Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[mr friendly guy]

Oops. I did get them confuse. Since I am going with dual cannons, I may as well get the heavy builds when another one drops. Currently I don't have enough research skill in cannons to create a good one.

I have a turret, but I am pretty sure it only allows me to equip one polaron turrent. So I put it on the back as to add an extra strike when I approach from the front. Perhaps I can use a borg turret for kinetic damage, although it doesn't boost with polaron modulators.

unless said Polaron turret is a special unique equip one you can in theory fill your weapon slots with nothing but polaron turrets (I'n practice that's not viable as turrets aren't strong enough to be main weapons on starships), if it's just a regular old Polaron Turret you can equip as many as you need of those.

oh and if you got alot of spare update items and Dil to spare someting you can do is make a Mark II weapon with the stats you want and then upgrade it to the mark you want it to be (up to about mark X or so it's quite cheap too), that's what I did for my Delta Recruit char (it was plasma weapons in her case but still).

EDIT:if you use the Kinetic cutting beam also use the Adapted Borg Console as those give 2 piece set bonus that boosts your weapon damage.

My mistake. It was an omnidirectional polaron beam array which I created, at ultra rare. The kinetic cutting beam seems to do more damage than my standard beam, but it obviously won't be boosted by all my polaron boosters, so in the end, my standard polaron does more damage. Its somewhat offset by the fact that the kinetic cutting beam only drains 8 instead of 10, so the other beam gets an extra 4%. However since its only a mark 12, I could upgrade to mark 14 and see what it does.

The omega boost is great, but at 2.5% proc I am not sure I am going to be able to rely on it enough.

Nevertheless I am going to try it out.

Edit - it actually seems to do more damage than my polaron beam array. *I can only assume I have some other bonus for kinetic weapons I wasn't aware about.

[Lord Revan]

IIRC the kinetic cutting beam doesn't get boosted that much but however it has fairly decent based damage on hull and it does proc certain kinectic damage procs (not projectile specific ones though) also alot of stuff has lower kinectic resistance then energy resistance.

[mr friendly guy]

I find it funny now that Jem'hadar "bug ships" since becoming tier 6, they are more powerful than the Defiant and I can make a good case they are better than any other Fed escorts at least with raw numbers. I guess several decades the technology has improved. Which could be a problem given how easily the Dominion could churn out the bug ships, a case of quantity has its own quality. Only this time, the bug ships are damn powerful if equipped right.

http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-t ... econ-stats

I don't think Fed pilot escorts (tier 6) are quite as useful as them.

http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-t ... ship-stats

The Dominion have the advantages of

1. Higher hull points - 46000 vs 38,800 at level 60

2. Higher weapon damage

This requires a little bit of maths, but here goes. Figures are currently what I have used on my Jemmie bug ship.

If one uses a omnidirectional beam array for the weapon type and the Omega kinetic cutting beam in the aft, the front allows us an extra beam weapon (since Fed escorts are 5 fore 2 aft weapons while Jemmie ships are 4 fore and 3 aft). Since escorts attack front on for the cannons to be use, I can get an extra shot in with a beam array in the front. However, the Jem'hadar ships have +15 to weapons, while the Feds only have +10. Essentially 10% more damage with each weapon (every 1 point adds 2% more damage to the base).

After doing the maths (using my ships own stats), the extra beam does do slightly extra damage, around 10109 vs 10028, but the catch is I calculated using its full strength and not at the reduce power (from firing all the other beams). I am not sure if we will end up doing more front end damage. Moreover if they survive, you need to hit them with beams until you can manoeuvre to the front and hit them again. This gain gives the Jemmie ship the advantage with higher weapon settings.

The advantage the Feddies have is


1. Higher shield modifications 1.05 vs 0.99 - which gives extra 480 shield points even with Aegis epic, MK 14 shields. Doesn't seem to compensate for the sheer number of hull points the Jemmie ship has.
2. Pilot manoeuvres (don't know how well this works).

The other big thing is the consoles, however the Dominion defense screen is pretty badass. It regenerates my shields really fast.

[Lord Revan]

The Pilot skills can very powerful if you know how to use them right, Until recently I used the Nandi for my engineer and it's surpricingly powerful for a free ship.

[mr friendly guy]

On watching the video of the Feddie pilots, I am going to give them the slight edge against the T6 Jemmie ship. I am now trying the tactical one myself.

First the disclaimer. I am assuming equal consoles (at least the ones that are interchangeable between ships). Its highly unlikely the Jemmie will have Omega taskforce sets for bonuses which the alliance has.

Basically it boils down to

1. Microprojectile barrage launcher in tactical - gives an extra 1-2 k damage within a second. This would offset the weaker energy levels in weapons.

2. Microprojectile barrage launcher - gives a passive 25% boost to torps (although doesn't seem to work on my neutronic torpedo and this might be a bug). The extra damage on mark 14 torpedo is quite good.

3. Superior manoeuvrability - the ability to do flips just allows this beauty to get behind or at least away from the front end of the Jemmie ship, while presenting its front weapons to it. With a 1 torp, 2 dual cannons, 2 beam configuration at the front, and 2 turrets (or in my case, Omega cutting beam + omnidirectional beam array) I can have all weapons firing at once.

4. Pilot skills - I think this again feeds into manoeuvrability, but you can summon fighters to help you with piloting skills to give the advantage. In PvE play, the advantage is that it doesn't share the same cool down with photonic fleet, delta alliance reinforcements, nimbus etc.

Still testing these pilot ships now. The good thing about STO is the replay value with different ships. So far I have tried command battlecruisers with the tactic of deploying drones, drones, fighters and fleet reinforcements. Then tried 2 science ships, and now trying my hand with escorts using cannons. Any other ship type Feddies can play?

[White Haven]

With a 1 torp, 2 dual cannons, 2 beam configuration at the front

...What...

[mr friendly guy]

With a 1 torp, 2 dual cannons, 2 beam configuration at the front

...What...

Are you referring to the "not mix beams with cannons" rule? Its just that when you get the ship it comes with beams and cannons at the front, so I kept that type of configuration.

*******************************************
I am now finding the Iconian radiant weapons wank. At first I thought 1000 temporary hit points at 2.5 to 5% chance, meh. But once you try it, more often that not the proc triggers and I literally gain more life than I have even after taking a bit of damage. This allows me to heal fast in a way, which reminds me of the Dominion defense screen I used for my bug ship. However since this ability comes built in to weapons, I free up an extra tactical console for a boost to the antiproton effect.

[Lord Revan]

With a 1 torp, 2 dual cannons, 2 beam configuration at the front

...What...

Are you referring to the "not mix beams with cannons" rule? Its just that when you get the ship it comes with beams and cannons at the front, so I kept that type of configuration.

default confligs ships come with aren't always so good. Beams work best of broadsides where your field of fire overlaps thanks to beams having such wide firing arcs, however where beams are at their best cannons won't work at all as they're out of firing arc. Also while not as bad beams are weakers when you're firing from the front arc as your rear beams won't reach the target and cannons have more damage per "shot" then beams.

[mr friendly guy]

Generally I try and manoeuvre the pilot ship such that I can bring my cannons into bear. I also use the ships innate abilities or pilot abilities to boost turn rate to do this. However sometimes these are just exhausted and I finish the ship as I fly past it with my beams. This is for both my engineering and tactical builds. My tactical build while doing less damage with its polaron vs the engineering boost antiprotons (its just easier to find synergy for antiproton damage), also has the advantage of microprojectile barrages and isokinetic cannon to do that extra damage. But even then I occasionally need to broadside it while turning to face with my cannons, or to present my stronger sided shield to their weapon fire while I wait for my shield heals and hull heals to cool down.

[mr friendly guy]

Doing a bit of research on the cannon mixing with beams bit.

http://www.freemmoguides.com/star-trek- ... gy-weapons

All cannons have a 1 second shared cooldown – firing a cannon of any type prevents any other cannon from firing for 1 second – which means that multiple cannons must be fired in sequence.

There has been much discussion and debate over the relative effectiveness and optimal numbers of dual cannons and dual heavy cannons. Judging from the beta, it appears that the original intention of the design was for dual cannons and dual heavy cannons to have different optimum numbers. However, test results indicate that this is not presently the case, and that there appear to be some glitches in how multiple cannons function.

For the time being, the best option appears to be to mount dual cannons or dual heavy cannons in pairs, with two dual heavy cannons seeming to perform slightly better than two dual cannons. Adding a third will provide a slight increase in damage output, but not as much as using a different weapon instead (even a turret, the lowest damage weapon type, appears to add more damage output than a third dual or dual heavy cannon).

I’m far from convinced that multiple cannons are working right at the moment, so am going to hold off on going into the details of the testing I’ve done for now – my expectation is that there will be changes at some point, which would render it all obsolete. For the time being, if you are interested in detailed results of testing multiple cannons, I’d highly recommend the work of some of the posters to the Escort Class Starships and Tactical Officer Discussion sections of the official message boards and Legatus in particular, as my results so far seem to match his.

[Lord Revan]

hmm intresting, granted I always have at least 1 torp forward anyway and most of my ships run a beam build as I fly slow(ish) ships so beams are just better for that.

[White Haven]

That guide is five years old.

On the charitable assumption that this is your first MMO, I'll just go ahead and say that MMOs almost always go through serious mechanics shifts over that time scale. STO definitely has, several times. Now, I've already gone out of my way previously in this thread to answer just this sort of question in excruciating detail, so I'm not going to repeat myself except to say two things. One, stacking multipliers are the route to holy-shit-damage in nearly every RPG ever made, and mixing weapon types is a great way to not stack multipliers. Two, STOBuilds is generally the best place to find actual non-hilariously-outdated information about what actually does and does not work and why.

[Simon_Jester]

Uh yeah. Friendly guy, cannons are NOT on a shared cooldown and have not been at any time since you started playing the game.

[mr friendly guy]

Ok, so it looks like time to start crafting a couple of extra antiproton and polaron cannons for my various pilot escort ships.

Meanwhile I am trying out an inhibitory science ship and if I time it right, it seems to do good amounts of damage even to Heralds. Basically it revolves around gravity well III and subspace vortex III. The latter is only available from the Xindi Terrestrial lock box, which gives more damage per second than gravity well, so I have to hit the Heralds with both at the same time. Gravity well to keep them there, and subspace vortex to more than double the damage of gravity well. The advantage of subspace vortex, is that unlike Tyken's rift it doesn't share the same cool down as Gravity Well.

A few neat things including a Krenin console and constriction anchor which boosts exotic damage as a side effect. In fact the constriction anchor boosts my exotic damage than a console giving the maximum 37.5 particle generator skill. But the thing that really boosts things is the enhanced plasma manifolds boosting auxilliary by 62 points. Coupled with emergency power to auxilliary with another 26 boost to auxilliary its pretty neat. To top if off, use the Romulan quantum singularity boost purely to get 100+ science ability, plus the Krenim "time to kill" trait where I get 10% boost damage for every science ability which stacks 3 times. Basically if I time it right, I just manoeuvre within line of site of the Heralds ships as they're coming out and then hit 6 buttons (including 3 science abilities just to boost up the damage) and then hit them with gravity well and subspace vortex.

The thing is, I only have a common inhibitory secondary deflector at MK 12 for extra radiation damage on top of the exotic ones. The radiation damage jumps dramatically at MK 13 even if its still a common secondary deflector.

[mr friendly guy]

They are setting up an Admiralty system.

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star- ... lty-system

I just have to say, 5625 specialization points for 45 minutes task. Wow. Real useful to allow my character to have full specialization trees (at present time I have full marks in Commander and Commando) and 10 in pilot. Looking forward to using my other ships since I collect a few.

Also we have a new reputation system.

https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star- ... il/9576243

Looking forward to season 11.

[Highlord Laan]

I think you mean, 5625 skill points.

[mr friendly guy]

It seems to be called specialization points once I reach level 60. Sometimes the game still calls it skill points, for example in the Hirogen hunting grounds.

Back to the new reputation system, it looks like its geared towards a torpedo boat. I am trying out one of my escorts as a science + torp boat. Maybe I might get that Intrepid with batmobile armour console and add that to Fleet intrepid to create a Gravity well/subspace vortex torpedo boat with kemocite laced weaponry. Depends on how good the gear is.

[Lord Revan]

Well the thing is when people normally talk about specialization points they talk about the points you get spend in your specialization trees the ones you get when you "level up" past level 60, while the stuff you get while doing things is called skill or experience points.

[The Romulan Republic]

Decided to try getting back into Star Trek Online (still haven't finished the Iconian War). Last time I left off I was taking a break on Risa. The planet's got quite nice scenery, but other than that seems to be rather dull from what I've seen.

Still, I really like that the planet actually seems to switch between day and night. Not sure I've ever encountered that before. Is it a new feature of the game?

Its a nice little bit of detail that makes it feel more real, in any case.

Edit: Sometimes its nice to take a break from the missions and screw around. In my case, trying to climb a hill/mountain on Risa. Got nearly to the top then slid way down and actually lost a good chunk of my health. Still, good to know that Captain (well, now Vice Admiral) George Chamberlain of the USS Phoenix is following in the James T. Kirk tradition of dangerous rock climbing and falling off mountains.

[Lord Revan]

Decided to try getting back into Star Trek Online (still haven't finished the Iconian War). Last time I left off I was taking a break on Risa. The planet's got quite nice scenery, but other than that seems to be rather dull from what I've seen.

Still, I really like that the planet actually seems to switch between day and night. Not sure I've ever encountered that before. Is it a new feature of the game?

Its a nice little bit of detail that makes it feel more real, in any case.

Edit: Sometimes its nice to take a break from the missions and screw around. In my case, trying to climb a hill/mountain on Risa. Got nearly to the top then slid way down and actually lost a good chunk of my health. Still, good to know that Captain (well, now Vice Admiral) George Chamberlain of the USS Phoenix is following in the James T. Kirk tradition of dangerous rock climbing and falling off mountains.

All you need now is a Vulcan XO to annoy you when you are climbing

Well outside of the summer event there's pretty much nothing to do on risa and it's not the only Planet with a day/night cycle as Bajor has that as well but they're only ones I know of, but seeing as most planets are something you quickly visit and never return it's not all that odd that it's not used that much.

Season 11 should start soon so I think so it'll intresting to see what that brings.

[mr friendly guy]

Decided to try getting back into Star Trek Online (still haven't finished the Iconian War). Last time I left off I was taking a break on Risa. The planet's got quite nice scenery, but other than that seems to be rather dull from what I've seen.

Still, I really like that the planet actually seems to switch between day and night. Not sure I've ever encountered that before. Is it a new feature of the game?

Its a nice little bit of detail that makes it feel more real, in any case.

Edit: Sometimes its nice to take a break from the missions and screw around. In my case, trying to climb a hill/mountain on Risa. Got nearly to the top then slid way down and actually lost a good chunk of my health. Still, good to know that Captain (well, now Vice Admiral) George Chamberlain of the USS Phoenix is following in the James T. Kirk tradition of dangerous rock climbing and falling off mountains.

If you still have problems with ground missions, try the Iconian armor set since you are finishing the Iconian war and some of those Heralds are frustrating. You need a lot of dilithium and tech upgrades, but this is what mark 14 epic iconian armor looks like. http://i.imgur.com/mzwrav4.png and yes those maximum hit points stack, ie your toon gets 364.6 extra hit points even if you have zero skill in armor. This item alone makes you ridiculous tanky. If you have a second item in the set, say a personalised shield you get an extra 161.4 hit points, ie 526 hit points extra.

If you really want to maximise your tankiness (is that even a word?) use an Iconian armor with Delta shields and then arm your Captain with one weapon from each set, the bonuses trigger, ie 142.2 Maximum Hit Points and +5% Run Speed from the Delta alliance set and the Iconian set bonus of +161.4 Maximum Hit Points and 5% Armor Penetration. So you get 687 hit points bonus. Obviously you'll need to spend a lot of dilithium to get them up to mark 14 and epic quality, but the standard quality alone should make you pretty tanky.

[Lord Revan]

I dunno about you but I never found the Heralds energy damage to be that bad (unless I was eating every special attack) but what I found bad was the melee damage they did which the Iconian set protects against (and the 3 peice set bonus for the Iconian set is nice too).

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. Due to having to replace my laptop on short notice, I now have a clean install of STO and a clean install of Windows 10... and STO does not want to play with Windows 10. The game client fires up, but it loads and then... doesn't do anything except sit there occupying about 500 MB of memory and flickering between "responding" and "not responding." It's trying to run in fullscreen mode.

A cursory search online reveals that Cryptic/Perfect World/Arc/Whatever is being utterly unhelpful about issues related to this. Does anyone know what might be going on? Surely someone here has played the game on Windows 10 by now...

[mr friendly guy]

I am glad then I haven't upgraded to windows 10 then.

Season 11 looks to be released on October 27. Not sure whether they have new episodes regarding the invasion by the Terran empire as they have mainly focussed on redoing the Cardassian arc with the parts where the Terran empire appears getting a makeover.

Looking forward to playing these episodes with my tactical pilot escort. If the Defiant (a Tier 5 ship) is a "tough little ship," then my Tier 6 ship is a monster, at least for taking on ships smaller than a Borg cube.

Also the Terran empire set looks like having good gear for my torpedo boat.

[mr friendly guy]

Lock box event.

Stocking up cheap (both from dilithium store and the exchange) with xindi-amphibian and xindi-terrestrial. The amphibian because I want to see if I eventually get a narcine carrier because it looks like a beautiful ship, and the terrestrial because I am eventually going to sell it on the exchange for lots of EC once this event passes. The kemocite laced weaponry manuals would hopefully drive people to purchase it.