Mastery Tab
Skill tabs
This as previously known as the mastery tab. The Skills tab gives you a HINT of how good you are with the appropriate ship.
They have basically 6 levels:
Base - you can sit in it! Congrats!
Level 1 - You can use the weapons and tank USUALLY assigned to it.
Level 2 - You can have a few of the support skills trained up to 1.
Level 3 - You have all the support skills trained up to 3.
Level 4 - You put time and effort and use everything associated with it, along with extra skills you don't need.
Level 5 - You can do anything in this ship as you put a lot of training time into it!
This is somewhat variable in how you use it. Sometimes, the Mastery tab has you train skills that don't matter all that much.
The advantage is that you have a HINT of what you can train next to become better in that specific ship.
Note, there is a lot of overlap between this and the Magic 14 too, skills that help every ship. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/The_Magic_14 has more details on those.
For example, this algos we are using with a shield setup, so the armor skills don't matter all that much:
Algos example - Too many skills
Note, this is a shield algos without much in the way of guns.
So have level 1 on skills, we can BARELY use this. To get to level 2, it would take us 2 days, 6 hours. Thes are *good* skills. The Advanced Drone Avionics III is a *GREAT* skill for the algos. I'm missing Surgical strike 3 and trajectory 3, also great skills for ships using guns, but i don't really need guns for this build.
However, mastery 4, it's 3 months! This is not great for my specific build of an algos though. I'm not using ANY Armor skills for instance. That's at least 1 month of training i don't even have to do right now. I can instead focus on the skills that help me.
Algos example - Not enough skills
There are a LOT of drone skills I'm missing here under level 4. These are all helpful skills, but doesn't cover ALL The skills that make this ship good.
For instance, the specialization skills are huge, they let you use t2 skills. But I'm not using JUST light drones, my main damage is actually medium drones. and medium drones is missing from the skill suggestions for level 4.
So if we left medium drones at level 2, as I have it now, we would have a very bad time because most of our damage is from medium drones.
Greetings, here is your quick tip of the day on general skills and the 'mastery' tab. (now called the skills tab)
Skills are what power this silly game of ours, and getting those skill points up just to 'sit' in a ship can be somewhat daunting. But flying it all and flying it well are pretty radically different.
By training in order: to sit, the ship, the main thing it does, then the magic 14, you are going to be more effective in ships.
Lets say you want to fly a maulus. You can sit really easily, luckily! You train up the ship skill first, gal frigate 4 is great and useful. Then you'd train the ship specific things, the damps. So you'd train to get to signal suppression 3. You'd also train Ewar, along with long distant targeting. Finally, you could switch back to the Magic 14 to round out the ship.
You can use the 'mastery' tab in a ship to guide you on this journey but it's not the end all be all answer. So you might have to pick and choose based on the roles you want to fly it on, versus what CCP designed it for.
As an example, I have a high skill point sabre pilot on the left, and a lower skill point sabre pilot on the right. Mastery 5 on left, Mastery 1 on the right. 5% slower (most important in a dictor), same align (luckily, second most), much much bigger 30% (third most important), 10% worse EFHP (fourth most important), and 10% less dps (doesn't really matter).
You can see the differences, so what do I train? I look into mastery tab, see that i'm missing key skills in one specific skill, Interdiction 3 instead of 5. you might also notice the sabre on the left is EXTREMELY susceptible to neuting due to the ragged edge of the cap 'stable' part. (ps it won't be cap stable) I am not carrying about my mastery 'level', because I don't need shield compensation (no shield booster here!), but I am just using it as a semi-guide. I am also boosting capacitor management and capacitor systems operations.
Anyway, hopefully this helps you get better with your own ships!