Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well Cryptic has finally, finally released the T6 Nova that players have been asking for literally years, along with another ship that is far less interesting. The release is also in concert with a long double-XP and Red Alert event, which is great news for those of us with many ships still to master, I'm going to be doing a lot of moving equipment and assigning BOFFS to each new ships, it gets tedious after a while The "ready ship" option is supposed to bring gear across from existing ships but it doesn't always work meaning it has to be done manually. At some point I'm going to have to do an audit of the unique equipment and traits I have available as there are way too many to deal with as is!

The exchange has been stuck at 500 for weeks now so if you want to buy Zen you really need to get in line as I couldn't get any in time for the discount for new ships (as in, made the offer on Thursday and still haven't gotten the Zen as of today) so I could only get one of the two. Sneakily Cryptic only let you use the 100% discount coupon for ships not in the new items tab, but the 50% coupons do work on those.

[Sammy00]

The game is quite playable without spending a single cent, which many "free" MMOs can't claim. They give out Tier-6 ships (the best ones in the game) 2-3 times a year for fairly low effort. Progress is also fairly rapid. You can go from Level 1 to 50 in about a month. Levels 50-65 are more of a climb, but at that point, you'll have a decent ship.

[Elheru Aran]

The issue for me is mostly just how little flavor there is to each faction. While there's some faction-specific stuff, it's almost all early-level stuff. After that point, everything is the same. Including that fucking Nimbus stage where you have to run about the stupid planet from Star Trek V for hours to track down more pointless Tal Shiar bullshit.

Like, at least Klingons got a good solid 3-4 unique storylines. The Romulan Republic gets maybe two... one of which (Reman Rebellion or whatever) everybody else gets in on the action. I started the Jem'Hadar bit for a while, but didn't get very far... because after the intro storyline, it was more of the exact same plots.

Lord of the Rings Online, for all it's kind of a crappy grindy game, at least gave its factions (Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit) serious, different storylines. Like, completely different. Maybe once you leveled up enough they started repeating stuff, I don't know, but the stories were unique for as long as I played each. There's really nothing stopping STO from doing this other than, I suppose, game size. But it seems like every faction in STO ends up running the same missions in whatever skin you're using. They don't even change the map or anything.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The game is quite playable without spending a single cent, which many "free" MMOs can't claim. They give out Tier-6 ships (the best ones in the game) 2-3 times a year for fairly low effort. Progress is also fairly rapid. You can go from Level 1 to 50 in about a month. Levels 50-65 are more of a climb, but at that point, you'll have a decent ship.

You can climb the levels way faster by doing DOFF assignments compared to episodes, those give out more XP than you might think. You can easily get there inside of a week, especially if you have other characters send you things to help you on your way- my newest characters make use of the overflow weapons that my original ones do not.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

New content is out, Shadow's Advance and they've brought in one Admiral Janeway, replacing Tuvok as the one giving the orders. With the later addition of Tom Paris, the only Voyager characters now not featuring are Chakotay and Torres, the latter being more interesting than the former unless the Maquis somehow become relevant again.

The increased rewards for Lifetime Subscription (more inventory, bank and BOFF slots) is really good as all my characters were struggling for space, most of the bank slots are occupied by consoles after all. I'm going to be moving a lot of stuff around as a result, this is gonna be fun!

[Soontir C'boath]

So, I am playing this game again and just finished the Cardassian Struggle which was really short. Maybe there's more later on, but I was hoping to be hopping back and forth between DS9 for awhile longer. Though i do see the one for the Gamma Quadrant further on. They replaced a bunch of characters, but left Quark in the station and he barely says anything!

Anyway, all that said. I'm glad to be playing this game again. Definitely enjoying the starship battles and the Prometheus is a beaut.

[Lord Revan]

So, I am playing this game again and just finished the Cardassian Struggle which was really short. Maybe there's more later on, but I was hoping to be hopping back and forth between DS9 for awhile longer. Though i do see the one for the Gamma Quadrant further on. They replaced a bunch of characters, but left Quark in the station and he barely says anything!

Anyway, all that said. I'm glad to be playing this game again. Definitely enjoying the starship battles and the Prometheus is a beaut.

There's more of DS9 in the Gamma arc.

As for Quark IIRC the reason he doesn't say or do much is that he's not suppose to be back (yet) and they didn't bother phasing him out until the Gamma Arc

[EnterpriseSovereign]

It's the summer event so once again my characters are hard at work gathering eggs/tokens, all to turn them into dilithium (ultimately). What with the shift to large Mudd packs in the store the demand for Zen and therefore dilithium the exchange rate has been bouncing off the cap of 500 for months now. In times gone by, when you wanted Zen you could just buy it for whatever the going rate was at any one time or take a chance that it might drop in the future by offering less. Now because it's permanently at 500:1 you place your offer at that value and that puts you in a queue weeks long before you get to the front, so you find yourself joining that queue as soon as you have a particular quantity of refined dilithium that you want to sell. For me, that is 125,000 dil to get 250 zen, which is once every 16 days per character.

If Cryptic decides to raise the cap at some point, that is going to piss off the playerbase no end.

In other news, I was lucky with the endeavour rolls in that the last 3 times I levelled up I had the choice of whether to spend the resulting point on the last space area I hadn't filled (projectile damage) or elsewhere. I don't know if that was luck or whether the rules had been altered, but regardless that's all of my space endeavour sections maxed so I can take my foot off the gas now.

This weekend is an upgrade weekend so it's time to get going on the ground gear that isn't at gold level yet.

[Soontir C'boath]

So I think I remember the reason why I stopped playing this game was because I plateued and I just kept getting destroyed and annoyed. This time around, it seems I'm almost there with the ground combat. My entire party will die at some point at least once and it's just too damn frustrating.

Obviously, this means I'll have to grind for better gear one way or another in the meantime, but damn do I want to one-shot some ships.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I only do the bare minimum when it comes to ground combat, for story missions and stuff so I only bother upgrading ground gear after I've done the ship-mounted stuff, and wherever possible I've spent endeavour points on space. Now that's done it leaves ground, I prioritise critical chance and damage first. Space is more interesting and the loot is worth ten times as much, and the space patrols (which you can do through the menu) give you the choice of marks for the rep store and some of the best gear can be found there.

With the upgrade weekend, now is the time to upgrade any stuff you want to improve. I'm going to be looking into which versions of each energy type give the best bang for the buck, compared with the vanilla one.

And the situation with the Mudd packs is an ongoing frustration felt by all the players given the choice of either 3 or 8 items from the pack, when there are 4 ships in each one so unless you pay double you have to decide which ship you can do without.

[Soontir C'boath]

Whooo so grinding the Summer Event is paying off. Just sold a manual for 18 million energy credits so at least I have some room to breath now and get some stuff.

I gotta admit, I had bought the lifetime subscription so I did get a T6 ship which is helping out a lot. Made most of my weapons beam type with consoles to match so that has helped in destroying other ships without too much despair.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

What T6 ship is it? With beams I've always favoured the dual beams over arrays on all but the slowest of cruisers. The spire tac consoles are great for boosting damage output both directly and by critical chance. And the weapon modifiers are important too.

[Lord Revan]

What T6 ship is it? With beams I've always favoured the dual beams over arrays on all but the slowest of cruisers. The spire tac consoles are great for boosting damage output both directly and by critical chance. And the weapon modifiers are important too.

The T6 lifer ship is the Manticore for FED, dunno what's it for KDF or ROM.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

What T6 ship is it? With beams I've always favoured the dual beams over arrays on all but the slowest of cruisers. The spire tac consoles are great for boosting damage output both directly and by critical chance. And the weapon modifiers are important too.

The T6 lifer ship is the Manticore for FED, dunno what's it for KDF or ROM.

Duvqu' Heavy Destroyer and Dinaes Warbird Destroyer, respectively. Stats are identical for all three.

I wondered if it was that, or because LTM also has a monthly stipend of 500 Zen (on PC) it was a store ship if LTM was bought a while ago. I got mine 8 years ago. I've also accrued T6 ship upgrade tokens and elite captain training tokens but I cannot decide what captains and ships to use them on.

Summer event means using the jetpack floater a lot, when it's Horga'hn Hunt that means as soon as it starts racing round the island getting ten as fast as you can, then switching to another character for another ten, and so on. The event lasts 15 minutes so you can easily cycle through four or five characters if they each have the fastest jetpack. I usually run out of time during the fifth. What makes it worth doing is the small chance of getting a bird egg each time. Doesn't happen every time but if it doesn't, the favours you pick up (which are not character bound) go a long way to buying an egg anyway, so the characters that don't manage to get an egg don't miss out.

[Soontir C'boath]

Ok, so good part. I've managed to sell a few manuals bought from the summer event and I now have ~55 million EC. Not bad for a noob. However, now it's coming down to buying better ships and it looks like I have to do specific missions for fleet credits. So a completely different currency from zen or dilithium. Feels like there's too much going on with this game to progress any further. Maybe I'll just throw down a couple hundred bucks and just get the zen.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

How many active characters do you have? The more you have, the faster you can refine dilithium ore which you can sell to turn into zen. I started off with just one back in 2012 when the game first went to FtP. Gradually over time with various expansions necessitating new characters I now have a baker's dozen and cycle through them as efficiently as I can to farm the dil, with the exchange rate being what it is it's necessary now if you don't want to shell out real money. Just be aware that some items are unlocked on an account basis and some on character. Not a problem if you have a single character but it can become one when you create more.

I do know how overwhelming it must be when I look at all the things a new character has to do to attain the same level of development as the others and is why I now dread having to do it. For the established toons I need to customise them further as they've already unlocked all they are going to.

Fleet credits are awarded by contributing resources to fleet projects, the level of development determining what missions are available. Of course if you're looking to get actual fleet ships you'll need something called Fleet Ship Modules, most of the ships in the store are fleet-level anyway. Fleet ships cost only 1 FSM if you own the store version of that ship but significantly, the store version comes with its special console and mastery trait, the fleet one does not.

Under the PvE Task Force Operations tab you can select missions which offer a choice of marks such as fleet marks, space patrols are good for those as they give dil ore, marks (selectable upon completion), and loot. Space loot is worth ten times as much EC as ground loot and is best offloaded at vendors as they give better EC prices than recycling things yourself. It can also be turned into salvage which you need to re-engineer gear to get better modifiers. As you've found, the exchange is where the huge sums of EC change hands since the good stuff in the game is not initially acquired with ec but one of the other currencies and is turned into it when trading.

What weapons are you running on your ship? They all have unique procs and will determine what kind of build would be optimum. Really with new ships always coming in I spend more time collecting their masteries than taking time to enjoy them (since the mastery has to be collected individually for every character) which makes double-XP weekends all the more important.

[Soontir C'boath]

I am actively only playing with one. Federation tactical is my main and I have a Romulan tactical that I only brought up to 11. Not really in the mood to swap back and forth.

I've been buying duty officers off the Exchange to turn over in the Fleet I'm part of to get the Fleet Credits.

I try to stick with beam weapons with tactical consoles for beams that I find although at this point I suppose I could just buy what I need outright.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

My first character is Federation tactical too, my second a Klingon engineer, my third a Romulan Science created for the Legacy of Romulus expansion.

Actually, once your character reaches level 11 the duty officer system unlocks, DOFF missions give a lot of XP and are a great way to level up without doing an awful lot.

What I meant was, what energy type are you using?

Energy damage is a set of eight damage types—Phaser, Disruptor, Plasma, Tetryon, Polaron, Antiproton, Proton and Electrical—that are mostly commonly dealt by directed energy weapons.

Each different energy damage type has a bonus effect, known as a proc. Most weapons come with one of these bonuses, while some rarer weapons may contain multiple, or a special one replacing the standard proc.

Directed Energy Weapons, such as Beams and Cannons, use Energy Damage. Deployable Ship Devices such as Satellite Turrets also deal Energy Damage based on the type of weapon it carries.

There are tactical advantages to using a single energy damage type primarily due to consoles giving a greater bonus by energy type (e.g. phasers) than by weapon type (e.g. beam arrays). However, some players prefer to use a wide variety of damage types in the hopes of scoring multiple proc hits.

I've got most of them, each one necessitates a slightly different console layout.

[Soontir C'boath]

I said beams cause I wasn't using any one specific type as I cobbled whatever I got, but I just bought a couple antiproton beams for a hefty amount so I'll be sticking with that in the future.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I said beams cause I wasn't using any one specific type as I cobbled whatever I got, but I just bought a couple antiproton beams for a hefty amount so I'll be sticking with that in the future.

When levelling up my new characters I would do something similar since they have level requirements so I couldn't just equip them with whatever stuff I had left over from other characters.

AP is popular because of the extra crit, several of my toons use them. You have the option of crafting those using the R&D system, craft at mark 2 (for fast crafting and cheap) and apply upgrades if you have them. You'll probably have to do some REing when they go up a quality level if the new modifier is a poor one.

[Lord Revan]

At the moment Phasers or Disruptors are the most supported energy type at high level that said for 99% of the content all that matters is that you energy weapons match in energy weapon type (the energy type based tact consoles are much better then weapon type based ones).

It's pretty easy to build your character in a way that's "good enough" for most content. oh and with phasers the most popular non-zen ones would be the DSC-style sensor-linked ones but those can get really expensive (personally I use the advanced phasers that came with the DSC connie since I got the first legendary ship pack back in the days as it had many T6 ships I wanted).

[Alferd Packer]

If you get your rep up to tier VI for each of the reputation systems, it's fairly trivial to outfit a powerful set of cannons/turrets on an escort in either phaser or disruptors (when you get to tier VI with rep, you can chose the weapon type). Also, equipping a reputation weapon when at tier VI gives you a flat 2% damage bonus per reputation weapon slotted, so it makes sense to get as many of them on there as you can.

In related news, I just picked up a Fleet T6 Saber and have discovered that Miracle Worker abilities are absolutely busted. Mixed Armaments Synergy III and Narrow Sensor Bands III double your damage for 10 seconds. I haven't done an ISA run to quantify its DPS yet, but I would not be surprised if it was clocking in well over 100K. I just wish the Saber didn't look so janky.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well now I have to take a closer look at specialisations- I've been playing catch-up with all the masteries I've never been able to explore anything beyond the Sci/Eng/Tac paradigm.

[Alferd Packer]

A lot of the specialization BOFF abilities are firmly in the Nice To Have category--like if you have the slot on your ship, and nothing else to put there, it's worth trying out something.The biggest benefits they offer are the passive bonuses they grant you by maxing out and selecting a specialization tree as your primary or secondary one. Overall, It seems like Miracle Worker and Temporal Agent are the two strongest, with Pilot having some interesting use cases.The others are fairly niche in their applications, and don't have a huge bearing on the "shoot things until they die" meta of STO combat.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The latest Mudd Pack includes the choice of these ships:

Crossfield-class Science Spearhead
Sarcophagus-class Dreadnought Carrier
Dhailkhina-class Command Strike Wing Warbird
Jem'Hadar Recon Ship

By all accounts the Sarcophagus is a must have because of the trait it has, by contrast the Jem'Hadar ship is an easy pass because both console and trait can be gotten elsewhere.