Attributes in EVE - how do they work?

This post contains details of attributes, skills, and some pointers to use them to get the most from your characters.

As of the current release of EVE (Red Moon Rising) this is how the attributes break down:

Memory
Primary Attribute in 64 skills
Secondary Attiribute in 103 skills
Contributes to 167 skills in total

Basic Learning Skill - Instant Recall
Advanced Learning Skill - Eidetic Memory

Intelligence
Primary Attribute in 104 skills
Secondary Attiribute in 53 skills
Contributes to 157 skills in total

Basic Learning Skill - Analytical Mind
Advanced Learning Skill - Logic

Perception
Primary Attribute in 103 skills
Secondary Attiribute in 35 skills
Contributes to 138 skills in total

Basic Learning Skill - Spatial Awareness
Advanced Learning Skill - Clarity

Willpower
Primary Attribute in 16 skills
Secondary Attiribute in 111 skills
Contributes to 127 skills in total

Basic Learning Skill - Iron Will
Advanced Learning Skill - Focus

Charisma
Primary Attribute in 32 skills
Secondary Attiribute in 17 skills
Contributes to 49 skills in total

Basic Learning Skill - Empathy
Advanced Learning Skill - Prescence

Each level of basic learning skill you train will increment the appropriate attribute by one point.

Once you have trained the basic skill to level 5, you will be able to purchase and train the Advanced skill. Again, each level of advanced skill increments the attribute by one point.

There is also a generic Learning skill which reduces training time by 2% for each level of skill trained - so training this to 5 will give a 10% reduction in training time across the board.

Planning how to train your skills
There is an excellent application called EVEMon - it can be found here.

It can be used to plan how to train your skills, and can also make suggestions to you about the order in which you should train skills to speed up the training time.

It is very very good, and highly recommended if you want to get the most out of your character. Nothing worse than training a skill for 28 days, only to find that if you'd spent 5 days training something else, it would have cut that 28 days to 15.

Yes, having the right skills and attributes *can* make that much difference ;-)

Below I've included an informative post from another forum with an overview of how to create a 'good' character. Personally, I disagree with their reasoning - they end up creating a character that is good at combat, but there are many more career paths available in EVE (if you want to make 300k ISK + per Level 2 agent mission, you'd better have a high Charisma to learn those Social skills).

Note that it also doesn't take into account roleplaying, or choosing a race because you like their back story or think their ships look cool.

But if you want to get out there quick and have some fun, this will provide the basis of a servicable character than can be honed over time:

Here's a quick guide to how to roll a character that dosen't suck. It's not going to tell you what skills to train in what order to power level or to make quick ISK.

-What makes a character suck?
Poor starting attributes.

-Why does that make a character suck?
You end up with excessive training times for high rank skills.

-But I've already had this character a week!!!
Rerolling to something with more than 5 Perception is going to remove a month when training up to use battleships effectively, and so on for everything else high end.

The most important attributes are Perception and Intellect followed by Memory and Willpower and the lower the Charisma the better. The focus is on creating characters who are fairly well rounded but can train all the important combat skills quickly.

You're best starting out as a Minmatar Sebiestor or Caldari Deteis as they have the best overall stats.
You should avoid True Amarr or Intaki bloodlines as their backgrounds waste too many points in Willpower and Charisma with too low Perception.

It's important that you select CUSTOM during the character creation process. You can do this when the game asks you to enter your characters name. You can elect to do this by changing the dropdown menu in the bottom right of the screen.
This is important, I'll repeat it: DO THE CUSTOM CHARACTER CREATION PROCESS

After you've selected your character, gender, bloodline, made them look impressive and given them a cool name you'll be presented with some choices. First you'll want to add 5 discretionary points and pick a background. I've organized them all by bloodline, displaying the final attributes and what to select to get them.

Minmatar Sebiestor -> 9i 6c 10p 7m 7w
+2 int, +2 per, +1 mem
Rebel background

Caldari Deteis -> 10i 6c 9p 7m 7w
+3 per, +2 will
Scientist background

Caldari Civire -> 8i 6c 10p 8m 7w
+3 int, +1 per, +1 will
Entrepreneur background

Minmatar Brutor -> 7i 6c 10p 8m 8w
+3 int, +1 per, +1 will
Workers background

True Gallente -> 9i 8c 10p 6m 6w
+3 int, +2 mem
Immigrant background

Amarr Ni-Kunni -> 9i 8c 10p 6m 6w
+3 int, +2 will
Border Runner background

True Amarr -> 9i 4c 7p 9m 10w
+2 int, +3 per
Wealthy Commoner background

Gallente Intaki -> 9i 8c 8p 7m 7w
+1 int, +3 per, +1 will
Artists background

After you've chosen appropriate stats and backgrounds, select Military school -> Operations -> Command -> Starship Captain. This will give your character racial frigate level 4. This will allow them to pilot any frigate and get a lot out of the ships bonuses. It will also allow them to begin training racial cruiser and racial industrial. You'll need to train a lot of other skills but I'm not going to get into that. What it does is give you an excellent starting platform to build off of and shaves days of training off of a skill you'll be training up anyway.

Cheers,
TOM

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