[Adz]

Hi All,

So while by no means am I new to MMO's (Original EQ Beta so 20 year vet) I am a new player to STO.

Thing is I got no idea where to start. I've bought a few key bundles over the few months when they've been on sale and I'll grab a few more Elite Packs while on sale but I got a load of Zen to spend as I need to. Discovery pack for the ship that will level with me and later I'll spend what Zen I have on whatever packs are of decent value.

So, playing through the basic story arc at the moment. Just got hit with a few skill points but not much of an idea on where to spend them. My experience with MMO's tells me there are reasonable 'gates' to hit while levelling. Things to 'unlock' or work towards like factions or particular skills to level. So besides following the basic story arc to level what advice would be on offer to a Joined Tribble Tac? What skills are worth having, any particular places or story arcs I should follow for the rewards they offer? Any particular gear or currency I should be looking to collect? Any and all advice or comments are appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Adz

[Generator]

This guide on Reddit is a fantastic source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/wiki/tenforward

I'd post more but we're about to leave for church. More later.

Generator

[Raz Beraht]

...Joined Tribble Tac?

Joined Tribble Tactical toon? Count me in

But seriously, you probably shouldn't stress too much until about level 50ish. My Discovery toon is in mid 30's level-wise and I've assigned maybe 2 skill points so far.

You gear will be trash until you can get "starter gear sets" during some of the later story missions. As a new player with a new toon, you're not going to have much in the way of energy credits to buy many new BOFF abilities for a while either. Level 1-50 will pretty much be learning the game and experimenting with different toys. Once you know what you want to accomplish you can start working on it and we can help you figure out how to make it happen. So my advice is to play and learn until you approach or reach max level and that's when the game/grind really starts.

As far as unlocks here's what happens.

-You'll unlock the Duty Officer (DOFF) system. Here you collect and assign crewmen (not bridge officers) to various missions. It's basically a card game.

-You'll unlock the Admiralty System. It's the same as the DOFFs but you're sending ships on missions instead of crewmen. The ships your character owns or has owned are in your "fleet" and available for missions.

-Reputation Systems. This used to unlock at end game but with Age of Discovery they're sprinkling it into the general leveling system. These are "raids" or group missions where you have to do certain things and kill certain baddies to win. It's the heart of end-game and playing those missions to earn marks gets you the good gear. However the best gear from what I've noticed comes from lockboxes.

[ForTheGamer]

Just my own thoughts here. The reddit stuff is good and you should look into them.

As for sets:
~ The Iconian Reputation space set is a really good one to work with. I'd also recommend the Solanae Hybrid Technologies set is a nice one you can pick up from "A Step Between Stars".

Most of the sets though are for 50+ really, so if you aren't there, no worries about it. Just grab some gear and you should be good. Also your DSC ship has a leveling warp core, so you don't need to replace that until 50.

For space skill points:
~ A good idea with space points is build to however you'd like to play. If you are building ships like escorts, it would be a good idea to probably invest heavily into tactical. If you are using cruisers, a good idea is to invest heavily into engineering. If you are using scientific ships, a good idea is to invest heavily into science.

But that's pretty self explanatory, so I'll go a bit deeper. Personally, I use a lot of science skills in my build, regardless of ship. Therefore, I go up the science tree nabbing skills that boost not only that, but also increase my damage potential. That's pretty much what you need to look at.

For ground skill points:
~ Make sure to boost your armor and shielding. You'll more often then not be the most shot thing with your away teams, so make sure you can take a blaster to the face.

For personal traits:
~ Though this is a pain to get now, Coalition Squad Tactics grants you a boost depending on the class you are in, plus whatever Player joins you will grant you a boost depending on the class that player is. (lockbox)

~ Fleet Coordinator is another where you'll gain a modest boost of attack power (2%), but you'll gain another modest boost for every player who joins in your group. (base)

~ Since you are tactical, Galvanized Munitions will grant you a percentage of your damage from your cannons that will be applied to your front facing shield. Requires you to be cannon based, but if you fly an escort, that's usually what you use. (lockbox)

~ Eyes of the Swarm and Wing Commander are useful for if you are using pets. Eyes of the Swarm increases the damage, Wing Commander increases their experience gains. (lockbox)

I'm not going to add ship traits, because that'll really depend on what T6 ships you own.

Other than those little advices I can give you, you can pretty much play however you want. The game really isn't going to break you for doing something different than usual.

[Generator]

Oh damn, almost forgot (thanks for mentioning traits, FTG)!

Look on the exchange for A Good Day To Die. It lets you activate Go Down Fighting at any time, regardless of your Hull health total.

Also, as far as sets that can be picked up just from mission reward, I've recently become a fan of the Sol Defense set (from "Midnight"). Just wanted to throw that out there.

[Adz]

Thanks for the info. Been reading a few other places too but a lot of info online seems of the older variety or totally around the end, end game.

NRG Credits, I got 4 mill. As mentioned I bought some keys on sale a fair while back so I dropped one onto the market so I'd have some cash to get moving.

Having a lot of end game 40's in CoH and having been in beta there and then after some early 40's I went more casual I kind of get PWE's business model. So I keep one eye on STO sales in case it was something I ended up jumping back into.

Also happy to work on builds that sync across multiple game mechanics and can wrap my head around that concept. Just didn't want to miss too much levelling up.

Will be back no doubt. Also that advice to join UFPlanets chat for Q and A. Best advice ever. Folks there have been very helpful and patient with some pretty basic straight forward questions.

Cheers

Adz

EDIT: Tenforward...gold, pure bloody gold. Beer, rolly and laptop parked at that url while sitting out in the sun. My mmonerd is satisfieddoubleplus

[Dragonscoils]

I'm by no means a Tac expert but I've been around since 2012.

This is the build I'm currently using for my FIRST Tac since I've always ran an engineer....
The theory I'm going for is that you want the first 2 tac ultimates and even distribution in science and engineering.
This gives you the most choices with the options slider at the bottom and is also torpedo and carrier pet friendly also giving more options.
Also keep in mind that the first point in each skill gives you the most bang for your buck due to diminishing returns.

https://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/...c5b3503d98c48c

It's probably a good build to keep from screwing up too badly but an adjustment here or there to fit your needs is fine. I'm sure others have better advice to give as well. Have fun!

[Dark]

Unless your gear is obsolete in terms of Mark or your character skills are invested in things that are irrelevant to your ship, the largest factor that determines performance is going to be your Bridge Officer (BOff) abilities.
The high end super-expensive Duty Officers (DOff) and Starship Traits are strong because they interact with said BOff abilities, of which you'll have ~13.

It is impossible to overstate just how important your BOff abilities are in determining the performance of your ship, which is why I just repeated it again. Literally everything else is insignificant in comparison. You'll see high DPS folks mostly talk about weapon mods and traits, but that's because once you have a good BOff layout there's nothing to discuss, and the differences in mods and traits are often increases in just fractions of a percent.

The key here is to learn that abilities have a cooldown, a system cooldown, and a duplicate ability cooldown.
Unless something changed recently, the latter two aren't shown in-game.

If you look at an ability like Cannon Scatter Volley (CSV), it's active for 10s and has a 30s cooldown. It also has a 15s system cooldown and a 15s duplicate ability cooldown.
If people only carry one copy without ways to reduce the cooldown? That's a big "I don't know what I'm doing" sign. That's a 33% uptime on your primary DPS ability, and it's your primary DPS ability if you're carrying CSV.
Two copies would mean 10s every 15s. If you're built with cannons and turrets and using CSV, that's double the uptime of your primary DPS ability.

If you're carrying CSV and Cannon Rapid Fire, that's another indication you don't really know what you're doing. That's because at the high end we have traits like Withering Barrage and Go For The Kill, which respectively extends the duration of CSV and CRF. You only have 4 Starship Trait slots, 5 with an expensive upgrade from a Fleet Holding. You're not going to carry both, that's inefficient.

Going back to the 1 copy vs 2 copies (or a build that effectively reduces the cooldown to 15s without need a 2nd copy) thing, Withering Barrage extends the duration of CSV by 4 seconds. So that's 14s every 30s vs 14s every 15s. So the one copy player went from 33.3% to 46.6% while the two copy player went from 66.7% to 93.3% uptime. This is significant.

Your gear of course has to match your BOff loadout. If you're using CSV or CRF, you want to be using all turrets aft (because they're buffed by CSV/CRF) and cannons, dual cannons, or dual heavy cannons fore (because they're buffed by CSV/CRF). Likewise if you're using Fire At Will or Beam Overload you'd want to be using all beam arrays, or dual beam banks fore and omni arrays aft. You don't mix them because then you'd either have weapons that aren't affected by your primary DPS abilities, or you'd need to double the tac abilities towards your weapons. That's obviously a loss in efficiency and performance.

(There's of course specific builds where this doesn't necessarily apply, but if you're making something viable in that vein you're already familiar enough with the mechanics and options that I don't need to repeatedly emphasize a "build" is primarily about the BOff abilities because everything else is insignificant in comparison. You'd already know.)

Lastly, "Dragon" and "Drake" builds.

Dragon builds use two copies of two different Emergency Power to Whatever abilities (so total of 4).
Emergency Power to X has a duration of 30s, a cooldown of 45s, a duplicate ability cooldown of 30s, and a system cooldown of 15s.
So with just one copy of Emergency Power to Weapons (EPtW), you'd have it up 30s out of 45s. With two copies of EPtW, you'd have it up 30s out of 30s - it will be constantly active, less the activation time of under a second.
That system cooldown of 15s means you can activate a different pair, like Emergency Power to Shields, 15s after EPtW. Then keep that up constantly (less activation time) every 30s, offset from the initial EPtW by 15s. This is generally the preferred use of excessive Eng seats, you don't have much good Eng BOff abilities to fill the stations.

Drake builds use Damage Control Engineer DOffs to replicate the effect of Dragon builds with only one copy of two different "Emergency Power to" abilities. A purple DCE DOff has a 35% chance of reducing the recharge time of all Emergency Power to abilities by 30%.
That proc also applies to the ability that triggered it, so by having one copy of EPtW and EPtS you'll have two chances of triggering a cooldown reduction on EPtW by the time you need to activate it again. Of course that's not a lot, which is why you generally need 2 or 3 DCE DOffs, each of which trigger independently. It's not 100% uptime like the Dragon, but this is generally for ships without much Eng seating.

[Scarlett]

Aaaand the Kraken Build: using Kremin BOffs (from the Fleet Research Lab) and matching career Readiness in the Skill Tree to reduce cooldown on the related abilities. It's expensive to buy these BOffs, and you may need to respect the Captain in order to get the Readiness skill to match. Also, you would need Advanced <career> Readiness to reach maximum capability. BUT, this removes the need for DOffs to assist with cooldowns via procs or innate ability.

To be sure, this is only for Engineering Seats, so ships with a lot of those (or high rank seats) would benefit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/c...kraken_builds/

[Arno12]

Dragon Builds, Drake Builds, Kraken Builds? So many build types I've never heard of, then again I've only played the game for a year and Aux2Bat is all I know

[Adz]

Unless...seating.

Dark, thank you, thank you!

Maths like this helps a lot when considering the best way to synchronize all the 'moving parts'. As mentioned, I'm experienced with MMO's so the concepts of rotations and cooldowns for min/maxing DPS/heals/buff/debuff uptime isn't new. It's getting the acronyms sorted and particular idiosyncrasies with STO's particular mechanics 'sitting right'.

Been doing a bit of reading online and have been looking over the market, and will continue to monitor it to get a decent idea on regular costs of some Boffs particular traits and combos of same.

Right now just very much enjoying the story lines and slowly learning my way around everything and messing about with difficult and elite missions to get an idea of how much of a difference they make to difficulty. With regard to that if anyone has any suggestions on particular areas of the story arcs to take time with I'm happy to take any and all advice.

Thanks again all. Making the transition to STO easier than it was sorting it all out alone.

[Scarlett]

Yes! Right now the story is way more important. I mean, we all started Star Trek because of the story, right? All this technical talk takes time to learn (with most things in life) and, in the end, doesn't matter that much. The real goal is fun, no matter what

[Adz]

Yes! The real goal is to [communications scrambled attempting to resume] top the DPS charts and PVP leaderboards, no matter what !!!!!

lol

/em fixt

edit: my only excuse is I'm an aussie.