Militia Scout, Militia Assault Rifle, Skirmish Game Mode.
Do this until you hit 5,000,000 SP, without spending a single point, and you will be ready for anything and have enough ISK to back it up.

I don't have that much patience, honestly.

Never. Ever. Spend one thin dime on this game. Go Gal Logi proto as soon as possible and get a rail rifle. Then you will have won this game and you can then move on to something else.

Logistics.

Have a fit for nanohives and uplinks, spam those at the start of the match, then switch to your scanner / rep / injector and soak up those points from your squad / random blueberries.

Most WP for least effort = fastest character progression

Run militia fits, spec some into core skills. 1.8 patch is released in 2 weeks or so with new stuff.

It takes more SP to fill out all that equipment, but even just using all standard gear you can pull in good WP each match doing this.

Use a MLT dropship at the start of matches to place your uplinks in hard to reach places, and put your nanohives up there so your team can camp them and you get more WP. You might lose the match since your team just ends up camping on towers, but what do you care? You soak up the WP, and don't earn anything extra for a win as opposed to a loss.

Reps give you TONS of WP since they removed the WP cap, just follow a heavy around. Scanners will give you oodles of points in a squad, particularly from orbitals, and 60 WP every time someone dies and doesn't bleed out is just money in the bank.

Dust community, why haven't you given this guy a straight answer yet? Goregasm Elite, the answer to your question is that no play style allows the fastest character progression to any significant degree. The reason behind this is that there are three ways to gain skill points,

1. Passively
2. Daily log-ins
3. Actively

Obviously no matter what play style you choose, the amount of points you gain passively and through logging in are the same. Now the thing to consider with actively gaining skill points is how those points are rewarded. The answer is simple



Now let's say your typical skirmish match lasts 15 minutes. That is 900 seconds, meaning 4500 SP just from that part of of the equation alone. Now as you can see quite clearly, whether you gain 500 WP, 1000 WP, or 2000 WP a match, most your points are coming from simply participating (unfortunately, depending on who you ask). So my advice to you is don't pick a role based on how fast you can gain SP, but rather pick a role on what you think is fun.

P.S.
Passive points are rewarded 1,000 an hour, so 24,000 a day and 168,000 a week.
Login in at max is 6,000 a day so 42,000 a week.
Active points are rewarded up to 190,400 a week.
After you hit the active cap for the week you can still earn up to 1,000 WP.

Ignoring any points gained after hitting the cap, you gain 400,400 SP a week.

Don't spend any points until we know if 1.8 comes with any form of Respec. If we don't get one, wait to see all the final stats. If we are getting one, spend your points frivolously to try things out (note, only spend them on things they state we get back, more than likely dropsuit command stuff).

Though doing passive things (CPU, PG, Armor, Shields, and Biotics) never really hurt anyone, unless they didn't do them.

You can create a second and third character as an alt and I believe back in the closed beta CCP allowed them to gain passive points as well, but currently you cannot. You can still log into them every day to get the log in bonus, but that is a very slow progression if its your only source of SP. If there is another account on your PS3 however and that account has a character on Dust then it will receive passive skill points (one of the many reason people suggest that CCP simply allow our two given alts to receive passive SP).

A base x1 skill costs around 310,000 sp to get to level 5, so, just take that number times whatever the multiplier to get how much level 5. That's all.

My advice, listen to Aero Yassavi and don't spend your sp on weapons and dropsuits yet. The best thing is to get your dropsuit upgrades done(Shield, Armor, core, electronics, and engineering) these will be you most important in survivability and fitting you dropsuits with good gear when you chose your dropsuit, weapons, equipment.
Now under you armor and shield upgrades are you choices of armor plates/repairs, shield extenders/regulators/and energizers. you don't want to skill those till you decide what suit you want., well maybe not the armour reps because I use one on every suit

I disagree with Ryno(?) I would not worry about handheld weapon upgrades( gives you damage modules) to start with depending on your suit I would worry about what I listed above Just my opinion.

Give us a idea of what your play style is, what you have tried and what you wanna try to do overall.

A militia tank.

But the benefit of Dropsuit Shield Upgrades is that once you have it you spend no ISK, don't need to use any CPU or PG on your dropsuit, and it applies to all the dropsuits you will ever use. Yes the actual shield extenders will give you more shield up front though. Ideally you want both shield upgrades and shield extenders if you are aiming to be a shield based unit.

The active cap is 190400 per week.

I have an alt with 9 mil SP that's a heavy. You could take it into PC. proto suit, complex plates, complex damage mods, etc.

I think heavy is the lowest SP investment, but the Caldari and Min heavies will take more SP to shine.

Just going off of the OP.

You can easily put 25 million SP into logi. It's by far the most SP intensive.

Heavy's with HMG's are the superior cqc fighter in most aspects. What a lot of heavy players like to do to negate their slow movement is drive around in an LAV and hose down any players running around by themselves.
Another thing you might want to know about is that, other than scouts, all suits have a built in scanning range of about 10 Meters (which is right in the heavy's kill zone.) So a heavy may be hiding behind a corner while you're walking up to an objective and you won't see him until you're in his clutches.

That is where profile damps, Precision enhancers, and range amplifiers would be beneficial if you're looking to avoid harder targets until you get a better vantage point.

If you are starting with 10 million SP, first thing you should get is Core Upgrades 5, Electronics 5, and Engineering 5.

It hurts, and it sucks saving for those later. Just get them now.

Then you can figure out what kind of playstyle you want later (fyi dont spend any SP in dropsuit command until 1.8 for sure).

Then decide if you want an equipment based build (logi), an assault rifle based build (assault), a high ehp and slower moving heavy build, or a quick, low hp + cloaking scout build.

Then you can build your weapon and shield/armor considerations around your dropsuit choice and go from there.

this is really soul less we are basically min maxing a suit out for him... but there is a lot of good information for new players here and it answers a lot of questions not covered in the tutorial, so I'll lend my expertise.

it looks like you're a heavy, your job is tanking and dealing absurd amounts of damage. you have the most health of any suit in the game but the trade off is that you're slow and have a high scan profile. I'm a scout so I don't know much about heavys but scanning and stealth is my trade.

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you inquired about scan precision, radius, & profile.

scan profile: how easy it is for scanners to pick you up. (the lower your profile the better)
scan precision: every suit has a built in scanner, the precision of your scanner is how "good" that scanner is.(low is good)
scan range: the range in meters of your suits built in scanner.(default is 10m for heavys i think)

how does it work?
lets say you have a scan profile of 65db
and I have a scanner with a scan precision of 55db
since my suit scanner's precision is lower than your profile you appear on my mini map as long as you are in range of the scanner and a red chevron appears above your head even if you're in cover or behind a wall. if your scan profile is lower than my scan precision, however, you don't appear on the map or get the red chevron.

the same effect as being scanned is produced by having someone in your line of sight (LoS). LoS has a perfect precision and is impossible to avoid by lowering scan profile(for now). LoS scans have a range of 90 meters [citation needed] so anything outside of 90m will not appear on your mini map or get the chevron even if you're looking right at them.(not sure how LoS scan is effected by sniper scopes)

"YOU HAVE BEEN SCANNED"
some players use "active" scanners this is a piece of equipment that provides a temporary boost to the user's scan range and precision. it adds a orange red pulse affect to scanned enemies that will fade over time. the downside of using an active scanner is that enemies scanned by it get the "you have been scanned" pop up on their screens alerting them to the fact their position is compromised. a suit's built in (passive) scanner doesn't give any warning to the enemy. active scanner results are also shared between all members of a squad. were passive scan isn't.
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why none of that matters to a heavy

you're a heavy, as you have undoubtedly noticed you have the highest profile and precision of any suit and I don't think any heavy suit can fit an active scanner. scanning and it's related skills are all but useless to a heavy because it's scan range is terrible and it's precision and profile are so high that they can't reasonably be brought down with the use of modules. your slots would be better served with using the slots to add tank and dps. if you get scanned just yell "COME AT ME BRO" because there is no efficient way to avoid it.

I agree more or less. And I even love my heavy repping logi suit. I just played in an epic Domination with maybe 5 or 6 heavies per side with HMGS at A. What a blast! I died 11 times, 5 or so in OBs , but it was worth it! You do get loads of warpoints, but fewer kills maybe ... if you actually repair ... Only got 5 or so kills in this battle . The grinding can get a little boring .