next, we will set up some Columns. You will want to make it look like the below:

You will likely need to move Transversal Velocity up in the ranks, and will definitely need to move the Tag up.

Why Transversal Velocity? Why not Angular Velocity? Read the Eve Tracking Guide. We think most people get Transversal easier, although, if you take the ships signature size into account, arguably Angular Velocity is better. We’ll leave it up to your comfort level after you have read the tracking guide.

In the SHIPS tab, you want to select Ship Type and then you can select whatever else makes you happy. This is information that will be used by the “Brackets” when you mouse over a pilot in space. Ship Type is vital because this is very useful information in evaluating a target. A lot of people make the mistake of looking at the Ship Name – which is of no value, it can be anything. Try renaming Your Frigate to Your Raven and see if you can get called as a primary – it might surprise you.

In the MISC tab, we suggest that you select the to option to “Move Entries with Broadcasts to the top”. Especially if you are in a fleet wherein the fleet  and wing commanders make good use of the tools.

Lets save it!

We suggest naming this one PVP | Combat – it seems descriptive enough and easy to remember.

Combat Brackets

Now, we have a cool new overview setting to try out – but before we do that, we will want to set up our Brackets. This determines what we will see “in space”. Typically, we’d like to see a wee bit more than simply the targets in space, things like moons, stargates, etc.

Working off the PVP | COMBAT overview, lets head back to our Filters->Types and add:

Lets save it!

We suggest naming this one PVP | Combat [BR] – add the [BR] for BRACKETS, easy to remember.

Now head to the “Overview Tab” and set up V1 to use the new Overview and Bracket profile.

Click apply at the bottom of the screen, and you are all set!

PVP Logistics

You should have the hang of this now, and we’ll just provide instructions without the screenshots. We will use the PVP | Combat settings as our base template.

Under the Ship category you just want to select:

• Logistics

Under Drones:

• Logistic Drone

PVP Capital Ships

Under the Ship category you just want to select:

• Freighter
• Jump Freighter
• Capitol Industrial
• Dreadnought
• Carrier
• Mothership
• Titan

PVP Battle Ships

Under the Ship category you just want to select:

• Battleship
• Black Ops
• Marauder

Others

You should have the hang of this now, some other possibilities might be:

• Support Only (Heavy Assault Cruisers & Battle Cruisers)
• Frigates
• Interdictors
• Recons
• POS

Think about the type of ship you are flying, the types of gangs you are most likely to engage, and create the filter that will best help you.

Factional Warfare (FW)

There are some subtle differences between PVP Settings and FW settings. This is due to the fact that most PVP occurs in null space, where you just don’t care about things like Security Status and Militia Wars. We suggest you use the PVP Settings above, and simply make a few changes to the States for each one.

Specifically, you will want to add:

• Pilot has a security status below 0
• Pilot is an outlaw
• Pilot is at war with your militia

Then Flip over to Color Tags and enable the same – remember that this affects your chat channels as well!

Seriously, any of the Pure PVP overviews created above should be created for FW as well. Arguably, you could just create a FW overviews and not bother with PvP overviews – but we believe that separating the two out is best and if you only engage in one and not the other, well there you go.

Agent Missions / Ratting

For this, we suggest taking the PVP Combat (or FW Combat) overview/brackets and applying three Types from the NPC Category. This allows you to continue watching out for unfriendly/neutrals while seeing the NPC’s for the mission or Rats (NPC Pirates) as the case may be.

• Pirate NPC
• Faction Navy NPC
• Mission NPC

You also want to go int othe Entities category and select anything that has Deadspace, Destructible, or Mission in front of its name … there’s a lot of them!

You will want to make sure you set up Brackets for your Missions and Ratting, because unlike PVP and FW, the NPC’s can be quite unintelligent about deploying their gangs, and you typically want to see where (in 3d space) the groups of targets are. Quite typically, attacking one group will not pull the other group to attack you, allowing you to work through them one group at a time. However, the overview only shows distance, and simply because you have two targets that are both 30km away from you, doesn’t mean that they are in the “same” group. One might be 30KM above you and the other 30KM below. Set your brackets when dealing with NPC’s and use the Tactical Overlay.

For those who use Drones, it might be well worth your time to add the Combat Drones to your Bracket. This will allow you to see your drones in 3d, which is useful for watching to ensure that they don’t head off an engage someone you don’t want them too, or get to close to another group and aggro them, or – forget you deployed them and leave them sitting in space!

To set the this, you will need to enable combat drones under the Drone Category in the Types tab, and then you will need to turn on both:

• Pilot is in your alliance
• Pilot is in your corporation

We suggest using them only in a Bracket, as they will clutter up your Overview quite well. If you team up often to Rat or run missions, you might also want to see your gang in 3d space – just turn on “Pilot is in your fleet” and you will be set.

But Bubba, every once in a while I get a mission to blow up a “factory” and I can’t see it!

The easiest thing to do is to click on the White Arrow next to Overview and select “Show All Brackets”. Then you can look around in space for it. If you know what type it is you can add it directly to your overview. We don’t suggest leaving these things in the overview, as you will jump into a mission room and find 300 large collidable objects, or something like than and can’t find your targets in the mob. Do as you like though and make life as easy on yourself as possible.

Salvaging

The most typical time to Salvage is after/during a Mission or Ratting run. That isn’t to say that salvaging doesn’t occur after a large PVP encounter, but that’s a different scenario and we will focus on the Agent Missions/Ratting salvager here.

Start with the Combat overview/brackets that you created for Agent Missions/Ratting, and we will add the following Celestial types:

• Cargo Container
• Wreck

Then under States:

• Wreck is Already Viewed
• Wreck is Empty

Then save this to be used as both a Bracket (with your drones) and an Overview (no drones). This way, if rats Spawn while you are salvaging wrecks, you aren’t blind to the fact. Why do you want Brackets for salvaging? You really want to use that Tactical Overlay to visually determine the optimal path through the wreckage.

Conclusions

You have the hang of it now, think through creating yourself a Traveling Overview and Bracket for when you are simply attempting to get from one system to another in a single piece!

After you do all that work, you likely want to “backup” your Settings, check out EVE Cache precautions — what to delete and what not to delete for details on how you might go about doing that.

As you can see, the Overview and Brackets can be a deciding factor in how well you navigate this game, and learning how to manipulate said pieces of technology can be a confusing and harrowing experience for the un-initiated. We hope that we have clarified the waters rather than further muddied them. Good luck out there, and keep in mind the fact that I don’t believe anyone is neutral, you are either Blue or a target – so make sure you don’t show up on my overview!

Appendix A – Additional Reading

•  Militia Overview Settings – Don’t Be A Fool
• HowTo: Overview Settings – Brackets and Tabs [v1.01]
• EVE Evolved: Setting up your overview, part 1
• Anitta Blake’s PDF
• Eve-Online Overview Settings
• Overview Settings Guide

Appendix B – Videos

I’ve played Eve-Online for since October of 2004 – my only character in that time has been Redick and I’ve been a complete and utter Carebear (someone who doesn’t care for Player versus Player Combat – see Eve Lexicon). I played quite actively for the first year – working within Taggart Transidimensional. I was even a Director within the corporation in charge of Human Resources, particularly focused on recruiting.

After a year of play, work and life got to the point that I couldn’t invest a lot of time in the game and I simply allowed my account to go inactive. This past spring, I re-enabled my account and began playing again. Initially, I looked to join back up with the guys at Taggart; however, the old guard was gone and the new faces weren’t quite the same. After talking with the Directors for a while I decided that they were no longer a company I particularly wanted to associate myself with.

I headed off to the recruiting boards and looked for a new company in game, and Freelancing Corp quickly rose to the top of my preferred list. For a number of reasons:

• Old Corporation founded in 2003
• Founder of a Large Active Alliance (Confederation of Independent Corporations)
• Active Null (0.0) Space Operations

See, I’ve always desired to get into the massive Player vs. Player combat of Eve; yet never quite managed to. After a thorough recruitment process, the Freelancing guys hired me on. For the past nine months, I’ve been slaving away in space running missions for the Minmatar Republic Fleet. I obtained access to Level 4 missions with them a month or so back, and shortly thereafter – Jump Clones!

Well, with Jump Clone access, I decided I could leave the safety of my Empire Carebear ways and join the majority of the Corporation out in Delve. Over my Christmas holidays, I determined to do just such a thing. A couple of things happened – first, I convinced Tommy to give the game a try – and second, I realized that I really lacked the necessary skills to engage in 0.0 with any effectiveness.

The fact that Tommy started playing convinced me to start up another character to play alongside my best friend – and leave me the option of taking Redick out into deep space. I ran my first PvP operation last Friday night, and it was a blast! I even managed to get the killing blows on two battleships – whoot! I’m officially addicted to PvP in Eve.

I still need to level up some battle cruiser skills to effectively participate in the fleet warefare – but that is just a matter of time, durring which I can focus on gathering the funds necessary to pay for the ships and equipment I’ll take to war. My new character is currently in Empire space, in an NPC Corp, running missions for Republic Fleet with Tommy. However, I’m thinking I’ll soon enlist in a company that is actively engaged in the Factional Warfare so I can get my PvP kicks in empire too!