[Jess]

I was just curious if there were any builds for that ship. I really enjoy it, and I know it's not the best ship, but it's what I have access to!

I'm really looking for equipment that's easy to get since my crafting isn't maxed out at all.

Thanks!

[ThatOneGuy1191]

First question is, do you plan on running a beam boat or cannon boat?
Second question is, what flavour do you want to use?

[Jess]

First question is, do you plan on running a beam boat or cannon boat?

Right now, I have the following:

Fore Weapons
Resonating Tetryon Beam Array Mk VI [Chance] [Dmg]
Quantum Torpedo Launcher Mk VIII [Dmg] [Spr]
Tetryon Dual Cannons Mk X [CrtD]
Antiproton Dual Heavy Cannons Mk VIII [CrtD]

Aft Weapons
Tricobalt Torpedo Launcher Mk X [Acc]
Disruptor Beam Array Mk VII
Phaser Beam Array Standard Issue

In the past, I used to have Aegis Deflector, Impulse, and Shield. I also had 1 Quantum Torpedo Launcher, 2 Antiproton Dual Heavy Cannons, 1 Antiproton Dual Beam Array. In the aft, I had 1 Quantum Torpedo Launcher and 2 Antiproton Beam Arrays.

Second question is, what flavour do you want to use?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this . I never really got into flavours or anything like that. I usually just equipped what looked good.

Edited to Add:
I can't really purchase anything using Zen as I don't have funds available for that, so C-Store/Zen Store isn't an option for me unfortunately.

[ThatOneGuy1191]

One other question I do have is, are you a lifetime subscriber?

So by flavour, I mean energy type. I personally recommend phasers as they can potentially disable subsystems on targets which is always useful. Beams are good for broadsiding of course, but that would take away from making use of the Chimaera's/Manticore's tactical mode, so I'd go with cannons for sure. There's an easy 2-piece set you can get from "Beyond The Nexus", consisting of a turret and console. Other sets are locked behind reps, specifically the Gamma and Disco reps, both 2-piece, Disco has a torp, and Gamma has a turret/omni (though phaser is locked behind T6) both with a console. It's also worth getting the Terran rep up to T6 for the phaser cannons.

[Jess]

One other question I do have is, are you a lifetime subscriber?

Unfortunately not. Every time I had enough money to pay for one, other things got in the way!

So by flavour, I mean energy type.

I typically went with Antiproton. For some reason, back when I was a monthly subscriber, I always got Antiproton instead of Phaser! I guess I just got used to that.

[ThatOneGuy1191]

In that case, there's an antiproton set from the Iconian Resistance which also gives a good amount of survivability. There's some cannons from Temporal and Delta reps too. Unfortunately, most of the other anti-proton stuff that you want to get is lobi or lockbox stuff.

[Jess]

In that case, there's an antiproton set from the Iconian Resistance which also gives a good amount of survivability. There's some cannons from Temporal and Delta reps too. Unfortunately, most of the other anti-proton stuff that you want to get is lobi or lockbox stuff.

Thanks! I'll certainly check that out!

[ThatOneGuy1191]

Of course, that's just weapons and a handful of consoles. You'll want some things from various fleet holdings such as Vulnerability Locators and Exploiters, that increase crit chance and damage respectively, both cost 50k Fleet Credits and 8k Dilithium, but both consoles give a big buff to damage. Though depending on your budget - and how you're doing for credits - you'll want to pick up some isomagnetic plasma distribution manifolds, which give a stacking increase to your Weapon power setting, along with a big damage buff again You'll also want to pick up a Fleet Deflector. One other rep thing I did think of is from the Competetive Wargames rep, specifically an impulse engine that gives you a huge speed and turn rate boost after using a firing mode.

[Rastilion]

The usual setup for most energy weapon ships is:
Cannons OR Beams of the same energy type (Unless you are running some specialist firing modes that can support both).
Phaser, disruptor and polaron are the easiest to get equipment for. Of course, the others are just as doable, just a little more tricky to set up.

For your ship core
Deflector: Elite Fleet Intervention Protomatter Deflector, EPS variant (Additional crit. chance and severity, Dranuur Fleet Colony)
Impulse Engines: Prevailing Innervated (or fortified) Impulse Engines (Evasive Maneuvers on firing modes [innervated] or healing [fortified], Competitive Rep tier 3)
Warp Core: Mycelial Harmonic Core (Discovery Rep T4, for the 2-piece with the shields)
Shields: Tilly's Review Pending Shield (Discovery Rep T5, Weapons deal more damage to shields, 2-piece with core 120% increased hull healing)

For the consoles:
Tactical and Universal:
Lorca's Custom Fire Controls (Discovery Reputation T5, Shield pen, weapon power and crit chance)
Vulnerability locators of your energy flavor (Fleet Spire, Critical chance)

If you are able to do ground missions at elite level, you can farm isomagnetic plasma distribution manifold ressources in "Into the Hive" elite (vs borg) and "Miner Instabilities" elite (vs romulans and na'kuhl).
Just FYI: The isomags can roll EVERY mod, re-rolling them can be a pain. It might be more worth to sell them and buy your energy flavor ones if you have the EC cap increase.
Also: Isomags and locators are mutually exclusive. Isomags perform better, but are not necessary. If you still want to go for them, fill up all engineering and universal console slots with them.

The remaining consoles depend on your energy flavor.

Hope that helps a little and sorry for the text wall

[darthnovawave]

To add a little context here, the only way you can get the Chimera is if you were a lifetime subscriber OR if you were a regular subscriber for at least 1000 days back before STO switched to the Free-To-Play model. So to have access to the Chimera, you should also have access to the T6 version Manticore (as well as all the other factions' T5/T6 counterparts). The Chimera T5-U and Manticore are really close in terms of game mechanics, but the Manticore upgrades the Lt. Engineering seat to a Lt. Commander Engineering/Command seat and you get an extra +5 power to Shields and Auxiliary, which while not much can open up a few additional build options for you. Both ships have access to both visual looks in the Ship Tailor, so you can still run the Chimera look on a Manticore or vice versa as an option if that matters to you.

On the "energy flavor" piece, conventional build wisdom is to pick one energy type (phaser, disruptor, antiproton, etc.) and make all energy weapons match that type. That way, you can pick consoles with mods that enhance that energy type to improve your damage to everything you fire. The specific energy type you pick really doesn't matter outside of really high end builds using expensive traits or more expensive special versions of weapons, so generally you can feel free to pick which one you like. That said, there are a LOT of consoles out there that buff Phaser damage available relatively freely from mission rewards and reputation system projects, so from a budget perspective it can be a bit cheaper to make a stronger Phaser build on a budget, but again any energy type can be used to tackle any content in the game.

Similarly to energy flavor, you generally will want to pick one weapon type (beams OR cannons/turrets), as the Tactical bridge officer powers you will have access to (Beam Fire-At-Will, Beam Overload, Cannon Scatter Volley, and Cannon Rapid Fire) either only enhance beams or only enhance cannons. Thus, to get the most benefit from the damage boost, you ideally want all your weapons to be the same type. There are specialization firing modes available for ships that have Intelligence, Pilot, and Miracle Worker seating that can enhance both types of weapons at the same time that lets you break this rule of thumb, but the Chimera/Manticore doesn't have access to these.

I'd also recommend checking out the "Energy Basics" page of the STO BETTER website (link below). They have a ton of info on that site around how to build ships certain ways (and explain why) and focus on general play rather than hyper-specific builds tailored around a specific TFO (what used to be STF) queues to maximize DPS parse numbers as you see most people post out there online. There are literally hundreds of ships in the game at this point, so rather than mocking up a build on each and every possible ship and scenario, they try to teach the underlying basics of how things work (something the game does nothing itself to teach players) so you can apply those things to the specific layouts and features of the ship you are working with. The rest of the site offers tools and info about other types of builds and how to continuously improve your build towards high-end content in the game, and they've recently started diving into ground builds as well this year.

https://sites.google.com/view/stobet...ics?authuser=0

If you want to follow Rastilion's advice and chase the "Console - Advanced Engineering - Isomagnetic Plasma Distribution Manifold" parts ("Isomags" for short), the Isomag consoles tend to be the top performing damage enhancer in game now, but in order to get them you need to collect parts that have a 50/50 chance to drop from the R&D box you get from beating certain Elite TFO queues. The ground queues "Into the Hive" and "Miner Instabilities" on Elite difficulty tend to be the most popular queues for this, as ground content is far cheaper and easier to build for even at elite difficulty. The second catch is that once you have the parts to make one, there are several dozen possible random modifiers that can be applied to an Isomag, so if you don't luck out and get one with the damage type modifier matching your energy flavor of your ship's weapons, rerolling the modifier in the Re-engineering system to get the right one can be really expensive.

The "Console - Advanced Tactical - Vulnerability Locators" from the Fleet Spire holding used to be the best option until the Isomags came along and are far cheaper than the Isomags to acquire, since you can just buy the one with the damage modifier you need in the first place, but you can only have Advanced Tactical OR Advanced Engineering OR Advanced Science consoles on a given ship and can't mix and match across career categories on a given ship. Vulnerability Locators are still very viable options, so if you want to minimize the grind that may be a more attractive route depending on how much time and energy you want to invest into things.

Hope this makes sense and is helpful!