Star Trek Online : A New and Unbroken Thread!

[Rishathra]

I just heard the synopsis and knew the new Klingon tutorial was badass.  You start as second officer, and the first officer tries - and fails - to kill the captain for showing cowardice.  Guess how you get your first ship? 

[Sir T]

At one point there was a queue of 21,300 people.  Don't change chars or you wind up at the back of the queue btw

Only one emergency patch though, and only 2 downtimes, one of this is going on as I type. That counts a s relatively stable launch. Lots of latency but nothing too bad. If I had a penny for the endless questions about why their new Rommie could not join their fleet at level one though. Read the fricking patch notes.

Some wag was showing off the Plasmoric leach and calling it useless in chat :D

[Morat20]

Logged on long enough to handle my duty officers to find:

1) hey! I have traits! (quickly picked some. All nice ones, at least as far as I'm concerned).
2) Nukara rep? Goddammit, I'm still getting Romulan and Omega marks for stuff!
3) Hey, warp cores. Dang, now I need a good warp core.
4) More LCARS like interface -- interesting change. At least everything is where it was, so despite the new look I can find my way around without confusion. (Other developers: Take fucking note. Change the look OR change the layout, don't do fucking both at once unless you want an irritated user base).

[Surlyboi]

So. Much. Bitching about how shitty a launch it was last night and how the Romulan story was derivative of Mass Effect and Star Wars. I have finger indentations on my forehead from all the facepalming I did.

With a couple of minor hiccups, this launch was pretty goddamn smooth.

[Tyrnan]

I particularly loved all the forums posts with "devs hate KDF!11!1" on the same day they got 1-20 leveling content and a new tutorial because a) Feds got the leech and b) it was part of the Romulan expansion.  Mostly the same whiny fuckers that have been bitching for 3 years about the KDF not having enough content. 

[Riggswolfe]

Logged on long enough to handle my duty officers to find:

1) hey! I have traits! (quickly picked some. All nice ones, at least as far as I'm concerned).
2) Nukara rep? Goddammit, I'm still getting Romulan and Omega marks for stuff!
3) Hey, warp cores. Dang, now I need a good warp core.
4) More LCARS like interface -- interesting change. At least everything is where it was, so despite the new look I can find my way around without confusion. (Other developers: Take fucking note. Change the look OR change the layout, don't do fucking both at once unless you want an irritated user base).

You can get a green warp core from Nimbus to start you out.

[Tannhauser]

Rushed home thru a tsunami to find I'm 24303 in line to play!  Oh well, I kind of expected it.  Logged on before work very briefly with my new Rom toon.  Newbie area seemed pretty cool and I want to do the tutorial because I have missed all the improvements/updates.  The 'Doffs' are pretty interesting.

[Stormwaltz]

You can get a green warp core from Nimbus to start you out.

There's also an Engineering DOff mission. I've got one running, I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.

[ghost]

So this is fun now?

[Reg]

It better be.  I bought the Romulan legacy pack but now I'm distracted by NWN.  I will get around to it eventually though. I figure if I just start a brand new Romulan character that'll be easier than trying to carry on with my level 25 Fed.

[Tannhauser]

After a 1.5 hour wait I got in and did the tutorial and the first two missions.  Not bad.  They just took the server down.  During EST primetime :)

Very glad to get the old Warbird for my first ship.  I doubt I'll play this long though, had quite a bit of playing when the game came out and it kind of bores me.

[Sir T]

I particularly loved all the forums posts with "devs hate KDF!11!1" on the same day they got 1-20 leveling content and a new tutorial because a) Feds got the leech and b) it was part of the Romulan expansion.  Mostly the same whiny fuckers that have been bitching for 3 years about the KDF not having enough content. 

AND they released a couple of new Birds of prey onto the C-Store, in response to the "KDF HAVE LESS SHIPS WAAAAAAAAHHHH" crying.

Frankly if I was a Dev I'd be ignoring those whining jerks. 

[Surlyboi]

Honestly, fuck the Klingons. Fuck everybody on the forums, for that matter.

The amount of whining there is legendary. Fuck 'em all. I'm having fun.

[Stormwaltz]

There's also an Engineering DOff mission. I've got one running, I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.

Despite having four purples assigned to it, the result was disaster/explosion.

A lesser man would suggest RNG shenanigans. 

[Kitsune]

The doff mission tossed out a purple warp core at me.

Which I promptly put on the exchange for ten million credits.

We'll see just how hungry people are for these things.   

[Rishathra]

What rank warp core did it give you?

[Morat20]

I pulled a blue warp core from the mission. A Hyper Injection Mk XI [Eff] [A ->E] [SSR] -- I have no idea what all that means. Seemed okay, so I slapped it on.

Hit my first bug: Finished a Borg mission. "Hail Starfleet" button is greyed out. Despite the "defend the sector" (or whatever) button being checked and "hail Starfleet" as the next step in the mission.

[Sir T]

Heres how it breaks dowm

1-Overcharged: These increase the maximum power setting of auxiliary up to 130, and will also give an auxiliary boost if the natural power setting is 70 or lower (an efficient trait for that power setting).

2-Hyper Injection: These do the same as overcharged, but for engine power.

3-Field Stabilizing; These do the same as the other two, but for shield power.

Note that there is nothing that will do this for weapons, presumably because 99% of the player base would use it.

When you get an uncommon variant, it will come with an additional trait. These include (all numbers posted are for Mk X):

1-Coi: Increases Driver Coil by 15

2-Eff: Increases Starship Warp Core Efficiency by 15

3-EPS: Increases Electro-Plasma System by 15

4-SEP: Increases Starship Engine Performance by 15

5-Bat: Increases Starship Batteries by 15

6-Rep: Increases Starship Subsystem Repair by 15

For blues you get an additional trait.

 Essentially, it will show as X->Y, where X is one power setting (denoted as either W, S, E, or A), and Y is a different power setting (again denoted as W, S, E, or A). Those letters represent the first letter of the power setting in question (example is W = Weapons). So, an example would be W->S. This basically means that 7.5% of your weapon power would be added to your shield power.

Of course Singularity cores are different. hey come in the same three types: overcharged, hyper injection, and field stabilizing. However, there is one difference between the two, and that is instead of increasing the maximum of that power level by 5, and an efficient trait for that same power level, they instead provide a variable 5 to 15 power level increase, based on how charged your singularity level is So at times its best to keep it at fill power

Green versions also have similar additional traits like warp cores, which include:

1-EPS, already noted above

2-GG: +15 to Graviton Generators

3-PI: +15 to Power Insulators

4-PG: +15 to Particle Generators

5-SingA: Increases Singularity Charge Rate by 20%

6-SingC: Reduces the cooldown on Singularity Power Use by 10%

7-SingS: Reduces the rate at which you lose Singularity Power by 20%

Blue versions do not have X->Y like warp cores do. Instead, they get a wide array of tags that boost various Singularity abilities.

Dunno about purples.

[Stormwaltz]

Has anyone figured out how to access previously purchased civilian clothes?

I'm trying to modify a couple of old outfits (formal attire and Bajoran Vedek), and when I enter modification, the entire outfit is being reset, and the costume pieces aren't available in the drop-downs.

[Sir T]

There's a bunch or really odd bugs going round. I tried to join a mirror group only to get booted out 6 times. I cant hand in red alerts. People are complaining about various costume problems. People cannot kill the Crystaline entity again. 

But the amount of Romulans I see wondering around is jawdropping. You can really make Remans look damn cool with their hood by the way.

[Morat20]

Yeah, the can't hand in red alert things is a pisser. I finally just dropped the one I had completed. I'm leaving my starfleet guy to do doff missions and probably spend time exploring the Romulan side today. (Figure that's better tested, at least the episodes).

I think they snuck in a lot of changes under this -- and not all of it's thoroughly tested. I noticed that the pop-ups in the daily yesterday (the "recover minerals" thing from the Gorn mission) were too big for the box, so some of the letters were missing. They changed all the fonts and popups and stuff to the new system, but didn't check to see if everything fit. (Apparently they don't use an auto-font sizing feature).

I do like that the ship powers are now color-coded for system, so you can differentiate between shield and armor repair powers at a glance. (Not that I need too, but it's nice. Especially for my Klingon alt who I don't play enough to remember what the heck is what).

[Tannhauser]

The Doff missions are very cool.  I just did a mission where I sent a security team to confiscate contraband on my ship.  It was a critical success and returned two bottles of Romulan Ale.  

That hit me right in the squee-box.  

It's all I can do not to throw a bunch of money at the screen looking for elite deck officers.  I really like their traits and professions, gives them a sort of personality and individualizes them.

The only initial complaint I have is that it seems very hard to focus on one tree, like Diplomacy.  Each sector only seems to have a couple of missions.  Or maybe I'm missing something?  Is it possible to focus on raising one skill like this?  Seems designed to raise multiples at once.  

[Morat20]

You kinda raise them all at once, really. The DS9 sector (and it's surrounding ones) seem to be very good for trade and diplomacy missions, though. :)

Your officers can also generate missions for you, which is nice. I admit I threw some money at the game to up my doff limit (it's currently at 300, of which I have like 260 officers). Since they started charging out the ass, dilithium wise, for upgrading the things I've been slower to do so. I use the officer exchanges a lot to sorta try to trade up for free.

[Sir T]

YOu kinda have to travel around for diplomacy missions, and any other type of mission frankly. And there are exchange officer missions (one you have completed certain officer chains around the Cardassian/DS9 area) area which can give you higher grades of doffs, whioch is probably the best way to upgrade your whites and greens. And I've never ever had to upgrade my doff limits on any of my characters. 100 officers is fine for me :)

It sworth the expense to buy a blue officer if you are going into this though, they give +10% of the reward as a bonus and a higher chance of criting.

[Morat20]

YOu kinda have to travel around for diplomacy missions. And there are exchange officer missions which can give you higher grades. And I';ve never ever had to upgrade my doff limits on any of my characters. 100 officers is fine for me :)

I found I get way too annoyed if I run out of doffs when I need them. I really only need about 60 (not counting the 10 on duty), but it's like 5 whites to a green, 5 greens to a blue, etc....

I need to zip up some more greens into blues, though.

[Tannhauser]

Ok, is that a mission itself?  Because I haven't seen where you combine/trade doffs for new ones.

[Sir T]

Just be aware that if the Doff has the little Padlock symbolk its bound to you,. and you cant do anything like that with it. All you can do is dismiss it.

Perrsonally I dont really doo doff mission unless they net me 50 Dil so I'm pretty selective and The doffs I have are dewsigned to work with those missions. Also I so some high value doff missions as they are a good way to get fleet marks.

Ok, is that a mission itself?  Because I haven't seen where you combine/trade doffs for new ones.

Its at the personal officer in the academy and later the starbase onces its unlocked.. You can also split higher grade doffs into lower grade ones.

[Rishathra]

Apologies for not being specific, but if I tried to write it all down it would be a clusterfucked wall of text.  Basically, keep playing with the system and you will learn which missions are good/bad/worth it/not worth it to take.  It does favor the player raising multiple categories at once, so don't focus on just one, it would be wasteful.  Most of the assignments with the different colored background to them tend to be rather high payout, compared to most, so go for them if you can.

For those trying to expand/improve their roster, the colonization chains give good officers for completion, and the 4028 chain is also good.  When you finish it, it unlocks an assignment called Strike Against Fugitive Support Network, which shows up regularly, gives 2 contraband as a reward, and a dominion prisoner on a crit.  The prisoner can then be exchanged for a gamma quadrant doff, which is generally at least rare quality.  The duty officer exchanges used to be great, but the dilithium cost of it now is crippling imo, and I no longer do them.

[Sir T]

Have a read here for how to get the chains that set up Doff exchange missions and other things.

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Chain

Yes its a wall of text. That's why we don't want to spend the next year typing :D

[Morat20]

Once you're capped (level 4 commendation) on a type of mission, xp still builds up to a max of 150k. You can do a fleet doff mission (one for each type of doff mission) that takes 10k of that XP and gives you something like 75 fleet marks and maybe dilithium?

[Rishathra]

75-100 fleet marks and some expertise.

[Stormwaltz]

My favorite DOff mission - and I've only seen it ONCE since the system came online - was something about scanning a spatial rift. I critted and got a purple El-Aurian Bartender. o_O

If you can crit the mission "Raid Facility 4028 Safehouse," you can get a TON of rewards. 2-3 Commodities, about a half-dozen prisoners (one a blue or purple Vorta), and various bits of equipment.

[Morat20]

Hey, I wanna know what mission that is!

Gotta love the new bugs. Nothing says "fun" like having to join a PvE queue a half-dozen times before you can actually play it. (You join, engage the action, warp in, then warp right the heck out. Judging from the error message there appears to be a bug in the team formation or team check).

[Ginaz]

Been playing this a bit the past few days.  I like the new Klingon starting experience and the Romulan storyline has been pretty good so far.  My handle is @foshizzlle (yes, I know its stupid) if anyone wants to do something or throw a guild invite my way.

[Surlyboi]

Unlocked the Tal Shiar destroyer on a lockbox from a failed borg sector run. Jesus, it's fast. Transwarps through sector space at 20.15
 
There are some drawbacks, chief of which is you don't get any of the cool singularity core tricks you get with your standard Romulan ships and no cloak. The boff stations and the firepower you can kit it out with make up for that though.