[Dark]

Hi! I'm Aeren@Dark83 in STO, and I've heard some basic quesitons about reputation being asked recently, so I thought I'd make a quick introduction.

Welcome to level 50!

You've unlocked the reputation system, congratulations! You should start on it immediately.

What about missions, the foundry, or PvP? No. Reputation system. Now.

Why now?

The reputation system is time gated.

Every reputation system has a 20 hour project (which gives 2500xp) you can do once a day, and a 1 hour project (which gives 200xp) you can do three times a day. Those are the only ways to advance your reputation, which means there is a minimum amount of time necessary to reach Tier 5 - 40 days. No amount of additional effort will cut the time required, your progress is capped - so start ASAP!

Which One?

All of them. At the same time.

As mentioned in the above section, you can't focus and grind any particular reputation system. The progress you can make is limited, so you may as well do all of them at the same time, and it's not even going to take that much time.

Each day, the first time you do a mission related to a specific reputation system, you are rewarded a bonus of 50 relevant marks. The 20hr project requires 30 marks, and the hourly projects require 20 marks. That means doing one relevant mission a day will give you enough marks for the daily and one hourly from just the bonus alone.

Taking one point in the Undine space battle zone counts, doing the random mission offered by Joint Command in the Dyson Sphere space counts, one mission in Nukara counts, and so on. It doesn't take much time or effort, just 5 missions spread amongst different content.

If you don't do all of them at once, and instead you do 5 missions for a specific reputation system, you're going to be short 200 various marks a day. Overall, you'd need to put in ten times as much time/effort to work on just one reputation system at a time, and you won't be advancing them any faster. Ten times the effort for quintuple the time? Doesn't sound smart to me!

Easy Romulan Marks

Romulan Marks have an extra method to attain which is unique to it - Epohh Tagging.

Spend a few minutes a day tagging Epohhs, and you'll have 4 Active Tags each day. 4 Active Tags are used in a daily DOff assignment, which gives 1 Epohh Research on a Success, 3 on a Critical Success. You should hopefully be able to get a Critical Success at least 25% of the time (there's a Very Rare Paradan Astrometic Scientist that will put it to 26%), which means around 6 Epohh Research every 4 days, 30 Epohh Research every 20 days.

If you have 5 Epohh Research, you can buy an Epohh pup. So 6 Epohh pups every 20 days. It's a 1 day assignment to raise a pup to a moppet, a moppet to an adult, and then an adult to an elder. So after a 3 day delay, you should have 6 Epohh elders every 20 days. An Epohh elder can be cashed in for 400 Romulan marks - which means 2400 Romulan Marks every 20 days.

Not bad for a few minutes spent tagging Epohhs each day! It's the best possible effort:reward ratio of all the reputation systems. If you do this when you start working on Romulan reputation, you should easily have enough Marks to buy anything you could possibly want from the Romulan reputation system by the time you hit Tier 5.

Events!
The critters we can raise in the summer and winter events (birds, monkeys, candy epohhs) are basically like this, but can be cashed in for any type of reputation marks. Handy!

Easy Omega Marks

The Borg reputation is rather unique in how easy it is to grind, because of eSTFs. eSTFs stand for Special Task Force missions on elite difficulty. At this point in the game they're trivial for most of us veterans, and the space ones are popular. Just ask for ISE (Infected: The Conduit, Space, Elite), CSE (The Cure Found, Space, Elite), or KSE (Khitomer Vortex) on our {UFP-UFPK} channel and you're likely to be able to get a quick team that can massacre the Borg. It's an easy way to get your Omega Mark daily, as well as get the widgets for Omega Reputation gear.

Closing Statement

Hopefully I didn't waste your time and you learned something useful.

Remember, I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together! If I made a mistake, don't hesitate to correct me.

[Daedalus]

Nice guide Dark! I agree with everything above except the need to grind all reputations simultaneously. If you only have one character, I would do exactly as you suggested.

If you have more than one character and limited play time, I'd suggest focusing on one character until t5 is reached. Once you receive your t5 unlock, you'll be given the ability to create sponsorship tokens for your other alts that will let you earn reputation XP at 2x the normal rate (effectively cutting your time-gate to 20 days vs. 40 for additional characters).

If you have more than one character and extra play time, complete your daily reputation rewards on one character, advance your rep projects, and use your remaining time to earn marks (but do not contribute these to reps until you get your sponsorship tokens) on your alts. The marks never expire and can be used any time, but you'll get twice the mileage for half-the effort (with the understanding that it will take the alts a total of 60 days to achieve t5). By the time you are able to create sponsorship tokens for your alts, you'll be sitting on a healthy supply of marks that you can simply feed into your rep projects as needed.

If you have more than one character and have no need for food, rest, or daylight , then by all means run as many of the daily projects possible and advance your reputation tiers together.

[Curzon Peers]

I'm not sure I can get behind the do all of them idea.

First of all, I understand grinding marks is easy, but I'd say on average a single mission is going to take you 10-15 minutes, so JUST doing your reputations is going to take around an hour and not everyone wants to spend an hour on just reps. There's other things to do for fun and there's also doff and fleet grinding to do. I'm sure most people spend a couple hours on, but not everyone can, and it still is a bit of a time sink.

More importantly grinding up rep is all well and good, and the traits are good to have, but I think the main reason to grind rep is for the gear. A single piece of equipment is going to run you at least 500 marks and several thousand dilithium, so you do need to focus your time somewhat.


I should also note that once one character gets to T5 on a rep you can make sponsorship tokens that cause projects to grant double repuation. Also Dyson and Counter command marks are easy to get since the battlezones practically print marks. It's smaller sums, but more often than doing the queues (and with no cooldowns and waiting for a team to form up) and the final bosses are good money.

Also note some people refer to Khitomer as KASE and KAGE (Khittomer Accord)

[Dark]

First of all, I understand grinding marks is easy, but I'd say on average a single mission is going to take you 10-15 minutes, so JUST doing your reputations is going to take around an hour and not everyone wants to spend an hour on just reps.

Hm, I'm not sure about that time assessment.

Undine rep, I'd say 5-10 minutes, since you just need to capture one point. The Fed and Rom points take a while because there's essentially a timer, but judging by my turret cooldown time they're only around 5 minutes. The Klingon one is the fastest, especially if you're alone - there's only a few puny ships at each device, so you can generally get all four firing in under 5 minutes. Judging by my turret cooldown time, it takes around 3 minutes. Is my perspective skewed here? I'm currently grinding Undine rep, and it's really trivial to grab the daily box.

Doing an eSTF for Omega rep, especially if you don't PUG and recruit from {UFP-UFPK}, should only take 5 minutes on average.

Dyson rep, I'd say 5-10 minutes. The random missions are more like mini-missions. Things like go deliver a data crystal, or scan three areas, are really fast. Most of your time is going to be travelling rather than doing, so I guess it depends on your speed - I feel like I'm in a space whale (JHDC with Borg bits), and it doesn't take that long. I usually try to DOff while I'm in transit, and I tend to not have enough time to set up more than one or two assignments before I reach my next waypoint.

Romulan reputation you have to do an actual mission, which could take 10-15 minutes. Or you could be lazy like me, refuse to actually do the work, and just pop in there, tag epohhs, and set up the DOffs. It'll take a few days before the Marks roll in, but it took me literally less than 10 minutes (I timed it!) a day, back when it was easy to gather a group for tagging. Most of that time was loading screens, and the fastest I did it was around 5 minutes.

Warp into the sphere, and it should take only around 15 minutes to do Dyson and Undine rep. Tag epohhs and queue for an eSTF, and you'll have four reps down in around 30 minutes if you don't have to wait on other people. Nukara is the big pain in the butt because you actually have to do it, so that's maybe 10-15 minutes. I'm not aware of any shortcuts for that.

So I guess there's a priority there in terms of time spent? Always get the Omega daily box, because we (your fellow Fleet members) make it trivial and quick. Always do Romulan Epohh tagging (which is not a daily box?), because that has timers and you don't want undue delays. Dyson and Undine are the next highest priority, and they tend to require just a bit of pew pewing. Nukara requires more effort, so... do it if you have time?

[Remissus]

Excellent guide, Dark! I'll have to link folks I know to this when they start asking about what to do first on hitting 50.

[Curzon Peers]

Well as I said, the battlezone practically prints marks. a few minutes for a capture sounds about right, and I've been able to get a couple days worth of marks just doing the zone maybe twice. Voth is a little bit harder, but not by much.

I still think my assessment is right for borg, and nukara. Times have been cut down from what they used to be bug pugs always seem to be slow and I at least always seem to burn 5-10 minutes just trying to get a team together and another 5 getting the room to actually work.