Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[The Romulan Republic]

Okay, I feel really dumb now. I only have four characters like you. I don't know why I thought five.

They are:

A male human Federation science officer named George Chamberlain (currently a level 52 Vice Admiral).
A female Romulan Romulan Republic engineer named Miranda (currently a level 12 Centurion).
A female Klingon KDF security officer named Kira (currently a level 9 Lieutenant).
A female Ferengi Federation engineer named Tan (currently a level 2 Lieutenant).

The last two are Delta Recruits.

Edit: You know, I really need to get back to the Romulan story. Its just that its been so long that I barely recall what was going on when I stopped playing it.

[Elheru Aran]

Level 12... yeah, you won't have gotten past where it ends, probably don't have all that long though. It's really not a particularly long story. Once you finish 'Turning Point' there's 'Allies' and 'In Shadows', that lousy Wasteland, the 'Vengeance' storyline where you're fighting Elachi (that's fun) and then the Romulan Mystery, although for Rommies they call it 'Freedom'.

Well, *I* don't remember it taking that long...

[Lord Revan]

Okay, I feel really dumb now. I only have four characters like you. I don't know why I thought five.

They are:

A male human Federation science officer named George Chamberlain (currently a level 52 Vice Admiral).
A female Romulan Romulan Republic engineer named Miranda (currently a level 12 Centurion).
A female Klingon KDF security officer named Kira (currently a level 9 Lieutenant).
A female Ferengi Federation engineer named Tan (currently a level 2 Lieutenant).

The last two are Delta Recruits.

Edit: You know, I really need to get back to the Romulan story. Its just that its been so long that I barely recall what was going on when I stopped playing it.

atm I got 6 chars

• Shimon (level 60 Andorian Female Tac officer)
• Morai (level 60 Orion Engineer (my only KDF))
• Mirvast (level 60 Alien Starfleet engineer)
• Henriksson (level 56 human Science officer)
• Zairis (level 55 or 56 Reman Tac officer (my Delta))
• Dinata(level 53 Romulan Tac officer)

You got get 3 "free" slots as Free to play account and then you got a free extra slot for delta, the other 2 I used Dilithium to get the Zen needed (it's only 650 zen so at the time is wasn't too hard to get)

[Steve]

I don't want to count my alts, it's like a dozen plus now....

[Steve]

Ah, NM.

I don't want to count my alts, it's like a dozen plus now....

Edit: Ah, what the hell....

Federation:
FADM Steve Parker - Human Male Tac Officer (My main)
ADM Asami - Human Female Eng Officer (Delta Recruit)
VADM Trinande (50) - Alien Female Eng. Officer
VADM Larrisa (50) - Alien Female Sci Officer
VADM Dani (52) - Human Female Eng Officer
VADM Rana (50) - Human Female Tac Officer
VADM Lucy (50) - Human Female Eng Officer
VADM Korra (52) - Human Female Tac Officer (Delta Recruit)
CAPT Cordiza (35) - Joined Trill Female Tac Officer
LT CMDR Dariza (12) - Joined Trill Female Sci Officer
LT Yamia (4) - Alien Female Sci Officer

Note: Larrisa looks Human because she's supposed to be an Edo. That is, one of the people from the world that wanted to give Wesley a lethal injection for stepping over a barrier. The other Alien characters are all from a race I've used in various fictions.

Klingon:
LTGEN Galira (50) - Orion Female Tac Officer
LTGEN Layara (50) - Alien Female Sci Officer
BRGEN K'mbok (42) - Klingon Male Eng Officer
LT CMDR Neilani (11) - Alien Female Tac Officer (Delta Recruit)

Note: As with Fed side, the two aliens are from the alien race I came up with.

Romulan:
VADM Vanaris (53) - Romulan Female Tac Officer, Fed-aligned
SUBCOM Arrhae (27) - Romulan Female Eng Officer, Fed-aligned (Delta Recruit)
CENT Aareth (14) - Alien Female Sci Officer, KDF-aligned (Delta Recruit)

Note: Aareth is an alien because that's the only way to make a Klingon-Romulan hybrid character in this game.

And yes, I am aware that all but two of my toons are female. I am a straight male. I enjoy the sight. Although I also have a mental block that demands I always roll a male as my first toon.

Also, because I'm a major fan of Diane Duane's Rihannsu novels, all of my Romulan characters have full proper Romulan names, and I consider Vanaris' rank to be khre'Riov, that is, "Commander-General". I use Romulan ship names where appropriate as well. Vanaris, in fact, commands RRW Bloodwing. Just as I consider my Admirals to mostly be, at most, Fleet Captains with admiralty brevets due to merit.

1 main and 17 alts. *sighs* I am a serious altaholic.

[Coaan]

And I thought 5-6 was a lot of work to keep going. Jeezus.

[The Romulan Republic]

My poverty and financial paranoia would never permit me to collect that many characters.

[The Romulan Republic]

The Tholians really are tough motherfuckers in space combat.

[Simon_Jester]

It can help to optimize your ship's "armor" against the kind of attack damage you know your enemy likes to dish out. In this case, I believe Tholians rely on tetryon beams.

[Lord Revan]

It can help to optimize your ship's "armor" against the kind of attack damage you know your enemy likes to dish out. In this case, I believe Tholians rely on tetryon beams.

I belive you're correct about the energy type though with the Tholians it's not their beams that's the problem but their torps, "Tricobalt" ones IIRC that seriously mess with your shields and the web from larger ships.

quite frankly best way I found to deal with Tholians is to simply outgun them.

[The Romulan Republic]

So now I'm running around in Tuvok's mind.

I'm ejoying some of the Delta Quadrant stuff. At times it feels like interacting with a continuation of Voyager, though hopefully it works out better than Voyager ultimately did.

[White Haven]

Fight smarter. Also harder, but smarter helps. Tricobalts are destructible projectiles, which have one very exploitable weakness in their need to actually reach you to accomplish anything. Fire At Will, Tractor Beam Repulsors, Photonic Shockwave and other similar abilities, fighters set to Intercept tasking if you happen to be in a carrier, even simply fighting at long range so you have time to intercept them with manually-targeted fire...ultimately, if you're getting hit by tricobalts or heavy plasma torpedoes or Tholian thermionic torpedoes or boarding shuttles or any of the long litany of other easily-destroyed projectiles, it's...not always your own fault, but it is something you can avoid in the vast majority of cases.

Similar advice is valid against different enemy groups; the chances are if a given type of enemy is giving you trouble, it's not that they're just badasses, it's that you're missing something. There ARE counters to just about everything that can be done to you. Borg shield neutralizers and plasma fire got you down? Hazard emitters. Sick and tired of getting hit by electronic warfare effects and losing lock on enemies? Science team clears that right up. Getting boarded? Either see the last paragraph to deal with the shuttles or keep a Tactical Team handy. Adapt and overcome.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, I don't have a carrier to that's not applicable to me.

But I will try fire at will in the future if I have problems with incoming missiles.

[Lord Revan]

Well, I don't have a carrier to that's not applicable to me.

But I will try fire at will in the future if I have problems with incoming missiles.

if you have a beam build "Beam fire at will" is usefull for alot of things even as simple as giving a bit more DPS when fighting a single target (just bare in mind that targeting during FAW is random so if said single target has others near it those might get instead of the intended target), though it's most usefull in dealing with projectiles, mines or small craft as those generally don't more then a few solid hits to take down (in fact a good solid hit can 1 shot a small craft once you've brought the shields down) and generally they're too fast to be effectivly targeted manually.

[White Haven]

It goes a step beyond that, really. BFAW does three things, even at rank 1. First, it causes your beams to five five times per cycle instead of only four. That's a straight DPS increase even on 1 target. Second, it causes each beam to fire at two targets per cycle. That literally doubles your DPS when there are at least two targets to fire at. Thirdly, it causes targeting to be random across everything in range. This does dilute your fire when going up against large groups...but, key point here, you were going to have to shoot everything sooner or later, and those first two points add up to a full 150% increase in your damage output for the duration. It only triggers a 15-second shared cooldown and lasts 10 seconds, so you can easily run two copies, and it synergizes quite well with attack patterns (beta in particular).

Really, it's more or less the ultimate attack skill for beams, although that's largely because all the other ones are fairly pants. The only time it's really worth NOT using is when there's something within 10 kilometers that you actively do NOT want to kill, and that's...rare.

[Lord Revan]

only time I can think of that there was something in range that I didn't want to kill was when a hostile cap ship was within 2-3km and thus would take out or at least severely damage my ship with the warpcore breach.

but that said I agree with everything White Haven has said, with the right doff (a technician) you can reduce the Cooldown when you use Aux to battery engineering skill so that you can essentially never have to worry about the cooldown (it works on all tactical skills actually but it's almost vital for beam builds).

[Simon_Jester]

It goes a step beyond that, really. BFAW does three things, even at rank 1. First, it causes your beams to five five times per cycle instead of only four. That's a straight DPS increase even on 1 target. Second, it causes each beam to fire at two targets per cycle. That literally doubles your DPS when there are at least two targets to fire at...

HOW DID I NOT KNOW OR NOTICE IT DID THAT.

Thirdly, it causes targeting to be random across everything in range. This does dilute your fire when going up against large groups...but, key point here, you were going to have to shoot everything sooner or later, and those first two points add up to a full 150% increase in your damage output for the duration. It only triggers a 15-second shared cooldown and lasts 10 seconds, so you can easily run two copies, and it synergizes quite well with attack patterns (beta in particular).

If your DPS isn't doubled then you run into the problem that you're diluting damage across several targets, some of which can regenerate from that damage at a pretty good clip. Anecdotally it seems like large enemy battleships at high level don't really notice you until you start pounding on them with, oh, a thousand points of damage per second or something.

If your DPS gets doubled this is not an issue unless you're engaging, oh, four or five targets. Although for me it would incentivize me to put torpedoes back on my beam builds because I wouldn't feel confident keeping up sustained rapid beam array fire on everyone in the vicinity unless I had something capable of dishing out heavy damage to an individual target.

I always assumed this was the case, and muttered that it was so much less valuable than the equivalent Cannon skill because that doesn't reduce your DPS against your actual target.

[White Haven]

In solo scenarios, you're usually facing off against a small number of hard targets and a moderate number of soft, smaller targets. In cases like that, BFAW will burn down the light combatants fairly easily, and then once you're down to 1-3 heavies, you no longer suffer much/at all from excessive fire-spread. In larger groups, that's less true...but the more people in the group, the more BFAW-spam you can overlap, so that can take up the slack again. Additionally in a group setting, BFAW and Attack Pattern Beta stack nicely, because BFAW spreads the resistance debuff to all targets, and that debuff is unique to your ship. To clarify, that means that if three people have BFAW and APB up, every target in range has three stacked resistance debuffs on it, one per firing ship. It's silly from a game-design perspective, but there really just are very few times when Fire At Will isn't the best thing to be running on a beam ship, and there are very few times when beams aren't the best answer from a raw DPS perspective.

Now personally I'd prefer more variation, but as STO stands, beams just run away into the endzone quite handily. That's not to say that cannons are useless; the're not, but no one is setting DPS records with them. It'll be interesting to see if pilot ships change that at all given the tricks they can pull to increase cannon uptime, though.

[Elheru Aran]

So with a Sov, I am probably best off with plenty of beams and a torpedo fore and aft? Just wondering.

EDIT: And aren't pilot ships going to be cash-only? Not that that'll stop people from picking them up anyway...

[White Haven]

There'll almost certainly be one from the summer event, which should be starting in June. As for a Sovereign; if you're looking for Maximum Dakka, I wouldn't even bother with torps at all. I wish it weren't so, but in the current state of the game there are very few torpedoes worth using and even then usually only with a very specialized torpedo build. This is doubly true with full cruisers, since they can benefit from the weapon power command setting.

[Elheru Aran]

That's true, I forgot about that. The summer event is going to be ditching the pearls though which is rather annoying since I don't like wasting my time from last summer. Although the post was a little confusing and I may be able to finish the one I started... but we'll see.

As for the Maximum Dakka thing... so load up a buttload of beam banks, is that what you're saying? Phaser or Antiproton?

[White Haven]

Antiproton will edge you out a little bit in damage, but it's only a little bit. Personally, I went whole-hog on the crafted antiproton, but the difference between the various beam types is narrow enough that you're not screwing yourself by going for something different. If you're running a Sovereign with relatively low levels of gear, I'd probably recommend an A2B build, which centers around using Technician duty officers to make Auxiliary Power to the Emergency Battery lower the cooldown on your Boff powers. Given that a Sovvy has very few Tactical power slots, that can be huge, letting you effectively pretend as if you had 2 copies of BFAW and 2 copies of Attack Pattern Beta. The downside is that you'll basically be bottoming out your aux power whenever you use it, so many science powers will be effectively ruled out. It's by no means a God build, but it's a decent starter that can help compensate for the low number of tac officer power slots on the ship you're running. Beyond that, I STRONGLY recommend getting your Omega rep up far enough to get the Cutting Beam and the Assimilated Module console as soon as possible. There are almost no builds anywhere that don't use those two components; they're both very good, and their set bonus is amazing.

Beyond that, of course, we could talk builds until the end of time, and I'm at work, so I can't.

[Elheru Aran]

Sounds good. I'm already on top of Omega, I noticed those two are pretty common. The free rep credits you get from Delta'ing are coming in handy. I'm only... like level 41 right now, so yeah, not that impressive right now. Guess I'll be dropping my photon mines. They do come in handy sometimes.

Are crafted items that much better than the regular pick-ups?

[White Haven]

Are crafted items that much better than the regular pick-ups?

Yes and no and yes.

Confused yet? Good, it's a complicated topic. First, some basics. Outside of consoles, rarity levels do not scale any stats on an item at all. Instead, they add one modifier per level. There are four main modifiers (CrtD, CrtH, Acc, Dmg, arranged in order of descending usefulness. Especially Dmg. It's pants.) and a slew of crafting-only modifiers, of which an item can only ever have at most one of (Pen, Over, bunch of other nigh-useless stuff, again in the same order)

In an attempt to maximize damage, as the math currently works and has for several years, you want to maximize your Critical Severity [CrtD] on weapons and get your Critical Chance from other items (consoles, etcetera). It's not that crit chance is bad, it's that it's more economical to get it on consoles and other gear and get your crit damage on weapons simply because of how much of each stat different gear options actually have. [Pen] is roughly on-par with [CrtD] for peak weapon damage. All that adds up to the 'best' weapon in the game being a gold-quality Beam Array Mk XIV with either [Ac/Dm] [CrtD]x4 or [Ac/Dm] [CrtD]x3 [Pen]. [Ac/Dm] is a special mod that all space weapons get at Gold quality. There's a reason those run upwards of a hundred million EC on the Exchange.

Now, the best way to GET there is a several-step process.

-First, get your Beams R&D skill up to the point where, combined with the Doff you have running the projects, you will always get a purple when you make a Mk II beam. This is important, as this will take more than enough beams without having to add yet another roll of the dice on the blue-purple upgrade into the mix.

-Second, make a TON of Mk II beams of whatever energy type you decide to go with. You're going to get a load of shit. Any that come out as [CrtD]x3, [CrtD]x2 [Pen], or maybe [CrtD]x2 [Over] and [CrtD]x2 [CrtH] if you want to accept some lower-grade products to save time. By this point, you have spent very little money, as making Mk II beams is hella cheap. This is how you can afford to bin the vast, vast number of garbage beams you'll be making.

-Two-and-a-halfth, you can stop here and sell the good purple Mk II beams. This can make you some decent money without the cash outlay of the next step. Equally, if you want to skip the first twp steps, you can buy beams from other people who decide to stop here, then carry on forwards.

-Third, it's time to upgrade the beams that survived step 2. This is where you both spend and make money. A Mk II beam plus a Superior Beam Weapons Experimental Tech Upgrade (the experimental is very important) plus a blue-quality Research booster all add up to enough tech points to take the beam to Mk VII or VIII (depending on crit upgrades) with a 20% upgrade chance for EACH MARK, because it's all from the same upgrade kit. This is by FAR the cheapest way to fish for rarity upgrades. The upgrade you get from going from Very Rare (purple) to Ultra Rare (...very purple) is random from the four main upgrades. If you get a [CrtD], you've lucked out big-time. If you don't...well, that's still a decent beam, maybe, but it's not in the running for a HOLY SHIT payday or an utterly fantastic weapon. If you get luckier and go gold, that's money no matter what that ultra-rare mod is, because people pay for gold weapons. If you DID get a [CrtD] for the UR upgrade AND then went gold...you have SERIOUS fucking money on your hands, or a really, really great weapon once you stuff some more mark upgrades into it. If it didn't go UR at all, it's actually more economical to just sell it for whatever you can get and start over with a Mk II. Resist the temptation to keep fishing for the rarity upgrade on these beams; it's just not cost-effective.

Now this has been hella long-winded, because it's a complicated question. Ultimately, what all this means is that crafted weapons aren't at all better than non-crafted weapons, except that it's far, far cheaper to fish for the really great modifier combinations without having to pay tens or hundreds of millions of EC to people on the Exchange who've lucked into them themselves. Is it a pain in the ass? Yup. That's why people are willing to charge and pay a premium for the products of the process.

[Elheru Aran]

So... basically... crafting is a bunch of bollocks that can give you a minimal edge most of the time, until you do enough of it that you can actually make a weapon with enough oomph that it's actually awesome, but by then you've spent half your life crafting? Is that basically what you're saying? At least that's how it comes off to me...