--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu

Also mines in general are bad because it's a whole weapon slot that's contributing pretty much nothing to your DPS most of the time. If you're in a beamboat, the time you spend getting your mines in place means that some of your arrays won't be hitting the enemy, and in a cannonboat, it's -1 turret slot that could be banging away at someone.

Look at it this way: what's more useful, some mines that might hit an enemy every minute or so, or ~150-200 more DPS from a cannon turret/beam array?

e: Here's my current setup (to view it, log into your own gateway and replace your name up top with mine): http://gateway.startrekonline.com/#char%28T%27Troika@-Troika-%29/ship-equipment

Depends on which you enjoy more. I'm currently having fun making my Mogh class battlecruiser act like Reboot!Enterprise, Dakka for all!

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

As a Mine User, I can attest that this factually wrong.

>and furthermore, because they take up tactical bridge officer slots
>that could be better used for things like cannon rapid fire, beam fire
>at will, and attack patterns.

I avoid mixing energy weapon types and have had very little luck or value from attack patterns, so this is hardly a hardship.

>Also mines in general are bad because it's a whole weapon slot that's
>contributing pretty much nothing to your DPS most of the time. If
>you're in a beamboat, the time you spend getting your mines in place
>means that some of your arrays won't be hitting the enemy, and in a
>cannonboat, it's -1 turret slot that could be banging away at someone.

As I said; mines do need to have their relevant bridge officer powers leveraged properly to really shine.

>Look at it this way: what's more useful, some mines that might hit an
>enemy every minute or so, or ~150-200 more DPS from a cannon
>turret/beam array?

I get a lot more use out of the ability to make half of a Galor's HP go away in a single pass, myself.

Edit: Wait, OK, lemme math out why you're wrong. A single common Transphasic Mine Mk XI, like I've got, does 1,177 damage before skill boosts (maxed, in my case, but not directly relevant to the discussion.) 80% shield penetration means it's going to do.... 942 through the target's shields. Dispersal Beta 3 means that a full-dress mine drop is sixteen of these; a total of 15,072 damage, assuming that you drop a torpedo or two on the victim to distract him from trying to zarch them, which is easy.

The limiting recharge factor is the timer on Dispersal Beta 3, which is 30 seconds. More, the positioning condition for laying the mines is much easier than that for the vaunted heavy cannons; you just need to be in the right area, rather than flying at a particular angle. The calculated max DPS of ~500 is actually achievable, which I've never found to be the case with cannons, is what I'm saying, especially if you want to account for the fact that Transphasic base damage is actually lousy and trade up to quantums or something.

A buddy of mine who's played with Tricobalt mines reports that a dispersal-boosted drop of those things will cook the likes of an Undine Dreadnought.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

And this from the guy who as noted in another thread routinely curbstomps fleet actions with a burst-AoE kitted Vesta. V and another player from our usual circle who also is a mine-happy maniac routinely killinate everything. My usual tactic when flying with them is to become a support boat and just spam Grav Well III for them to drop mines and Fuzzies on.

I'm not sure what deep magic they're doing to pull it off, but they do.

--sofaspud
--

I fire phasers and try to stay outside the Fuzzies blast radius. I don't always succeed.

"Fuzzy out!"
"V, friendly fire isn't!"

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

And when I ditched Fire at Will in favor of dispersal patern Beta my lethality only improved. Sooner or later those mines WILL hit and will in general ruin the enemies day. Fire at will has a nasty tendency to draw too MUCH agro becaue of the random natyure of the second shot; and there are a lot of times during pve where your 1v1 anyway, at which point FaW is USELESS.

The STO official forums are filled with info, but it takes good hip waders and a lot of patience to really get to useful bits, IMO.

All my other info has come from perusing the STO wiki, which is actually pretty useful but doesn't often know about the bugs that the forum does (like how Beam Array: Fire At Will apparently wasn't working right until a recent patch/is still not working right but will be fixed Soon(tm)).

And talking to other players, of course. :)

--sofaspud
--

S.

Or you can ask here!

I'm actually considering the HEC for the Tac captain I'm levelling at the moment - it's a toss-up between that and the Avenger. Or maybe both!

Here is a great initial, I-just-hit-50-and-can't-afford-anything-serious setup.

Fore energy weapons: 3x Duel Heavy Cannons. I'd recommend the special Tetryon variant that's coming from the Hirogen lockboxes at the moment - their shield drain effect is apparently pretty cool and because the market has flooded, they'll be cheap.
Fore torpedo: 1x Breen Rapid Fire Transphasic (from one of the Breen missions, natch). Good, quick reload, decent punch against shielded targets. Once you rep up with Dyson, consider the grav torpedo - it's the best in the game.
Aft weapons: Tetryon turrets. Hirogen if they're available, regular if not.

Tactical consoles: 4x Tetryon-boosting consoles, as high quality as you can afford.
Engineering consoles: RCS accelerators are always a good fit here - as an escor, your turn rate is very important. Also consider universal consoles such as Phasmotic Leech (expensive as fuck, but best console in the game), Assimilated Console and the Dyson Console. If you get the Assimilated Console, replace one of your rear turrets with the Borg cutting beam and maybe lose your torpedo. Or don't, and run the 2-piece Borg AND Dyson sets.
Science consoles: Usually where I whack universal consoles, or shield consoles if you can afford them. Have you had a look at some of the cross-faction reward pack consoles? There's a lot of fun stuff there for very few ECs.

Shield, deflector, engines: Go with the set rewarded out by A Step Between Stars. Yes, you'll have to do it 3 times. It's also the best free set in the game, AND it's MK XII.
Warp core: The reward core from the Dyson introduction episode (with Worf!) is good enough to be getting on with. Romulans are screwed with this. Poor old Romulans.
Devices: You get a free device from 'Skirmish' (first Devidian episode). It's a 3-minute cool down panic button that boosts your defence. Other than that, batteries or just don't bother.
Hanger bay: A tricky one. First, know that the basic (blue) hanger ships are kind of useless. They start getting good with the Advanced variants from the dil store, and amazing with the Elite versions bought from Fleet holdings. If you can afford Elite stuff (usually costs Fleet Marks and dil) grab Elite Yellowstones. Failing that, Advanced Peregrines are OK, Advanced Danubes are OK as well. There are also Scorpion Fighters available from tiers 3 and 5 of Romulan reputation, but that's incredibly dull to level so maybe don't worry so much about it.

Bridge Officers:

Tactical
Commander: Attack Pattern Omega III, Cannon: Rapid Fire II, Cannon: Rapid Fire I, Tactical Team
Lt Cmdr: Attack Pattern Omega I, Cannon: Scatter Volley I, Tactical Team
Ensign: Torpedo Spread I

The idea here is to chain Attack Pattern Omega to keep it up at all time, then chain CRF while you focus on large targets. If you're going after groups of weaker ships, couple CSV with Torp Spread to ruin their days.

Engineering
Lt Cmdr: Reverse Shield Polarity, Emergency Power to Shields II, Engineering Team I

This is your first 'keep me alive please' officer. Use as necessary.

Science
Lieutenant: Hazard Emitters II, Science Team I

Your second damage control officer. Science Team clears some debuffs and heals your shields. Hazard Emitters clears the most damaging debuff in the game (plasma fire) and heals your hull.

Note that as of the latest or next patch, Tactical, Engineering and Science Teams now no longer share a cool down, making them all viable on a build.

I hope this helps!

Finally, every character in the game should pretty much skill out like this to maximise DPS, survivability and available subsystem power. http://imgur.com/sTgEqUK

I got the impression he was asking about discussion re: how the mechanics work rather than what build is best, but I could be wrong.

>
>I'm actually considering the HEC for the Tac captain I'm levelling at
>the moment - it's a toss-up between that and the Avenger. Or maybe
>both!

The Avenger is a pretty awesome bit of kit, but I think what type of captain you're running has little bearing these days on what ship they're sitting in. My science captain is rockin' a Vesta but I've put her behind the helm of an Avenger and not noticed any real difference; same goes for my engineer the other way around.

Granted, engineers can make a high-HP hull that much more impressive, but it's a pretty minimal difference when you look at the in-game outcome.

>Fore energy weapons: 3x Duel Heavy Cannons. I'd recommend the special
>Tetryon variant that's coming from the Hirogen lockboxes at the moment
>- their shield drain effect is apparently pretty cool and because the
>market has flooded, they'll be cheap.

Don't bother opening the lockboxes yourself, just run the Tour the Galaxy mission (even if you don't complete, it's still tons of EC per sector) and buy them on the exchange. Or hop into some PvE fleet actions (Crystalline Catastrophe, for example), you'll have decent quality gear coming out your ears.

>Fore torpedo: 1x Breen Rapid Fire Transphasic (from one of the Breen
>missions, natch). Good, quick reload, decent punch against shielded
>targets. Once you rep up with Dyson, consider the grav torpedo - it's
>the best in the game.

The Rapid-Reload Transphasic is pretty awesome but what you REALLY want is the Transphasic Cluster Torpedo, which drops a bunch of mines on the target that each do the same damage as a regular torpedo would, but have the mine-based 80% penetration instead. Extra yummy bonus: it only shares the global one-second cooldown with other torpedoes, so if you're carrying another torp launcher you can seriously unload. Downside: it can be destroyed... not that this usually comes up (at least in PvE).

>Aft weapons: Tetryon turrets. Hirogen if they're available, regular if
>not.

I run the 360 degree Antiproton Beam from the Solonae mission. Verra nice. I actually also have my TCP (above) mounted here because my playstyle is more bombing run than slugfest.

>
>Tactical consoles: 4x Tetryon-boosting consoles, as high quality as
>you can afford.

Tetryon is fun but is not all that and a bag of chips. Tetryon's special trick is extra damage to shields, on a 2.5% random chance basis. Now, that's per-shot (as far as we know, subject to change), so if you're going to run cannons then you'll get that damage more often than running beams, but that's an 'if' -- and the extra damage is only to shields. These are great shield poppers, but not especially great at actually killing stuff. Not *bad* at it, just not great.

I personally go with something that has more punch -- right now antiproton and protonic polaron are easy to get and boosted by Dyson set bonuses, and do more damage.

>Engineering consoles: RCS accelerators are always a good fit here - as
>an escor, your turn rate is very important. Also consider universal
>consoles such as Phasmotic Leech (expensive as fuck, but best console
>in the game), Assimilated Console and the Dyson Console. If you get
>the Assimilated Console, replace one of your rear turrets with the
>Borg cutting beam and maybe lose your torpedo. Or don't, and run the
>2-piece Borg AND Dyson sets.

... assuming of course that you feel like grinding for months to get the rep and dilithium necessary for those expensive bits.

No, seriously. The rep missions that are the best bang for the buck have 20-hour cooldowns, which means you effectively can do them once per day. To get the first couple of tiers is not so bad; getting the tier 5 rewards is 720 hours minimum, or, 36 days if you're spot-on and never skip a day.

Don't get me wrong, I like the rep stuff, but it's not something you should look at out of the gate, in my opinion.

>Science consoles: Usually where I whack universal consoles, or shield
>consoles if you can afford them. Have you had a look at some of the
>cross-faction reward pack consoles? There's a lot of fun stuff there
>for very few ECs.

Shield boosters are the best bang for the buck here, I think. Important safety tip: there are two types, one that boosts your shield capacity, and one that boosts your shield regen. It *really* depends on what you're flying to decide which you should equip.

In general, the high-HP hulls will benefit more from regen than low-HP hulls, in my experience. High capacity (but low regen) shields are better for escorts or other ships that aren't planning on sticking around for the slugfest.

>Warp core: The reward core from the Dyson introduction episode (with
>Worf!) is good enough to be getting on with. Romulans are screwed with
>this. Poor old Romulans.

Can't argue this, it's easily the best core in the game outside rep-farmed expensive-as-fuck pieces. This alone (and with the appropriate captain skill boosts) will let you complete the aforementioned Tour the Galaxy, if only just.

>Devices: You get a free device from 'Skirmish' (first Devidian
>episode). It's a 3-minute cool down panic button that boosts your
>defence. Other than that, batteries or just don't bother.

I drop turrets, because I like freem. I also pack shield batteries.

>Hanger bay: A tricky one. First, know that the basic (blue) hanger
>ships are kind of useless. <snip>

Can't argue most of this but will take a moment to note that there's an anti-Borg tactic where you basically hang back and let your shuttles nibble them to death, because the Borg don't bother targeting the little buggers.

Surprisingly effective! Slow, but, effective.

>
>Bridge Officers:
>
>Tactical
>Commander: Attack Pattern Omega III, Cannon: Rapid Fire II, Cannon:
>Rapid Fire I, Tactical Team

Nope, nope, nope, and yep.

*IF* you run a cannon build then attack pattern and the cannon rapid fire powers are useful. But cannons have narrow firing arcs and are finicky as hell, and the strange range rules STO has mean that you have to love the high-risk high-reward playstyle for them to really shine.

Me, I prefer living, so I run beams and torps. Torpedo Spread and Fire At Will are my bestest friends ever.

It's worth noting though that you can load up on nothing but turrets and make use of the Rapid Fire cannon powers to turn yourself into a 360 degree Death Blossom lightshow. Very pretty, often hilarious, and actually pretty effective if you don't mind getting in close (see: range limitations). Not recommended on thin-skinned hulls, though.

>Lt Cmdr: Attack Pattern Omega I, Cannon: Scatter Volley I, Tactical
>Team
>Ensign: Torpedo Spread I
>
>The idea here is to chain Attack Pattern Omega to keep it up at all
>time, then chain CRF while you focus on large targets. If you're going
>after groups of weaker ships, couple CSV with Torp Spread to ruin
>their days.

This is where I follow the advice of the longest-term player I know, who told me straight-up "Don't double up on bridge officer powers, you're wasting slots". He (and I, technically, though I come and go a lot) have been in since beta; I've never been steered wrong by his advice.

What really makes the most difference is the quality of your bridge officers and how well you stack your active duty officers' abilities. You want purple bridge officers, period. Beg, buy, or steal them wherever you can.

Purple officers make a huge difference. For example, I can drop a Grav Well 3 every 45 seconds reliably (standard CD is 60), and about 15% of the time I get a double drop due to DOFF abilities. (The numbers say it should be 20-25% of the time, but I'm talking in actual practice)

Grav Well 3 ruins everything's day (it does kinetic damage and bypasses shields).

>Finally, every character in the game should pretty much skill out like
>this to maximise DPS, survivability and available subsystem power.
>http://imgur.com/sTgEqUK

Yyyeaaah... no.

Skill out to support your playstyle. There's no One True Build. About the only rule is that you usually don't want to bother going past yellow rank in any skill, because of diminishing returns.

--sofaspud
--

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.

And the skills you buy should support your playstyle, including your ship choice. The skills that do things like boost subsystem power and exotic damage work best with science ships and, more importantly, certain science boff powers, for example. At the moment, my engineer who's flying a science ship doesn't have any torpedoes slotted (mostly because I goofed when picking up weapons from the exchange), so I dropped the tac boff's torpedo-boosting power in favor of powers that support the beams and cannons that are equipped. (It's not an endgame set-up, so I'm not stressed about it; she just hit 40, or RALH, in the middle of the mission I'm running as I type this, so I may be redoing her loadout soon, though.)

One very important tip: DO NOT BUY DRIVER COIL.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

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."

I'd not heard this one before. Can you expand on why?

--sofaspud
--

It's not actively harmful in and of itself, but there's really no conceivable situation where its benefits are better than almost any other choice there. If you're a glass cannon type, you'd want to buy it over the threat-boosting abilities because the last thing you want is to get hit more, but even in that case you'd probably get more mileage out of buying red ranks in weapon skills than green ranks of Driver Coil.

This is what Driver Coil does:

- Increases your turn warp speed and turn rate in sector space (and the increment it provides to warp speed is miniscule, and getting a higher-quality warp core/singularity core gets you a much greater benefit without sucking up skill points).
- Increases in-system speed and turn rate only at full impulse (i.e. not the maximum impulse in-combat).
- Reduces draw on other systems when at full impulse.

The latter one is the only one that might be of tangible benefit, and, even then, I already tend to drop out of full impulse before I get into combat. It's purely convenience, and a tiny one, and a halfway decent impulse engine does that and moreso. It's not actively bad, it's just an utter waste of points.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Well! Looks like I have some respeccing to do :)

--sofaspud
--

>_<

...So do I. Good lord, why is that skill even in the game?

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu

If it helps, one of the things they're talking about for Season 9 is a skill revamp. Which would be good, because they're pretty dumb as they are right now.

Similarly, while I am liking the damage of the Dyson grav-pedo, I hate that it (the heavy version, at least) is so bloody slow. Like, plasma torp slow. On several occasions, my forward launcher has actually reloaded before the first one hits the target.

As far as I can tell on the wiki BOFF rarity only represents their Trait makeup (i.e. irrelevant in space unless they have a really obvious Space Trait). (Also, I 'm sadly too much of an RPer to slot all humans just for leadership)

S.

Bit of both - the structure of the wiki is such that its good for small picture (you have a torp, this is what affects it) but not the large picture (don't use an escort as a torpedo boat, don't run rainbow).

But also, other then extensive forum diving there's little to direct you towards accepted approaches (e.g. armed with just the name Aux2Bat I was able to google up a basic understanding.)

>Tetryon is fun but is not all that and a bag of chips. Tetryon's
>special trick is extra damage to shields, on a 2.5% random chance
>basis.

The other big advantage of tetryons AIR is that you can get them from Fleet for comparatively easy?

>>If you get
>>the Assimilated Console, replace one of your rear turrets with the
>>Borg cutting beam and maybe lose your torpedo. Or don't, and run the
>>2-piece Borg AND Dyson sets.
>
>... assuming of course that you feel like grinding for months to get
>the rep and dilithium necessary for those expensive bits.

Ket, my sci, had 250 Omega marks when I logged in so I've been idly doing the rep advancement and was rather surprised when I yet to rank 1 today and saw the mark-prices for things.

Tangentially are any of the rep-passives bad or will "get the prettiest" work?

>>Science consoles:

Erisa currently has both point-defense consoles slotted here.

>I drop turrets, because I like freem. I also pack shield batteries.

What could possibly go wrong with turrets?

>>Hanger bay: A tricky one. First, know that the basic (blue) hanger
>>ships are kind of useless. <snip>

I seem to have Advanced Deltas slotted.

And that is my bus - more
bus - more thoughts later...

S.

I'm not too terribly up on my theorycrafting, but I don't think any of the passives are actively bad unless they're in the "increases threat but your ship is a glass cannon" variety (and I'd have to go look at the wiki to see if any are like that). Just take whichever one better fits your playstyle or is prettiest or what-have-you; if in doubt, I tend to lean towards offensive abilities.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Nice. It's worth mentioning that if you can spare small amounts of time over a couple of weeks to run through the B'Tran Colonisation chain, and then run the bonus mission at the end for long enough to grab 3 purple Technicians, you have unlocked the most overpowered build in the game. Throw it onto a cruiser and you'll be laughing.

>>Tetryon is fun but is not all that and a bag of chips. Tetryon's
>>special trick is extra damage to shields, on a 2.5% random chance
>>basis.
>
>The other big advantage of tetryons AIR is that you can get them from
>Fleet for comparatively easy?

As I mentioned above, the big advantage right now is that the Exchange is FLOODED with them, so you can get a set cheaply.

>>>If you get
>>>the Assimilated Console, replace one of your rear turrets with the
>>>Borg cutting beam and maybe lose your torpedo. Or don't, and run the
>>>2-piece Borg AND Dyson sets.
>>
>>... assuming of course that you feel like grinding for months to get
>>the rep and dilithium necessary for those expensive bits.
>
>Ket, my sci, had 250 Omega marks when I logged in so I've been idly
>doing the rep advancement and was rather surprised when I yet to rank
>1 today and saw the mark-prices for things.

It's expensive, but you'll earn a fair bit of dil from doing STFs (better still, Elite STFs) and the upcoming (or recently-patched-in) new Mirror event.

It's also generally not worth buying equipment aside from the universal consoles/cutting beam/grav torpedo until you can access Mk XII versions. Stick with your Mk XII Solenae set until then :)

>Tangentially are any of the rep-passives bad or will "get the
>prettiest" work?

Particularly for an escort, go offensive all the time. Remember, the best form of defence is to kill things quickly.

>>>Science consoles:
>
>Erisa currently has both point-defense consoles slotted here.
>
>>I drop turrets, because I like freem. I also pack shield batteries.
>
>What could possibly go wrong with turrets?

Turrets are fine, I just never use them. Point defence is (again) pretty good, but I'd really investigate some of the console reward packs available in the Exchange. For a couple of hundred thousand ECs, you can get stuff the other faction has to pay Zen for.

>>>Hanger bay: A tricky one. First, know that the basic (blue) hanger
>>>ships are kind of useless. <snip>
>
>I seem to have Advanced Deltas slotted.

Should be fine! I'm currently running Advanced Voth Heavies and they seem pretty great.

Also, just be aware that your fighters will probably die a lot in Sphere content - the Voth are bastards with AOE.

>And that is my bus - more
>bus - more thoughts later...

Feel free to shoot back with questions, etc. I think there are a few different play styles at work here and honestly whatever works for you is great.

Also oh god no don't use tetryons. They have the worst proc of all-- you're going to remove shields from an enemy super fast 99% of the time anyways. Literally any other damage type is better, because the procs on all other weapons are still useful when the enemy has no shields.

Anyways, if it helps any, my build is built around running ESTFs, a lot. The gear and build tolerances in there are tighter, because the enemies there hit harder, and in all four of the Borg ones, you need to kill the enemies very quickly indeed, if you want the optionals. Breach elite isn't really worthy of the name elite, it's super easy.

The enemies in starbase defence missions are very easy to kill compared to the ones in ESTFS, you can pretty much faceroll your keyboard to take 'em down.

Also farming the dil for fleet gear is not hard.

Step 1) make some klank alts and level them till they have access to the doff system
Step 2) run lots of marauding missions
Step 3) Feed the mountains of prisoners and contraband you get to the guy inside the throne room on Quosnos, or alternately to the guy standing in the hallway on DS9.
Step 4) Profit!

All you need to do is spend a few minutes a day sending your minions out and you'll soon be rolling in dilithium. You can move it to another character by putting it up on the dil exchange, then yanking it off again, leaving you with account-wide refined dil you can withdraw on whatever char you like.

Incidentially, any zen you buy on a char is account-wide.

http://www.wesleyguide.com/2013/01/from-assclown-to-adequate-space-poors.html

It seems pretty good so far in regular PVE.

From time to time I do (as do my usual circle of players), but we haven't spent time speccing for them specifically.

That said, our builds seem to work out pretty well in practice. We usually end up running as a 4-man group with a 5th random pickup; I wind up playing (in City of Heroes terms) a Dominator most of the time, laying down crowd control and debuffs and AoE damage up the wazoo. When I'm not running that build I'm Chibi-Tank the Undying, because an engineering captain in an Avenger is stupidly broken and can survive almost anything.

We usually have a player running a science captain, more general-purpose than my lcckdown-and-torp-spam build, and someone running an escort, and then there's V who brings the Fuzzy and oh god the fireworks.

Point is, all of our builds are very organic with not much in the way of theorycrafting. We've kind of gone the empirical testing route. :D

Anyway, the elite STFs are fun and we'd be happy to have others along.

>Also oh god no don't use tetryons. They have the worst proc of all--
>you're going to remove shields from an enemy super fast 99% of the
>time anyways. Literally any other damage type is better, because the
>procs on all other weapons are still useful when the enemy has no
>shields.

I agree, at least for endgame, but I do like mounting usually one tetryon-based weapon in early/mid levels to aid in shield penetration, because I don't usually have the bestest equipment at that point and so slipping a torp past the shields (rather than just beaming/cannoning them into so much debris) is more important.

>
>Anyways, if it helps any, my build is built around running ESTFs, a
>lot. The gear and build tolerances in there are tighter, because the
>enemies there hit harder, and in all four of the Borg ones, you need
>to kill the enemies very quickly indeed, if you want the optionals.
>Breach elite isn't really worthy of the name elite, it's super easy.
>

Hey, I like Breach! :) It's the most awesome Death Star run I'v seen in a game. Just... don't make the mistake I did and run a factory-fresh Obelisk carrier in that mission. Hah. Haha. What is this 'turn' and 'outrun the explosion' you speak of? The rest of the group held a wake for me outside.

By 'wake' of course I mean 'mocked the crap out of my soon-to-be-exploded ass'.

We ran a Khitomer Vortex elite the other night where we didn't get the optional success because one of our two PUGgers dropped out and the other was severely underequipped, but it was hilariously fun all the same. One of our players was having the shittiest luck ("I'M FIFTEEN KLICKS AWAY, YOU CHEATING GATEWAY!"), we were all punchy as hell, and at the end we were laughing so hard it took like three times longer than it should have to kill off the Valdore (I think that's the name) -- the cloaking cheating laughs-at-your-gravwells Borgulan ship.

We ended up comparing injuries afterwards.

"I've got a hull breach. A HULL BREACH! And bridge console malfunctions."
"My impulse engines are damaged."
"I... broke a bed in Sickbay?"

So you might say that while we run elites, we don't take them seriously :D

--sofaspud
--

You do make them sound fun. :D

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

S.

I'm tempted to try that on Ket's Recluse. :-)

>This is where I follow the advice of the longest-term player I know,
>who told me straight-up "Don't double up on bridge officer powers,
>you're wasting slots". He (and I, technically, though I come and go a
>lot) have been in since beta; I've never been steered wrong by his
>advice.

Hmm, but doubling up often lets you use the ability twice as often (an affect you can also achieve with appropriate doffs sometimes).

S.

I'm on my phone so can't check the game, but as an example the wiki gives the cd for Science Team as 30-70min, but applies only a 15s CD to duplicates.

That typo both amuses and terrifies me. It amuses me because no ability CD in STO is longer than 5 minutes, AFAIK, and even that long is pretty rare and generally limited to special items/ship abilities/set bonuses rather than class powers or boff abilities, in my experience, thus making the statement ludicrous on its face. It terrifies me because, back when I started playing World of Warcraft, during The Burning Crusade, there were abilities meant to be used in combat with hour-long cooldowns.

(I no longer play WoW; I took a year off from mid-Wrath through shortly before Cataclysm dropped, and after being annoyed at Blizzard and bored with WoW one too many times, I canceled my sub last February, and wound up spending the bulk of the remaining sub time -- about two months -- logging in to tend to my farms, only occasionally poking at the new content.)

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

It is what I'd usually call a "braino", my fingers not being capable of making errors that egregious on their own :-).

>It terrifies me because, back when I started playing World of
>Warcraft, during The Burning Crusade, there were abilities
>meant to be used in combat with hour-long cooldowns.

Although amusingly that didn't actually become pathological until they got shortened to 15 minutes, and guilds started waiting for the CDs to come up before pulling...

>(I no longer play WoW; I took a year off from mid-Wrath through
>shortly before Cataclysm dropped, and after being annoyed at
>Blizzard and bored with WoW one too many times, I canceled my sub last
>February, and wound up spending the bulk of the remaining sub time --
>about two months -- logging in to tend to my farms, only occasionally
>poking at the new content.)

I'm getting on towards that point myself, but mostly due to guild stuff; still it's giving me lots of time to play STO :-)

S.

What do you think about the Hargh'peng? Some people seem to swear by it.

For my money, the Hargh'peng is pretty cool but can't stand up to the end-game torp launchers for one simple reason: it's not affected by any torp powers.

That's a pretty big black mark in my book.

That said, if you're looking to fill a spare slot you could do worse. It's the fastest and as far as I know most accurate torpedo in the game (swatting fighters with it is hilarious), and it doesn't share a cooldown with any other weapon at all, meaning you can fire it off 1 second apart from other torps.

(As an aside, the Transphasic Cluster Torpedo launcher behaves this same way, making it another good choice.)

Damage-wise it's ... about on-par with endgame torpedoes. The debuff it applies isn't really useful in my experience, though we've used it as a way to mark a target before.

I sometimes run it but usually I have a more pressing need to fill that slot. I would not suggest it as a forward-facing weapon; it may be my playstyle, but I've had the best luck using a strafing run to bring down their shields and then kicking them in the teeth with the Hargh'peng as I bank away.

--sofaspud
--

The Hargh'Peng is great on ships where you just don't have the space for Torpedo Spread. Since on most escorts you are usually pretty OK for Tac space, I'd recommend something you can buff with a skill.

Hopefully this weekend I'll get the time to sit down and pound out a good 'Just hit 50' build for Cruisers, Escorts and Sci boats. The Hargh'peng will feature on the cruiser build.

You could probably get your hands on Voth antiprotons on the exchange though.

Also Bulwarks are easy as long as you just maneuver to the side their big shield isn't on. If you shoot that, it reflects damage. Same goes for the smaller cruisers.

I've noticed. I'm working (slowly, by the standards of more aggressive players) through Dyson rep, and I've got one piece of the Protonic Arsenal set in my bank (the console), am almost done with a second piece (the torpedo, just need a few more marks), and will be getting the third once I unlock the project (which will be a bit, since I have to finish Tier II and Tier III before it unlocks).

>You could probably get your hands on Voth antiprotons on the exchange
>though.

Sure, though they're going for half a mil EC and up (mostly "up"). I spent that much on the entirety of my current polaron+photon torp loadout, and by the time I finished grinding up enough spare EC to get four (since I'll have two torps, the Protonic Arsenal beam weapon, and the 360-degree antiproton beam array in the other four slots), I'll likely have enough spare dilithium to get the Fleet Advanced AP beam arrays instead.

>Also Bulwarks are easy as long as you just maneuver to the side their
>big shield isn't on. If you shoot that, it reflects damage. Same goes
>for the smaller cruisers.

Duly noted. I'll have to watch for that better.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Yes, that's where I've been getting them. Haven't had the energy to do more than maybe an hour of that a night lately, though.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Aaaaand it turns out that the relevant provisions are out on both KDF and Fed starbases. We've got plenty of every other provision, just not the personal requisition ones for the ship weapons.

And, unless I'm missing something somewhere, we have to do a fleet project to restock it.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

So, this weekend turned out to be fairly lucrative, in a few ways.

I had an unbound Tier XI blue antiproton beam sitting in my bank (reward from "Sphere of Influence," which I was setting aside to eventually put into an intermediate antiproton loadout before I decided to go polaron for the time being on the Margrave). When I was checking out the Exchange on Saturday, I noticed that there were a half dozen or so of these around, going for 750K EC and up. So I put the one I had up for 750K EC, and it sold within minutes.

A bit later, I did another check, and saw a lone Voth antiproton weapon of some kind or another going for 850K, when most of them were going for well over 1 million. So I snapped it up and relisted it, immediately, for 1.5 mil.

Then, my wife and I went out for a bit, to run some errands and take advantage of the nice weather we had this way on Saturday, and when I'd gotten home, it had sold.

So, after pondering this for a bit, I took some spare Zen I had left over from a belated birthday gift and bought a ten-stack of master keys. I took a ten-stack of Voth lock boxes I had knocking around, and, out of those, picked up three different Voth weapons out of it: two space weapons and a ground weapon. (Also a good bit of Lobi, and some nifty duty officers, which is why I didn't just put the keys up on the Exchange -- I had a few goals in mind for this.) Those went up on the Exchange for about 5 mil EC between them, and I've still got a purple Voth duty officer that I'm debating about whether to keep around for doff missions or put up on the Exchange as well. (She's not one I'd slot as active -- I forget exactly what her ability is, but it's a space one and doesn't compete with the technician boff CD ability, or even with the torp CD reset proc I have in the other two space slots.) All of that was enough to:

- Fit five purple Mark XI polaron beam arrays on the Margrave. (One of the fore weapon slots currently has a blue Mark XII Protonic-Polaron dual beam bank I got from a Dyson reward pack; the 90-degree arc of fire is a limiting factor, but when I hit the CDs for both it and the Dyson torp when I've got the right facing, things die.)
- Upgrade the remaining green-quality Tier X consoles I had knocking around to Tier XI or higher, blue-quality or higher.
- Pick up a few more lock box keys off the Exchange to round out the Lobi to trade in my Mark XI Jem'Hadar Space Set for the Mark XII version.
- Do some first-pass gearing for my just-hit-Vice-Admiral Caitian engineer, S'erro. (Got her to 46 or so thanks to the XP boost weekend, and the rest of it was basically just doff missions while hanging out in ESD.)

And I've still got about a million EC floating around the various characters.

I made some noises towards our fleet admiral about the provisioning, and he was mildly surprised to find that we were out of the personal provisions. So that's been slotted in the queue, but gods only know when it'll actually come up, and how long it'll take us to finish it, since I need to make sure I keep enough dilithium around to capitalize on it.

For Kroj, my Klingon farmer (thanks to Janice Collier, I believe) and Holmes, my 'oh dear, I don't actually have a normal character so I'll make a tactical human' character, I'm going to couple your idea of farming Sphere of Influence for Antiproton beams, the omnidirectional array and the warp core. On a Mirror Vo'Quv and an Avenger, that'll go well, especially with the VERY decent Solanae set.

Come to think of it, AccX2 Mk XI beams, boosted by the addition of a 360 degree beam and an already-great warp core should be the foundation of any new 50 non-escort build.

I intend (once I start grinding Dyson rep on her) to add some of the consoles you get as drops from starting Dyson rep missions and boost her proton damage and accuracy even more. As-is, she can broadside pretty much anything to death in just a few seconds. Mirror Universe Typhoons get a bit grindy but only until she can either trigger the directed-energy shield-pen booster power (I forget the name), or, give them a nice juicy dose of Eject Warp Plasma III.

Or both for extreme hilarity.

--sofaspud
--

Fair warning -- the price has spiked over the past few days. As of this morning, blue-quality Tier XI antiproton tac consoles are going for 400K EC and up, and purple-quality are going for a couple million and up.

Green-quality are still dirt-cheap, though.

The theorycrafting probably suggests that it depends on what kind of torpedoes you're running, due to how High Yield changes the nature of the projectile. Personally, I'm partial to Spread at this point no matter what I'm running, mostly because I don't like my burst CD being shot down; OTOH, the targetable projectiles tend to hunt for a new target if the original one gets destroyed.

"Anything I can get my hands on" right now. Eventually probably either the Dyson and Undine photons or the Omega and Romulan plasmas; not decided yet.

The Omega plasma HY looks like very much a mixed blessing...

S.

I love the Dyson torp with Spread. Gravity well procs for EVERYONE!

Plasma torps, I much prefer Spread to High Yield.

High yield torps look cool and they hit like freight trains, but the projectile speed is also a lot slower than a normal torpedo for most of them. Whereas a torp spread moves a lot faster and will connect a lot more often, and more importantly won't be shot down/mulched by random AoE effects.

I went with high-yield for a long time, for maximizing my single-target punch; I was also worried about accidentally aggroing All The Things. Two things convinced me to make the switch to spread: first, I got the Dyson grav photon torpedo, and its heavy mode is slow. Like, plasma slow. The launcher often reloaded before the warhead reached its target. Maddening. And second... well, I'm already getting all the aggro playing an escort, so why not?

If you want to have fun, get the Romulan rep torp with three purple torp doffs. instant chain of heavy plasma torps, but the target will probably die before any of them hit. Still looks funny.

If you arn't flying an (endgame) ship with enough spots for torp skills, that's a pretty good indication that it is a bad ship.

Though, really, I consider any ship without at least an LT commander tac a bad ship.