Star Trek Online : A New and Unbroken Thread!

[Sir T]

Yeah, which is why people used to recommend only having 6 beams on your cruiser as the power drain after that meant you were actually losing damage. Also, you cant fire your torpedos on your target (with the exception of the 180 degree torp, which you got from a Zen ship)

The flaw basically comes from the old system where power came from your crew, and since cruisers had lots of crew they had lots of power so they could fire beams all day, wheras Escorts could not mount that amount of beams as their crews were aniemic. But then they changed the power system so every ship effectively had the same amount of power but did not revisit the weapons systems to compensate, so suddenly Cruisers lost out big on damage. Even when they could get someone into the 70 degrees "donut" around the ship, the sheer power advantage of escorts now that they were firing less weapons which caused a lesser drain on the capacitor, and those weapons did more damage as they were still balanced to the time that escorts had crappy power, meant that Escorts would win every time. Essentially The 3 beans that cruisers could generally bring on you were no match for the 3 100% full power cannons the escort/ Klingon ship could bring on, and that's not counting turrets.

[Kitsune]

This is true, if you want to beamboat effectively you need to have gear that reduces weapon energy consumption, either the cruiser aura or the Mogai console set or Nadion Inversion or just general power buffs or batteries.  But once you have it properly set up, a beamboat can target a 2513.6 km^3 volume of space around it, compared to the 159.43 km^3 spherical cone that a 45-degree cannon ship can target.  Additionally, the Romulan reputation beam doesn't consume weapon power, and the 360-degree Solanae beam is good to stick on a rear weapon slot to let you get more firepower in your front arc if you can't broadside for whatever reason.

Normally rainbow beaming is a terrible idea, but with the new Dyson spire consoles it's less terrible, as they give a decent +all beams damage buff.  Previously your only bet was to fit only a single energy type on the ship and fill your tactical slots with +energy damage consoles, and that's still the superior option, but if you can't do that for whatever reason, the +cannon or +beam consoles can at least make your build be not awful.

[Der Helm]

The game is suprisingly complex and the quests (so far I seem to be doing mostly the Romulan story arc and a few patrol missions if I pass close enough to a system).
I recently got promoted to sub-commander and noticed a significant decrease in my survivabilty. Turns out I had not trained my crew members at all and had neglected training my own skills as well.

Could somebody enlighen me why I can't access the sub-commander tier of skills yet ? Do I have to invest a certain ammount of skill points in lower tiers like for BO promotions ? Could I get an invite to the fleet please ? I noticed that most of the "engame" ships are fleet variants. :)

Oh, and I started to run the recruitment missions for Doffs, but I have no clue what their point is later on ? Just another path of advancement ? A few ship/ground boni ?

[Sir T]

leveling is a big issue. Your best bed is http://www.stoacademy.com/ which has some guides and whatnot. But right now note that you cannot skill up tot he next level till you have spent enough on the previous level. If you want to know what way to do yours, well I like ground combat so I pumped more into ground combat than others may ave , but this is the way I built my sci. Press the skill tree tab

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/?build=AtroxCarrier_1756

and my Eng who I pumped more of the space skills into.

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/?build=CardassianGalor_1756

Same with your Boffs (bridge officers), who also need to have their provious skills poosted up.

As for Doffs (Duty Officers) when you have then you just load them up to do missions which gains you XP , dil and credits. I'm sure people can send a load of them to you if you ask. You can technically level your character by just logging in and doing doff missions.

But read the guides. :)

Played today and noticed they have hugely increased the amount of dil requirements to combine Doffs into a higher level. Dammit :(

[Rishathra]

Der Helm, I sent you an invite, and mailed some doff packs to you.

[Riggswolfe]

To revisit the beam vs cannon issue,

One of the people in my fleet has a guide for loading an Armitage down with beams instead of cannons.I had the typical escort captain reaction "WTH are you smoking?". However, she is always in the top 3 damage dealers in any group event whether STF or PVP so maybe beams are actually somewhat practical for escorts now. She said what was already posted above, that being able to always hit compensated for the lower damage per shot.

[Der Helm]

Der Helm, I sent you an invite, and mailed some doff packs to you.

Thanks a lot, I could not even open every pack because I hit my 100 Doff limit. Is it worth to buy more slots ? I have about 1k of those cash shop points lying around.

[Sir T]

I'd see about getting higher quality Doffs before expanding your doff pool. better doffs means more chance of success plus bigger rewards from the mossions. The easist way is the combine doff missions at the recruitment center, but they cost a lot of Dilithium now.

[Rishathra]

I'd say it is still worthwhile to convert a few groups of extra whites you have to greens, but take it easy, because it is a pretty expensive process.  Once your roster matures a bit and you have the infrastructure set up for you to acquire more high quality doffs, you will want to get the 100 slot upgrade.  Trust me, 25 is not enough.

[Merusk]

I send useless Doffs to Fleet projects.  Since I'm in a spam-invite Fleet they fill up everything but Dilithium and Doffs within a few hours of starting a project so that's how I make fleet credits.

[Torinak]

I hit max level and am suddenly having major problems with most space missions. I fly an Assault Cruiser with mostly tier X/XI weapons (phaser beams and turrets, photon torpedos with matching consoles), but routinely run into opposition in groups of 3 where each one is much tougher than my ship (there have been some Romulan ships where I literally never got their shields below 20%, and only killed them via bleed-through damage). What should I be doing? Different weapons? Different ship?

[Stokowski]

Have you (re-)run the current featured episode for the lovely unique purple Shield, Engine, Deflector etc.?
It's probably too late in the month to get enough Qmendations for the full ship, but that also unlocks the 4th device, the Overcharged Warp Core. The full set is very good in any vessel.

If you are lacking in Kinetic damage consider picking up the Kinetic Cutting Beam, via Omega reputation, and/or a level XI Hargh'peng torpedo launcher via the replayable mission, the Doomsday Device.

Are you using Directed Energy Modulation to help punch through shields?

Have you got your Bridge Officers all trained up with effective skills?

It's best to stack a single damage type/delivery system wherever possible. e.g.:
 (Phaser Beam + Phaser Beam + Phaser Relay + Phaser Relay) > (Phaser Beam + Disruptor Cannon + Phaser Relay + Prefire Chamber)

The Assault Cruiser is a decent vessel, although in the long term you may want to look to upgrade via a fleet version or something similar.

Don't panic, because it is not that unusual for there to seem to be a difficulty spike when you first hit 50, because the enemies are about as tough as they will ever get* ... but there's a long (potentially quite grindy) haul before a player can max-out their equipment and weaponry. While the baddies have hit their ceiling, a newly minted level 50 player still has some way to go. Don't worry too much.

* a bit of a generalisation, some later missions and events are indeed quite ... @!#%$^&* ... but in the normal course of play this holds true.

[Morat20]

How do you get the Warp Core?

[Stokowski]

Warp Core ONLY comes with the ship, which takes 1000 Qmendations to unlock. Once you have the ship however, you can take out the Warp Core and use it anywhere.

[Morat20]

Warp Core ONLY comes with the ship, which takes 1000 Qmendations to unlock. Once you have the ship however, you can take out the Warp Core and use it anywhere.

Ah, just got that today but didn't unbox it.

[Sir T]

I hit max level and am suddenly having major problems with most space missions. I fly an Assault Cruiser with mostly tier X/XI weapons (phaser beams and turrets, photon torpedos with matching consoles), but routinely run into opposition in groups of 3 where each one is much tougher than my ship (there have been some Romulan ships where I literally never got their shields below 20%, and only killed them via bleed-through damage). What should I be doing? Different weapons? Different ship?

Are you sure you have your weapons on autofire? Right click on your weapons in the weapons console and they will all turn green. That means they will fire automaticly when the enemy is in they arc.

Make sure you have one type of beam (phaser, disrupter, etc. whichever one you fancy) and you have your tactical slots filled with that type of damage boost. White ones are fine and cheap.

Set your power ratios to about 80%-90% weapon power and then fiddle with the rest to taste. Having a weapon boost console or power boosting console is a good thing too.

[Tyrnan]

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1028261

Seems I wasn't far off in my estimation:

IMPORTANT NOTE: All nine Advanced Dyson Science Destroyers are available in the C-Store for individual sale (2,500 ZEN) or as a 3-pack factional bundle (5,000 ZEN; over 33% savings!). As each faction has their own 3-pack bundle of Advanced Dyson Science Destroyers, for even more savings, you can choose to purchase all 9 ships in a 9-pack bundle (10,000 ZEN; over 55% savings!). Purchasing any one of the 9 ships individually, or any one of the 3-pack bundles, will make the account ineligible to purchase the 9-pack bundle. Also, purchasing one of the factional ships individually will make the account ineligible to purchase that faction’s 3-pack bundle. Once the 9-pack bundle is purchased, the individual faction appropriate ships become available to claim on each character on your account via the C-Store.

So that's around €50 for a single faction or all 3 factions for the "bargain" price of €100...

[Merusk]

I've not seen anything but bitching about the Dyson ships and how "terrible" they are.  "They don't DPS, they don't work well as Science since they're so fragile and only have 9 consoles" was the bitch from the guy in fleet chat yesterday.

I'll agree with the fragility of the freebie, but you're not supposed to get aggro in it, you're not a tank.

[Tyrnan]

I haven't flown one outside the FE episode. Are they really that fragile?  I could see me maybe picking up the Romulan pack (with the "free" Zen from my LTS since it's almost back to 5k after getting the Vest pack last year) since they still seem to be oddly science light.  But the fact that it doesn't come with the secondary deflector to complete the set would probably annoy me every time I flew it.

[Merusk]

I'm only a casual player and not doing any extensive number crunching on it, but they felt that way to me.   They only have two eng. consoles, so they're going to be more fragile based on that alone.  I was doing an all-cannon/ turret/ 360 device build on it and going POP very frequently because I drew aggro.

Which leads to another problem. They're a hybrid, but don't allow for that properly.  Tactical mode enables the perma-fixed forward cannon, but the ship has several Beam-Only "subsystem targeting" abilities that can take enemy ship systems offline.  Meaning you're going to be sub-optimal on DPS or have a useless cannon slot on your science ship.

It *really* seems like what you're supposed to do is equip all of the systems from the featured content and then incorporate the Dyson reputation weapons.  However I haven't found anyone who's done so and reported back how successful it is.

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Solanae_Class
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Experimental_Proton_Weapon#Experimental_Proton_Weapon
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Solanae_Hybrid_Technologies

[Tyrnan]

Thanks for the info.  The Dyson set does sound like it could be interesting in conjunction with the ship.  But I've only managed to get one character to the point of almost completing the Romulan rep, and that was only because Epoh tagging was so easy.  There's no way I'd start another rep grind.

Guess I'll just hold onto the Zen for now and hope there's something worth spending it on in the future.

[Merusk]

Dyson rep grind is super, super easy compared to the others.  I finished it on my Fed and now I'm working on the last segment for my Rommie.  Meanwhile, I crapped out at Tier 2 of the other grinds because farming for tokens is such bullshit, then you need to farm for even more to unlock the store items or special construction? Fuck. That.

Dyson is this: Login to Sphere Space, do a daily that takes 4-10 mins, get a once-every-19-hours token.  Or run a Dyson mission instance in a group for a token.  Apply that token to the rep project for 2,000 rep.  Repeat for a few months.  That's it. 

Store unlocks all items as you go, and the only projects are the actual set weapons and consoles. They should mod all the other bullshit reps to the same system.

[Tyrnan]

Oh ok that sounds like it should be doable.  Do you get one of those "make this shit faster for my alts" things when you max it or is that just for the shittier ones?

[Surlyboi]

I got to Dyson tier V in a week. It took two months to do that for Omega rep.

I've also done the full Dyson load out on my Rommie's Dyson ship and it's still sub-par compared to both the adapted destroyer and the defiant retrofit.

[Kitsune]

The Dyson science ships suck.  If you want a science ship, you're vastly better off picking a badass science ship like a Vesta.  If you want an escort, pretty much every free endgame escort is superior.  Its whole gimmick transforms you from an inferior science ship to an inferior escort, woo boy.  The hulls themselves are mediocre for the $$$ versions, and flatly subpar for the free ones you get from grinding the event.

The consoles on the zen ships are pretty powerful, but to get them you have to drop from $50 to $100, and they then take up 30% of your available console space that you could be using for permanent buffs.  If for some reason you have a huge nerd boner over the appearance of the ships and are sitting on a pile of money, then sure, drop the benjamin for them, stick on the gimmick clicky consoles, and have fun.  But if you aren't super thrilled by the prospect of flying around in one and just want a powerful ship, save your cash.

[Tyrnan]

I got to Dyson tier V in a week. It took two months to do that for Omega rep.

I've also done the full Dyson load out on my Rommie's Dyson ship and it's still sub-par compared to both the adapted destroyer and the defiant retrofit.

From grinding the missions I assume?  How pugable are they?  I hardly even group in this game but that might be the incentive I need.

The Dyson science ships suck.  If you want a science ship, you're vastly better off picking a badass science ship like a Vesta.  If you want an escort, pretty much every free endgame escort is superior.  Its whole gimmick transforms you from an inferior science ship to an inferior escort, woo boy.  The hulls themselves are mediocre for the $$$ versions, and flatly subpar for the free ones you get from grinding the event.

The consoles on the zen ships are pretty powerful, but to get them you have to drop from $50 to $100, and they then take up 30% of your available console space that you could be using for permanent buffs.  If for some reason you have a huge nerd boner over the appearance of the ships and are sitting on a pile of money, then sure, drop the benjamin for them, stick on the gimmick clicky consoles, and have fun.  But if you aren't super thrilled by the prospect of flying around in one and just want a powerful ship, save your cash.

Yeah I already have the Vesta pack for my Fed toons, I was just looking for something science-y for my Rom if I ever get around to finishing leveling her.  And the Rom version of the Dyson looks OK to me (the Fed one is terrible!) but that's definitely not enough to make me shell out if it's a sub-par ship.

[Stormwaltz]

I got to Dyson tier V in a week. It took two months to do that for Omega rep.

I've been playing the same character since beta, and she's still at Tier II Omega. 

[Sir T]

I run my fleet D'Deridex with my Rommie sci (I bought both Ships with the D'Deridex Consoles) and it works fine and I find it very enjoyable. You can try the Mirror Universe Ha'nom Guardian Warbird from the exchange as well as its a proper sci ship.

Basically, take your pick from this list

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Romulan_playable_starship

Anyway, yep, I love the look of the Rommie Dyson ship, but nothing I have seen makes me long to buy the thing.

[Merusk]

Yeah I already have the Vesta pack for my Fed toons, I was just looking for something science-y for my Rom if I ever get around to finishing leveling her.  And the Rom version of the Dyson looks OK to me (the Fed one is terrible!) but that's definitely not enough to make me shell out if it's a sub-par ship.

Yeah, the problem is that there's only 2 science ships for Roms.  The Dyson and the Ha'nom.  So folks were really excited to see the Dyson and are understandably disappointed its so lackluster.

[Sir T]

Don't forget the Rmor Temporal science ship if you have a few tens of millions to throw away! 

http://sto.gamepedia.com/R%27Mor_Temporal_Science_Vessel

[Tyrnan]

I run my fleet D'Deridex with my Rommie sci (I bought both Ships with the D'Deridex Consoles) and it works fine and I find it very enjoyable. You can try the Mirror Universe Ha'nom Guardian Warbird from the exchange as well as its a proper sci ship.

Basically, take your pick from this list

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Romulan_playable_starship

Anyway, yep, I love the look of the Rommie Dyson ship, but nothing I have seen makes me long to buy the thing.

I play the game very sporadically, usually for maybe a month and then fuck off for a year or so, so I've never had a fleet anything.  I have the legacy pack though so I guess the D'Deridex Retrofit should work nearly as well.

Yeah, the problem is that there's only 2 science ships for Roms.  The Dyson and the Ha'nom.  So folks were really excited to see the Dyson and are understandably disappointed its so lackluster.

Yep, I thought the Rommie temporal science ship might be a possibility until I looked at it and realised it's just the Wells with a different skin.

[Sir T]

Yeah, I was debating even mentioning the "fleet" part. All the fleet part does is add an engi console. I was playing with the standard D'D retrofit for a month and I was perfectly happy with it on my sci. I just got the fleet one on a whim as I had the zen and marks handy. But the standard D'D retrofit will work absolutely fine for your sci.

I do recommend getting the console from the D'ridthau as well though, as the turning boost from the D'D set makes the D'D Retrofit more enjoyable to fly, and the abilities are useful. Its an extra 1500 zen but if you are going to spend the cash you might as well do it right.

*Edit* oh, you have the legacy pack? Well hey forget I said that then, just strap on those 2 consoles!

[Tyrnan]

Sounds like a plan.  Now I just need to find the time to actually play the damn game! 

[Kitsune]

Science is generally a poor option for non-Feds, as essentially their entire fleet is specialized to other purposes.  Faffing about with the few abilities of a science ship will get you worse results than focusing on your cloaking and singularity boosts for Romulans, and the buff auras for Klingon battlecruisers are also generally more useful.

The only science ship I consider to be worth the trouble is the Vesta, and then only because it's also a carrier, has very good clicky console powers, and can be buffed to an escort's turn rate to go with the unique heavy cannons it carries.  It requires a pretty specific build to be able to make use of all of its features, however.  The phaser aux cannons in front, phaser turrets in back, the 360-degree Dyson beam in back to let you use the subsystem targeting powers, as many phaser damage boosting consoles as it will fit, and turnrate boosting consoles until the thing is zippy enough to actually keep the cannons on an opponent.  Some people dump the aux cannons completely and fit it as a beamboat, but having half of your guns draw from auxiliary power instead of draining your weapon power is an advantage that I didn't want to ignore.

[Der Helm]

So, I made it to level 50. Fun ride, much more enjoyable than I thought it would be in the beginning. Now what the fuck do I do. I guess I have quite a lot of missions I never even started because I almost exclusively followed the main story arc for Romulans. I am flying the Ha'fe Assault warbird. How do I go about getting some nice upgrades, there are so many options. 

I guess I have 2-3 goals right now.
1. Fitting out my actual warbird.
2. Try some PvP (don't stone me)
3. Getting a D'deridex or Ha' a pax  warbird (and trying a beam based DPS build because that sounds like fun if it can be done)

But how ? Which factions ? How do I dilithium ? Fleet marks ? Wtf ... Haelp!