Been seeing where it has been said that the best way to grow and prosper as a player and legion is a high amt of npc hunting and pvb. Can someone explain that for me in some more detail? I'm ranked 127 right now and typically doing missions. Not really all that interested in pvp. Also learned today that with my style, I'm probably better off putting my rank points into engineers instead of mostly decks. Anyway, thanks for your help.

eventually missions will run out... then what?

besides.. if you just do missions, there's no need for very many special ship modules or much research

Stellar Cartography.

Ok, those responses are nice, but they didn't really answer my questions. And its not to say that I won't do any pvp, but its not high on my list right now.

PvP at higher ranks can be painful to say the least, more people will hit you back at higher ranks. The sooner you start the better.

NPCing can allow you to get lots of special ship modules which will give you better atk/def/hull/nrg - space ratios than researched modules.

It also means that you can encounter ships such as blade harvesters/rogue labpods & troop carriers more often which are necessary if you want to play this game long term.

Being rank 600 with just vl/er mining volcanics/metallics is not going to let you play the game with the best mods. But being rank 600 with 10 15x MR toxic's/irradiated mining planets will allow you to have a strong ship build.

Pretty much what he said, plus.

You will come across lots of elites which give lots of good artifact drops but you really need to be in a good legion for that. Most npc legions will have on average 20-30 elite npc's alerted everyday and you want to bein on as many as possible, the higher you rank up the more and better the eiltes you see. Also you get good artifacts and badges from killing enemy bases.

All of the above leads to having a better ship and you will be able to kill more people, take less damage and be able to do the missions that you really need.