>I'm seconding the couch potato here. There's no skill good enough that
>it warrants going past the yellow ranks, because there's a significant
>opportunity cost to doing so. You're pretty much always going to be
>better off buying up three green ranks of a different skill than three
>red ranks of the same skill.

As a rule of thumb, this is valid.

The exception that violates it is if you're specifically setting up an ultra-specialist build, as in the case of my Romulan Science captain, who runs the T'varo Full Spec with its fire-while-cloaked ability. The survivability boost from being basically unable to keep aggro far outweighs the loss of shields, I've found, but I'm also limited to torpedoes and mines only, which makes all of the shield-and-beam boosting skills useable only in those brief periods while my cloak is recharging after a Voth or something detoggles me...

...and even a Red rank in a torpedo or hull boosting power will be used constantly.

That said, Permacloak builds are the only thing I know of in the game that would be ignoring that many skills. Anywhere else, the rule of thumb holds.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."