10+ PSA: Research for Beginners

Bridgeburners Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:48 pm

Hello Pirates,

There has been an enormous amount of research and debate about research in this game, and I'm going to skip about 99% of it.

My belief is that at this point, all of you are still just learning the ropes - advanced theories of the best way to burn 1,000 AICBs, or how to best handle a couple billion cargo's worth of lab coat is simply too much.

So, the basics.

There are three popular builds:

Turtle: All Shields
Juggy: Weapons and Shields
Rogue: Weapons and Engines

All three are good, battle-tested builds, and all have lots of items to help them excel.

At this point, I don't think that anybody should concentrate too heavily on any one of them. As you continue to play, one of two things will likely happen - you will find some nice items that really help one of the builds, or you will, via experimenting with the fleet armory, decide you really like one of the builds. At that point, I recommend changing your research to help your chosen path.

There's also mining - which isn't huge, but it does add up, especially if you are pirate who spends a couple of hours in the evening playing. 22 hours of mining can add up to some nice cargo.

That being said, there's no wrong way to do this - if you don't like where your research is taking you, you can always start researching something else.

This topic, quite naturally, leads into two follow-on topics: How to use a labcoat, and what do these three builds look like in practice.

My plan is to send out a outline of how to use labcoats tomorrow, and then do some case studies of how the various builds work. I'm running a rogue these days, so I have been copying some of the fights that I'm having. I'll walk through them, and (hopefully) highlight some of the finer points.

By the way - my practice for sending these type of MMs out is to send out no more than one a day, so that people don't start seeing them as spam. Of course, writing several pages isn't that quick, even though I'm a reasonable typist, though a lousy speller.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Bridgeburners