Star Trek Online : A New and Unbroken Thread!

[Sir T]

If you want to spend some money, the Haakona could be interesting for a Tac as with the universal slot you can have 3 Tactical boffs running, and its pretty maneuverable once it splits. I might try that myself.

You can try PVP if you want... You will understand once you do... Heh heh.  

As for Dil, there are quite a few ways to get it. STFs, running "hand in Contraband" doff missions, doff missions themselves and mining are the main ways, and you can get quite a bit from running doff missions that give you 50 dilithium. You can only "refine" 8000 a day per character, but you can swap dil between chars using the Dil exchange.

To be honest, I have quite a few characters, and I used to get a ton of it simply by going through them all and just setting up Doff missions.

[Rishathra]

Outfitting your ship:
Remember a few things in regard to this.  It can be a long process (I have one, maybe two of my alts who are near maxed out gear-wise, and I've been at this since beta), and the difference between good gear and the best gear is small, smaller than in most mmo's I would say.  That is not to say it isn't worthwhile, but you will function just fine in pretty much all of the game's content even with relatively basic gear.  The good stuff just makes it go more smoothly.

So, to start off, make sure you have at least mark XI gear across the board.  Go to the exchange and buy up all the blue/green stuff you can afford.  It's all quite cheap, but if you need help there, let us know.  Higher end stuff comes from multiple sources like reputation and certain mission replays.  The Omega rep ship equipment is still among the best you can get, but in the meantime, the Solanae ship gear you can get from replaying A Step Between Stars is quite good for a starter set.

What weapon type should you use?  The answer is whichever one you find prettiest.  Antiproton and Romulan plasma are generally considered the best, but if you just loooove the way tetryon beams look, you aren't gimping yourself by any great deal.  Choosing weapon damage type has greater importance in pvp, but I have no real experience there.

Fleet gear is very good, but try not to buy it from our store.  Instead, get an invite to a high ranking fleet's starbase and get the good stuff from them.  The way fleet provisioning works is that even when you buy from another fleet's starbase, you draw provisions from your own.  Many high ranking fleets will let you on their base for free, as it costs them nothing to do so.  There are even chat channels specifically for this.  Ships are the sole exception.  To buy the high end ships, you have to be a member of that fleet.

PvP:
Can't help you there.

Beam boats:
They are quite fun, and satisfying to play.  I'm a bit rusty on specific builds or what the current FOTM is, but you can look all that stuff up.

Which factions?  Well, if you only have one or two characters, all of them.  You get a slew of passive abilities for going up the ranks in the different ones.  I recommend going to at least tier 2 in everything.  For Omega, learn Infected Space Elite.  It gets boring after a while, but it is quick, straightforward, and puggable.  For Romulan, breed epohhs.  The time to mark ratio just can't be beat.  It takes a few days for your breeding process to come up to speed, but then the marks start flowing.  Nukara rep is a pain.  I leveled all my alts by getting reputation packs from the summer and winter events.  Dyson rep is a breeze.  All you have to do is a five minute solo mission once a day and you can slot a daily xp project.

Here's how you dilithium.  Roll a Klingon alt.  Run marauding duty officer assignments.  Get stacks of contraband.  Mail some to your fed character.  Have everyone turn in contraband for dilithium.  Profit.  Also, do the daily trivia mission at the academy.  A few seconds of work gets you an easy 480 dilithium.  Using the dilithium exchange, you can trade dilithium between alts as well.

I'd say the most straightforward way to earn fleet marks is to do the Colony Invasion instance.  There's also a defend the starbase space instance.  I forget the name of it.

I could go on for pages about any one of these topics, so I'll just stop here and say whatever specific question you might have in the future, I can probably give you an answer.

Edit:  Another way to get yourself geared up in mark XI is do do mission replays, as the rewards scale to your level.  But unless you really really enjoy doing them, just know that I would be happy to float a few hundred thousand EC your way instead.

[Sir T]

All I can add is that if you are experimenting stick to white mark XI gear as it will cost you basicly nothing, but Mark XI is a minimum for the top end content. Better is better of course but you wont embarrass yourself with that. I would certainly only get the white weapon boost consoles for now as they can get pretty damn expensive for even green quality ones.

For getting stuff that costs you nothing, there is a list of all the mission rewards here

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Mission_rewards

Pick what you want and repeat that mission till you get all you want. Now that you are max level it will all be mark XI

Oh and the acadamy question and answer thing is easy if you cheat and look up the answer here    http://sto.gamepedia.com/Lore

[Father mike]

two things:

1.  Many thanks for all the excellent info folks have posted over the past few days.   But ... when folks say, "if you want to know more,you can look it up."  Where do I go?  most of the sources  I find are over 18 months old.  Does the game just not change very much, or am I just failing at google that badly?

2.  Anyone taking bets on whether or not the expanded inventory going in soon means the end of using mail as unlimited storage?

[Sir T]

The STO wiki is a pretty decent source for all things STO. It may not be 100% up to date in parts but frankly the horror of updating stuff patch after patch would kind of thankless. Anyway it should be accurate enough to give you the nessesery info to puzzle out any inconsistencies for yourself.

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Main_Page

[Surlyboi]

I'm sitting on an assload of mirror ships and about half a billion EC, if you need gear or cash, let me know.

[Rishathra]

There should be a few mirror ships in the fleet bank as well.  No Romulan ones, though.  I'll look into fixing that this evening.

[Surlyboi]

I left a bunch of warbirds in the fleet bank. Go nuts.

[Merusk]

How close to Tier2 Spire is the F13 fleet?  My rommy's been donating to her current fleet projects but despite this I'm still stuck at a "can't use fleet requisitions" rank. At this point it looks like it's a vanity fleet for the leader to funnel all the reqs to his 9 characters, so fuck that.   I'm aiming for the Fleet 1000-day ship as I've found the regular version fun and want the extra survivability.

[Rishathra]

The project for Tier 1 is up right now, but not completed yet.  I don't see us ever getting to Tier 2, frankly.  There's just not enough of us actively playing to be able to contribute enough to get us that far.  That being said, I try to keep us provisioned so that we can score invites to better starbases and buy their stuff!

[Morat20]

The project for Tier 1 is up right now, but not completed yet.  I don't see us ever getting to Tier 2, frankly.  There's just not enough of us actively playing to be able to contribute enough to get us that far.  That being said, I try to keep us provisioned so that we can score invites to better starbases and buy their stuff!

I gave until it hurt, man. :)

[Sir T]

I tried playing last night, but it was totally unplayable for me. My internet seems to have gotten worse since I played it last.

[Surlyboi]

The project for Tier 1 is up right now, but not completed yet.  I don't see us ever getting to Tier 2, frankly.  There's just not enough of us actively playing to be able to contribute enough to get us that far.  That being said, I try to keep us provisioned so that we can score invites to better starbases and buy their stuff!

I gave until it hurt, man. :)

I'm still giving 'til it hurts, at least, dil-wise. I could run more missions for fleet marks, but I'm preoccupied with Omega/MACO shit at the moment.

[Morat20]

The project for Tier 1 is up right now, but not completed yet.  I don't see us ever getting to Tier 2, frankly.  There's just not enough of us actively playing to be able to contribute enough to get us that far.  That being said, I try to keep us provisioned so that we can score invites to better starbases and buy their stuff!

I gave until it hurt, man. :)

I'm still giving 'til it hurts, at least, dil-wise. I could run more missions for fleet marks, but I'm preoccupied with Omega/MACO shit at the moment.

I've got the Mark XII Omega space set queued up (got the Mark XI on my ship), and everything paid for but the dilithium. I love the Christmas event for the Epohh breeding, got me to T5 Dyson, and paid for the Marks for the Omega Mk XII weapons, the Romulan prototype Mk XII weapon and engine set...

[Rishathra]

To be clear, my statement wasn't meant as, "why aren't you assholes contributing more?!"  However, the requirements for the Tier 2 projects ramp up considerably, and my fleet marks are dwindling rapidly as it is.  Realistically, a fleet our size can't really hope for much more than we got, unless everyone got on every day and ground out multiple alts, and then funneled everything into the starbase.  That would just be silly and unfun.

The good news is that for everything but ships, it doesn't matter.  Get an invite to a big base, and you're set.

[Torinak]

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions in this thread. After paying a bit more attention to BOff skills (being able to clear debuffs is helpful), and some minor ship gear upgrades, I'm finding most lvl 50 missions a lot more doable. The big Romulan ships still cause problems (stupid tractor beam + 3 plasma torpedos at point-blank range), and I can't really tank borg cubes. I'm still in an Assault Cruiser; what should I be aiming for next as a Fed Engineer?

What types of ships/loadouts are people using to take out a borg cube in ~15-20 seconds? I've seen a Scimitar do it, but also some tiny Fed (?) ships. I haven't been able to click on any of them yet to ID them.

I've found most ground missions pretty easy, or completely impossible (one guy who one-shots the entire party). I gave one of my BOffs an old Fire Suppression Device just to get it out of my inventory, and she runs around spraying it everywhere...which seems to clear any debuff. Am I imagining things, or is it really as good as its tooltip suggests? ("Extinguishes Fires. Removes up to 100 bleed or debuff effects")

[Morat20]

IIRC, the "blow a borg cube up in seconds" is called "a tactics guy blowing ALL his cooldowns simultaneously".

My main's an engineer.  The ship I fly the most is the stock Recon Science Vessel -- the one you can outright just get for your last free ship.

Admittedly, I've given it lots of nice things (I'm currently outfitting the Breen vessel from 2012's event as a cannon boat), and my officers are well trained  -- but it's a nice sturdy ship, and it does fine against Borg.

I previously was flying it as a pure Beam/Photon torpedo boat, and it did solidly even before I started buying the Mark XII fleet phaser arrays and photon launchers.

[Merusk]

IIRC, the "blow a borg cube up in seconds" is called "a tactics guy blowing ALL his cooldowns simultaneously".

With fleet gear in a 5 tac-console ship and Doffs/ Boffs all focused on that purpose.

Seriously, I've been in groups with guys who explode shit like I'm using Mk1 gear.  I've resigned myself to knowing I'll never, ever be that Uber and am ok with it now.

[Morat20]

IIRC, the "blow a borg cube up in seconds" is called "a tactics guy blowing ALL his cooldowns simultaneously".

With fleet gear in a 5 tac-console ship and Doffs/ Boffs all focused on that purpose.

Seriously, I've been in groups with guys who explode shit like I'm using Mk1 gear.  I've resigned myself to knowing I'll never, ever be that Uber and am ok with it now.

I admit, grabbing the Romulan Plasma Balls of Death has helped my damage a bit. :) I'm running Plasma Ball of Death, Prototype Plasma Beam, and the Borg Plasma Torpedo thingy on the front, then two plasma beams and the kinetic cutting beam on the back.

Most of my consoles support that, of course. :) Some good choice of space doffs help with my gravity wells and tractors (it's lovely to see a shield collapse under my tractor beam, then a overcharged plasma torpedo hit it), and I do allright. But I was doing fine with mixed blues and greens from just hitting 50.

[Sir T]

What types of ships/loadouts are people using to take out a borg cube in ~15-20 seconds? I've seen a Scimitar do it, but also some tiny Fed (?) ships. I haven't been able to click on any of them yet to ID them.

They are probably Defiants or fleet Defiants. Fleet Defiants have 5 tactical slots for uber damage.

For ship boff powers I would have Attack pattern Beta at least. That reduces the resistances of the thing you are shooting at, ergo more damage from both you and your team your team. I'd also have auxiliary power to structural as its a fast cycling hull heal and it increases your hull resistances for10 seconds.  Emergency power to engines is a good alternitive as it gives you a massive speed boost to get out of trouble or into trouble depending on the situation. Emergency power to shields is also a good one. Aside from that its really up to you what you like.

[Surlyboi]

I've always seen fleet defiants do it. And the occasional super tricked-out Andorian escort. I put out a shitload of damage with my current setup, but I get wtfpwned by Kumaris.

My current setup looks like this:



That's a quad cannon, Omega torp, Voth wide-angle chroniton/transphasic torp and a fleet dual heavy antiproton cannon up front, Dyson experimental (Skeet) cannon, kinetic cutting beam and Breen transphasic cluster torpedo in the back. Full tron set of shield, deflector, impulse (thanks Rish) and full Omega, Dyson and tal-shiar adapted console loadouts. I'll drop a cube in about 45 seconds.

[Tyrnan]

So I got my Rommie to 50 over the weekend and got my D'd retrofit and it's a damn nice ship, thanks for suggesting it.  Currently have it set up Tac heavy since I'm soloing but it can still take a good amount of punishment and dish it right back out.  Did GW get a buff or something recently?  Even with just the rank 1 version it seems to be holding stuff in place much better than I remember.  Although I really wish it and Projected Singularity didn't share a cooldown.

Also gave the Haakona a go since I thought it would be nice to pilot the tactical vector, for a change of pace, with a healing pet in tow.  But the pet AI is completely fucking retarded.  It either lags 20km behind me or tries to hump me, constantly doing 180 degree flips.  It Singularity Jumps at the start of battles when there's nothing near it.  In about half a dozen missions it used a grand total of one heal on me.  And to top it all off it must be the only Rommie ship that can't cloak!  I know the MVAE pets weren't exactly smart but I don't remember them being quite so bad.

Edit: Oh and the Dyson rep is an absolute joy compared to the others.  Spent a couple of hours in the battlezone tonight and actually had fun in ground combat for the first time in years.  Not to mention earning ~800 marks, 20 implants and a shitload of dil while doing it.  I really hope any future rep grinds are more like this.

[Merusk]

Holy shit you earned that many marks in ground in the battlezone?  Fuck, I've been doing space PvE. Lozar is me.

I picked-up the Rommie Dreadnaught pack because *zen sale*    Having a fun time but it's so damn large it feels like a whale, despite being as nimble as the smaller ships.

[Tyrnan]

Yeah I was reading some threads on the forums where people were complaining about how grindy getting the marks were.  They were doing the PvE queues and a lot of people suggested the battlezone instead so I figured I'd check it out.  Considering I wasn't teamed and hadn't a clue what I was doing in the beginning I think the rewards were pretty damn good.  Just try and find capture points where there's at least another player or two unless you have uber gear as some of the mobs hit like a truck.

Oh and enjoy knocking small moons out of orbit with that dread! 

[Stormwaltz]

The battlezones are severely hit or miss. If you can join the zerg, you rake it in. If you can't reach the zerg, you spend 30-45 minutes dying repeatedly and leave with almost nothing to show for it.

I've tried them a few times, and I just don't like them much. Also "ground combat sucks" and whatnot. (It's better than it was, but... yeah.)

[Kitsune]

If I were you, I'd switch weapons to a more uniform damage type and drop some of the gimmick consoles to free up room in the tactical slots to buff that one damage type.  You have an entire box of lucky charms equipped in your weapon slots, which is making you give up on the doubled damage you could be doing if you had your weapons of a single energy flavor and used your four tac consoles to boost that one flavor.

[Morat20]

I can't decide whether to boost plasma beams or plasma torpedoes. Does the Borg torpedo launcher count as plasma?

So I split it -- half go to plasma beams, half go to plasma projectile damage.

[Surlyboi]

If I were you, I'd switch weapons to a more uniform damage type and drop some of the gimmick consoles to free up room in the tactical slots to buff that one damage type.  You have an entire box of lucky charms equipped in your weapon slots, which is making you give up on the doubled damage you could be doing if you had your weapons of a single energy flavor and used your four tac consoles to boost that one flavor.

Each of those lucky charms contributes to the trick consoles and gives me a fuckton more survivability. I've got a fleet defiant now that's all one flavor and it's gotten rocked every time I've taken it out so far. The damage is a lot higher, yes but it folds like a poker player with a handful of garbage. I'll try to refit the destroyer with all one type of damage and see what I can get with that.

[Sir T]

Since we are on the subject of loadouts, and the pwerson asking was using an assault cruiser, heres mine for my Galaxy Retrofit that might be more appropriate


The single grean beam is becasue I'm ising the Phaser disruptor hybrids from the Galor class and I never bothers spending the dil for the last beam. Its the fleet variant so theres an extra eng slot, but the important thing is the 3 neutronium and the RCS console. A similar setup in any fed cruiser will walk through STFs. Its simple but effective.

One thing you are probably not aware of is Kaybinds. Thats why I am showing slot number 7 in the pic. Keybinds are a way to program a series of things to happen when you press a key. The one I use is a very simple one from here

http://hilbertguide.com/

Skip down the page till you get to keybinds, where he expplains how to use it( The rest of it is pretty out of date but interesting to read nonethaless). Its basiucly download a file and put it into your sto folder, type a command in game and you are set. The one I use equilises the shields and runs a command in sequence when I press the space bar. The commands are ones you put intu tray 7. For example, If I had 2 tactical teams and 2 EPTS in the tray, it will fire each of them in sequence as I press the space bar every second or 2, making my shields react to incoming fire AND punmping power into my shields almost constantly. As you can tell this makea LOT of difference to my survivability. You have to keep pressing the spacebar as itwill only fire one of the commands at once, but its no great hardship.

[Tyrnan]

I keep forgetting this game uses a modified CoH engine and the same bind system, will have to look into that.  And since we're on loadouts I guess I should get some opinions on where to go with mine.


I'm currently using the Polarized Tetryons because a) they're easy to get and b) I wanted to see if the increased proc was any good (I've never really noticed it make much of a difference so maybe it's still bugged?).  But I was thinking of two other possible short-term loadouts until I'm finished with the Rom rep and see if I want to go with that set instead.

1. Antiprotons using the Omni one and either the blues from the rerun or some off the exchange.  Although the only ones that seem to be on the exchange are the Voth ones, are they decent?  My crit chance in space is only showing up as 6% but I assume that gets modified further by stuff like weapon mods and acc overflow?  I might have missed some SRO boffs as I leveled as I never really paid much attention to their traits 

2. Some flavour of Disruptors for the proc (would that hit any sort of dimishing returns with APB?) and because they look more Romulan.  Was thinking of maybe using the Bio-molecular warheads since they're the green photons (right?) for the same reason.  Does anyone know if the increased photon damage from stuff like the Dyson set affects them?

Willing to look at other shield/engine/deflector sets too, as long as they don't involve Task Force Omega (I've never done an STF and likely never will and there's no way I'm grinding to T5 in that ground zone!).  I'm just using the Dyson one for now since it's MK XII and was easy to get.

Fake edit: 9% base crit now since I just finished Rom Tier 2 

[Sir T]

To be honest, I always seem to go back to the Aegis set.

[Rishathra]

Voth antiprotons are decent, but overpriced due to limited availability.  If you find one at a reasonable price then sure, grab it.  The bio-molecular warhead is basically a green photon with a damage boost against Undine.  It's a solid torpedo, especially if you want to keep that Romulan feel.  Anything that boosts photon damage affects them.  The disruptor proc is one of the best ones, and it stacks with APB, so little to no diminishing returns.

You thought you got Omega rep from that ground zone?  Good God man!  Omega ground missions are done for fun, and almost nothing else.  If you are looking to grind marks either wait for the Summer/Winter events or do space instances.  One instance of Infected: The Conduit (Elite) a day and you've made enough marks to complete both daily xp projects and still save a little extra.

[Tyrnan]

You thought you got Omega rep from that ground zone?  Good God man!  Omega ground missions are done for fun, and almost nothing else.  If you are looking to grind marks either wait for the Summer/Winter events or do space instances.  One instance of Infected: The Conduit (Elite) a day and you've made enough marks to complete both daily xp projects and still save a little extra.

Oh trust me I know the ground zone would be a horrendous way to do the rep grind, I just seem to have an intense aversion to PUGs (CoH was the only game I ever really enjoyed PUGing in, every other game I always seem to get the GOGOGOGO/ragequitter crowd) and/or STFs.

[Surlyboi]

I've found that if you get a good PUG for infected: The Conduit Elite or The Cure: Found Elite, you can get your daily dose of Omega marks in about a half hour, tops.

[Merusk]

And if not you'll waste about an hour before you get the marks as people suicide rush the whole thing.  Either way, ~65 marks for less headaches.