Star Trek Online is free

[Phantasee]

Is there an easy way to get in on a Borg sector defense daily mission? I know they're on a timer, but I seem to have arse for luck when it comes to actually responding to one in time.

I'm wondering this as well.

[charlemagne]

I'm wondering this as well.

It's just a luck thing. Sometimes I warp into failed ones for days, sometimes I warp into "live" ones several times a session.

[Darth Tanner]

Ok I've made Vice Admiral and got my Odyssey and to be honest I'm bored. The lack of any possibility for getting a new/better ship (and the lack of customisation of the Odyssey) has more or less killed my interest in the game. I might try starting again as a tac officer but I’m not sure I could stand going through all the boring grind through parties of enemies one after another missions again.

I've tried the Klingon campaign but god the colour scheme and uniforms are just so boring and awful to look at. Still hope that my Bird of Prey will show some promise but it just swings around like a drunken sailor compared to my experience with cruisers, cannons are fun though.

[charlemagne]

I'm still entertained at VA so far, there's surprisingly a lot to do: DOFFing is fun, I find myself cruising the sector blocks looking for good assignments. Fleet actions are very repetitive, but enjoyable enough so far. I also replay old episodes in a team with my brother who is lower level. I'm also working on my diplomacy levels because I want an Orion slave girl on my bridge, of course

The good thing about f2p is that I can just quit any time it gets boring and come back once there's new featured episdes (in, like, 8 months or so ).

[Darth Tanner]

Yeah free to play is great. Looking into it there might be some exciting new option coming up, it looks like the Romulans will become a playable faction. So even if I do not play for 6 months looks like there might be a good reason to get me back once that’s released.

Of course the company has to stay afloat for that to happen, they haven’t made a penny off me yet. Lock boxes indeed, I’ve got enough of them in my bank to block off the neutral zone.

DOFFing is fun

Really? Am I missing something because assigning a bunch of mooks to do randomly generated missions for random rewards doesn’t fill me with joy!

[wautd]

Is there an easy way to get in on a Borg sector defense daily mission? I know they're on a timer, but I seem to have arse for luck when it comes to actually responding to one in time.

I assumed they stopped with that because it never showed up anymore. Untill I played my Klingy yesterday, then I immediately got one (couldn't finish it sadly, laptop crashed again (overheated?).

Also made Vice Admiral yesterday. The Odyssey looks marginally better than ye ol' Assault Cruiser but I seem to die a lot more often. I guess missions are just harder at level 50.

What's DOFFing?

[charlemagne]

Duty Officer Assignments.

The fun part is the various chains of assignments that reward either blue (or, on crit, purple) duty officers or give new shiny MKXII consoles.

The Odyssey really shouldn't die that easily, especially in normal missions. Maybe you've set difficulty to Advanced or Elite? The Odyssey is very tanky, even more so than a Sovereign. It has enough engineer stations even when you use the universal slot for a tac bridge officer.

[Alferd Packer]

I started doing STFs because, well, why not get my Borg gear. What I'm finding though is that my DPS is leaving a little bit to be desired. Is it worth the outrageous EC expense to get myself some purple Mark XI beam arrays? Or shelling out a ton of dilithium to do the same? Similarly I'm still running my Sovereign at 50; should I consider upgrading to the MV escort, or the Defiant retrofit, then invest in some DHCs or DBBs? I can't decide if a cruiser or an escort is overall more usefull when running an STF.

[charlemagne]

Cruisers and escorts are both useful, it depends if you're having more fun tanking and healing your team or just dishing out damage.

IMO purple XI is well worth it especially for weapons, every bit of dps helps. It makes normal pve go faster and of course it's good for STFs to make sure you get the optionals.

[White Haven]

At the same time, STFs give you purple XI and XII gear, so I'm not sure why you'd ever want to buy it...

[charlemagne]

Because outside of STFs the [Borg] modifier is mostly useless, so they're pretty much just blue, not purple.

[White Haven]

Given that there's nothing of any difficulty or reward to do but STFs, and those are all Borg, there's not a whole lot of point to anything but anti-borg gear. Once Cryptic gets around to putting a more diverse endgame into the game, that'll change, but for now...

And in any case, buying purple gear to farm STFs to get the same marks of purple gear is a bit circular, especially given how piss-easy normal-mode STFs are.

[Edward Yee]

Doesn't the same [Borg] bonus also apply against the Borg in sector block defenses and in Ker'rat?

[charlemagne]

Yeah, it does. And White Haven is right, while the [Borg] stuff isn't that great for PVP it's not like PVP is that great in STO either...

Most MMOs suffer from that endgame paradoxon of grinding instances for items to help finish those same instances easier. In STO this is somehow even more apparent, because the STFs are so quickly done.

[Alferd Packer]

And in any case, buying purple gear to farm STFs to get the same marks of purple gear is a bit circular, especially given how piss-easy normal-mode STFs are.

Fair enough. What should I be spending my money on at this point?

[charlemagne]

MK XI or XII consoles, like +[your preferred energy damage type] and resist consoles for the eng slots. Other than that there's not too much use for energy credits.

Maybe get an Aegis set while you wait for an MACO XI shield token drop.

[Spoonist]

So reached 50 without trying - that was a big dissappointment they could have at least made something out of it other than go visit the boss, congrats youre 50...

So some questions if anyone can be bothered:
1) At 45 you got this token from the klingon on DS9 that was supposed to give you a weapon - however none of the dudes surrounding him would take that token. What gives?

2) Now I want to try PvE but since the game itself is sooo easy I've never had to actually make an effort into build & skills etc. Never respecced for instance. My char is science so at every point when I got a free ship I picked the science one.
I've got crap consoles and have not even filled them all out yet. Got about 4M ec and some 20k dil to spend.
Any hints would be appreciated.

3) Never bothered with my Boffs, so I've got about 30 or so sitting in line for the day I'd need to get some specific skills. Now what happens with the boff skill points when you dismiss a boff? Tried going through the FAQ on their forum but it didn't say, so I expect them to be lost, right?

[charlemagne]

So reached 50 without trying - that was a big dissappointment they could have at least made something out of it other than go visit the boss, congrats youre 50...

So some questions if anyone can be bothered:
1) At 45 you got this token from the klingon on DS9 that was supposed to give you a weapon - however none of the dudes surrounding him would take that token. What gives?

Right click on the token and use it, you'll get an MKX requisition you can use to get MK X ground or space weapons/items from the dudes.

2) Now I want to try PvE but since the game itself is sooo easy I've never had to actually make an effort into build & skills etc. Never respecced for instance. My char is science so at every point when I got a free ship I picked the science one.
I've got crap consoles and have not even filled them all out yet. Got about 4M ec and some 20k dil to spend.
Any hints would be appreciated.

To get the most out of your science build, look at what skill the abilities you use most use (like Starship Sensors) and get consoles with +[that skill]. I'd also get the +35% Shield Capacity console from the dilithium store. Other than that it's down to preferences. Tac consoles should be your chosen energy damage type, plus I'd dump universal consoles like the Borg console there as a sci captain. Eng consoles should be mostly resists.

3) Never bothered with my Boffs, so I've got about 30 or so sitting in line for the day I'd need to get some specific skills. Now what happens with the boff skill points when you dismiss a boff? Tried going through the FAQ on their forum but it didn't say, so I expect them to be lost, right?

Spent BOFF skill points are lost forever if you discharge a BOFF. Doesn't matter though since you still earn BOFF skill points after making VA and you should be already swimming in them.

[Alferd Packer]

So I did Khitomer Accords last night and happened to be grouped with a Klingon running one of the new Bortasqu' ships. Mother of God, those things are tough as hell, and they lay down a frightening amount of firepower. I think we finished taking down the transwarp gates with like 5 minutes to spare, and that assimilated Scimitar had no chance.

[Edward Yee]

The good news: The new duty officer system is broadly an improvement. While it can be annoying that one has to run all over the place (i.e. only military assignments and a diplomatic assignment or two in the captain's ready room) unless you're on a Jem'Hadar Attack Ship or a Galor, and it's DEFINITELY a problem that a bunch of the new assignments have an unwritten cooldown timer (clicked it by accident? Whoops, it's greyed out and now you have to zone out and back in to clear that "gray"), I do like that now the Extreme Bartending and Culinary Credentials are always available on the Crew Deck, that one can now pick up the recruiting assignments at the Academy personnel officer (in the duty officer store), and I definitely approve of the new "trading up" system!

The bad news: Ker'rat is gone (on the Fed side, Cmdr. Makza no longer gives out the War Zones repeatable, though Lt. Cmdr. Icheb still gives the daily), and the new Asteroid Mining event is hilariously bad... if you didn't like the "Black Ops" portion of Boldly They Rode (the last mission of The 2800, now rolled into the Cardassian story arc), you are NOT going to like this. On top of that, the payouts (the daily itself only awards skill points) tend to be worse than you'd get by doing a regular daily such as the Academy mid-term (480 dilithium ore), and the prices of the EVA suits... 300,000 dilithium for a statistically identical "armor" of a different color.

The latter seems like a rather obvious attempt to crack down on dilz farming after people simply kept on dilithium farming when the War Zones repeatable was given a 30 minute cooldown, since the cooldown (like most dailies) started when one accepted the mission and completing the mission itself would take several minutes of that anyway, so one could just switch to a character whose mission wasn't on cooldown, do that, then switch back (or switch to a third character, even)... too bad the replacement event is awful.

[charlemagne]

Yeah, the rewards for the dil farming are awful, but the minigame is fun and bouncing around the asteroid is too. Right now I'm still hitting the refinement limit without much trouble though, so I'll skip the farming until the rewards are brought in line. It's ridiculous to get 480 dil for at least 7 minutes "work" when you can do the midterm in 10 seconds for 480 or "investigate officer reports" in 2 seconds with some of the "quickies" for 1440 dil.

The doff system is much improved and it'll be awesome once they iron out the kinks. Some dev said that they'll change it so you can at least see what missions are available from ops or engineering without having to walk down there. Also, it really should be our departement heads giving out the missions. I have no problem with my chief engineer hanging around the warp core and medical being in sick bay, but ops and science should be stationed on the bridge.

Maybe it's a good thing that the player base as a whole is kinda forced into ship interiors now. They've put off improving them for so long, now there should be much more pressure to finally get around to it. For starters, I want to be able to set standard uniforms for my crew. Then they should fix the giant hallways, and also if I choose a certain colour scheme for my bridge, I want my corridors in the same scheme.

Overall this was a good update, though.

[Edward Yee]

Too bad the only ship interior that comes appropriately sized (and isn't the Jem'Hadar Attack Ship or the Galor) is part of the US$22.50 DS9 bundle (the "Belfast" interior).

[Alferd Packer]

So I broke down and bought a Defiant retrofit. My reason being: I had enough Mark XI requisitions to almost fully outfit a new ship, and my Sovereign, while still a respectable tank, just doesn't have enough raw DPS. Additionally, it seems like a lot of people run cruisers in STFs; we're lucky if we get one escort.

So I gave my new glass cannon 3 Tetryon DHCs in the front, along with a Plasma torpedo launcher for funsies. I may for a fourth DHC, but I cannot overstate how much I love using Torpedo Spread. I put 3 Tetryon turrets in the rear, stacked 4 Tetryon tactical consoles, the full Borg set, EPS relay, shield booster, and the usual goodies, and sweet banana hammocks, this ship is a fucking boss. I have to get used to flying an escort again, but the damage output is truly insane.

I have a question, though: One of my Tactical Boff's Commander Space ability is Cannon Rapid Fire 3. My other Boff has Attack Pattern Omega 3 as her Commander Space ability. Since I can train Cannon Rapid Fire 2 at the Lt. Commander Level, is APO3 worth using instead of CRF3?

[charlemagne]

I'm no BOFF skill expert but I think I read somewhere on the forums that the attack patterns make a bigger difference with higher ranks than CRF3 would (actually prices for tac boffs with CRF3 have kinda dropped on the exchange because of this).

I equally broke down and got the MVAE, I'm loving Gravity Well on an escort, and yeah, the dps is just fun. I'm running with two copies of scatter volley and two copies of torpedo spread, 3 proj. doffs and boy do I vomit quantum torpedoes

[Atia]

I equally broke down and got the MVAE, I'm loving Gravity Well on an escort, and yeah, the dps is just fun. I'm running with two copies of scatter volley and two copies of torpedo spread, 3 proj. doffs and boy do I vomit quantum torpedoes

Funny I recently bought the MVAE too and I'm loving it for STFs. In fact I think we are running a very similar build too. lol. But tell me are you having problems with the Saucer bit of the multivector part being a total retard and constantly getting blown up by every little thing. The two engineering sections can go from beginning of khitomere to the end without getting a scratch on them. But that little saucer section seems to always getting blown up if a sphere so much as looks at it funny.