Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

One engineering power that you should always have is Engineering Team, it does for hull what Science Team does for shields. And if you have the sci slots available (because Sci Team and Hazard Emitters are both must-haves), Polarize Hull is very handy for breaking enemy tractor beams if you can't use Attack Pattern Omega since that power is lt. cdr. and above.

[Lord Revan]

the 3 " X Team" (X=Engineering, Science or tactical) powers are pretty much a must have, "Engineering Team" heals your hull and clears some debuffs, "Science Team" heals shields and clears some science related debuffs (like some that turn off your shields) and "Tactical Team" gives a nice damage boost and clears any hostile boarding parties you might have on your ship.

[Elheru Aran]

I need to grab Tactical Team one of these days.

That makes me think of something else, though. Retraining your Bridge Officers isn't terribly difficult nor super-expensive. It's not free, but if you have a decent amount of EC, you can buy the retraining tokens without much trouble. Just make sure you have the appropriate rank in place, select a candidate, and train. Once you're in endgame with the ship of your dreams (or a close approximation thereof), go for it.

[Feil]

Although cruiser is best at it, you don't actually need to run a cruiser to be an engineer-powered tanky beamboat once late-game equipment and ships start factoring in. You can even tank hard and broadside with a 7-beam escort... you'll just be a fast tank with lots of tactical powers, relying in part on Defense (a composite stat based mostly on your speed) not a slow tank with lots of engineering powers and relying more hardness and hitpoints.

Bar PVP (which is deader than the eternal lightless void of intergalactic space), nothing in STO, even on Elite, needs the amount of tanking that a well-run late-game cruiser can provide, so playing less theoretically optimal builds is very viable.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Although cruiser is best at it, you don't actually need to run a cruiser to be an engineer-powered tanky beamboat once late-game equipment and ships start factoring in. You can even tank hard and broadside with a 7-beam escort... you'll just be a fast tank with lots of tactical powers, relying in part on Defense (a composite stat based mostly on your speed) not a slow tank with lots of engineering powers and relying more hardness and hitpoints.

Bar PVP (which is deader than the eternal lightless void of intergalactic space), nothing in STO, even on Elite, needs the amount of tanking that a well-run late-game cruiser can provide, so playing less theoretically optimal builds is very viable.

With my 23rd cent toon I've gone down the tac route, having crafted half a dozen antiproton beams in preparation, most of which I've gotten to v. rare. Once fully levelled I plan on strapping them onto one of my escorts

Regarding subscriptions, I personally recommend the lifetime membership- just wait until it's on sale at a discount which happens every so often and it'll pay for itself in half the time it would normally. It really depends how long you plan on playing the game for

[mr friendly guy]

Haven't gotten a new ship for a while, but what do people think about the temporal ships. There are so many, not just one for science, escort and cruiser, but different types. I mean what do the temporal operative bridge abilities do? Is it worth it (from the perspective of playing a different style) given that it seems to be a money making scheme, ie you buy the standard one from Zen, then you buy the fleet version once you get all the abilities with the regular version.

[Zwinmar]

My problem is the ground combat portion. You can get by in space with a sub optimal set up, but ground...yeah, you get roflstomped with the wrong set up, that I still haven't figured out yet.

[mr friendly guy]

Iconian ground set. You become a tank. Every ground PvE I notice I am the guy with the highest shields and life total.

[Lord Revan]

the Iconian set is amazing for ground combat, just don't use the "look" if you got body image issues as it leaves pretty much nothing to the imagination.

[bilateralrope]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.
Using the transporter to go between your bridge and in-space seems a bit silly.

I also unlocked Duty Officers. Questions:
- Does my choice of department heads/first officer matter ?
- How can I identify repeatable duty officer assignments ?
I feel that I should get the non-repeatable ones out of the way first.
- Any tips for deciding which duty officer assignments to pick ?

[mr friendly guy]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.
Using the transporter to go between your bridge and in-space seems a bit silly.

I also unlocked Duty Officers. Questions:
- Does my choice of department heads/first officer matter ?
- How can I identify repeatable duty officer assignments ?
I feel that I should get the non-repeatable ones out of the way first.
- Any tips for deciding which duty officer assignments to pick ?

1. AFAIK, no.
2. Most of them are repeatable, although some come around less infrequently. Usually the ones that aren't easily repeatable usually have task 1 of x or something like that.
2 a. There really isn't a need to get them out the way first. Duty officer assignments are there to give you bonuses.

3. Generally do whichever ones you can get. However it depends on what you're looking to get out of them. For example if you want exp, just pick the ones with the higher rewards. If you want EC, dilithium etc pick those ones which reward them (although they won't reward much).

[Lord Revan]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.
Using the transporter to go between your bridge and in-space seems a bit silly.

I also unlocked Duty Officers. Questions:
- Does my choice of department heads/first officer matter ?
- How can I identify repeatable duty officer assignments ?
I feel that I should get the non-repeatable ones out of the way first.
- Any tips for deciding which duty officer assignments to pick ?

for doffs

1. as far as I can tell none what so ever it it's just whose face you see when you ask about special assingments
2. pretty much all doff missions are repeatble under a specific "respawn" timer the few that aren't are listed as such
3. depends on what you want from a doff mission, diplomacy ones are good as opening up additional transwarp locations and making some missions easier but are really grindy, though generally if you get a rare mission avaible and you got a decent chance of success you should get those as they give better then normal rewards, just bare in mind that "white" quality doffs can become KIA which means you loose them permanently (though higher quality ones can't and just become wounded IIRC)

[mr friendly guy]

Iconian ground set. You become a tank. Every ground PvE I notice I am the guy with the highest shields and life total.

To elaborate further.

The second tankiest set is the Delta set. My bridge officers who accompany me on ground missions pretty much level 14, epic delta sets. Its easier to earn Delta marks than Iconian marks I find (since you can grind various delta quadrant missions for marks without the hassle of queuing in PvE missions).

[Feil]

My problem is the ground combat portion. You can get by in space with a sub optimal set up, but ground...yeah, you get roflstomped with the wrong set up, that I still haven't figured out yet.

Setup isn't as important as tactics on ground. It's worth repeating what I said earlier.

Aim and crouch to shoot. Sprint to move. Stay close to cover. Avoid shooter mode, never fire on the move, and block line of sight when you're not shooting, or when you're running low on health.

Remember to use your kit and captain abilities, and stock up on Large Hypos.

Regarding equipment:

Leveling
Armor: focus on energy resistance first and kinetic resistance second.
Shields: capacity is best. Level 1-30, disruptor resistance is good, too.
Weapons: pulsewave for close (less than 7 meters), splitbeam for far or exposed targets. Avoid anything that's going to animation-lock you, like full-auto, dual pistols, blast assaults, or miniguns. Full Auto Rifles can be okay once you get used to working around animation lock, as it's one of the shorter and more useful animation-locking secondaries.

Late-game
Armor and shields from one of the Reputation sets is a good idea. Add a weapon for the three-set if it doesn't compromise your ability to do damage safely.
A Gambling Device (search for it under Reward Packs) is the best tribble-type Device you can use.

[Lord Revan]

with weapons I'd say knockback [KB3] mod is semi useful as a lot of the enemies have stuff that can be hard, annoying or both to deal solo, though they can't use those when they're flat on their arse obviously.

That said said mod is not as usefull at end game as it doesn't boost your damge at all.

[RogueIce]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.

What are you trying to sell?

Using the transporter to go between your bridge and in-space seems a bit silly.

Standard scene transition.

I also unlocked Duty Officers. Questions:
- Does my choice of department heads/first officer matter ?
- How can I identify repeatable duty officer assignments ?
I feel that I should get the non-repeatable ones out of the way first.
- Any tips for deciding which duty officer assignments to pick ?

- Pure fluff and RP, if you care about that.
- Basically all of them unless it says otherwise, or is "1 of __"
-- You can try but where they appear and when is not fixed. Just take them as they go.
- If you're looking for XP, dilithium or whatever, go for those. If you're looking to complete them for completeness sake, I'd start down the Diplomacy (Fed)/Marauding (KDF) path first, because those actually unlock useful things: additional transwarp destinations. The rest are just titles and stuff, and some Doffs you can get (1 free per tier) and buy.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

For dil, go for those missions that offer 50 as a reward. By itself it's not much, but if you get a critical success you can earn 250. Your chances of that happening are shown in the selection window and is pretty self-explanatory. Once you have some purple DOFFS your chances of that happening rise considerably.

[Simon_Jester]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.

Are you trying to sell randomly dropped loot? R&D materials? What, exactly?

[Feil]

Do you guys have any recommendations for a fleet? Like PVP itself, my old hardcore PVP fleet is dead.

All Holdings maxed out, and a place to pump fleet marks into, would be a plus.

[bilateralrope]

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.

What are you trying to sell?

I just tried selling stuff on the exchange. GW2 and Eve Online allow me to check the price of an item I want to sell much easier than STO does.

Are you trying to sell randomly dropped loot? R&D materials? What, exactly?

It's not about what I'm trying to sell. It's about how nice the UI is when doing so:
- To see what price an item is being sold for by other people, you have to search for it in the buy tab of the exchange, so I kept swapping between each page. In GW2, that information is displayed on the page where you set the price.
- You have to manually type the price in for STO. For GW2, you can click any of the existing buy or sell orders and it sets your order to that price. Clicking the price field and pressing the down cursor reduces it by one, which is a pretty good price to set for selling most items.

In GW2 it was convenient to throw everything onto the trading post that would get you more than the vendor price. Even if it was only the minimum currency increment more.
In STO, the UI of the exchange gets in the way. I'm not going to even both listing white items.

[Simon_Jester]

Understandable...

Honestly, for most random drops it's not worth the trouble to use the Exchange unless you have a lot of time on your hands. Some things are worth selling off, others not so much. And if the prevailing price is less than, oh, several thousand EC (which it's not, except for uncommon or better items of high mark, as a rule), then again, not really worth it. You'll get as much EC as you actually need to buy the few pieces of equipment it's worth paying for at low level.

If you just want to not have to worry about EC and are prepared to spend real money, there are a few items that can be bought for Zen and sold on the exchange for very high EC prices. So high, come to think of it, that you might have to pay Zen for a wallet upgrade just to hold it all.

[Zwinmar]

Thank you for the ground guide, definitely easier now though I am in the unique position of having four high level toons without knowing all the tricks. Fed and 23c @ 60, Klink @55, Romulan Fed @ 54. Though to be fair I leveled most of them back years ago now and the 23c toon went ridiculously fast with the exp boost.

[Zwinmar]

double post, meh:...

Do I need to play through the Delta Quadrant to get the Iconian War Arc?

[bilateralrope]

One detail about the exchange that I really hate is that it punishes people for trying to sell things in bulk.

On any search, a maximum of 400 results will be shown. If there are more than 400 items for sale that match the search criteria, the least expensive (total cost, regardless of stack size) will be shown.

Here's what this means: If there are 400 people selling something for 1,000 ec each and you list two of them in the same listing for 1,800 (900 each) then your listing won't show in the results. If there are less than 400, but more than a page worth, your listing will be hidden on a later page because it's sorted by the total price of the listing.

What this means is that, when it comes time to sell the lockboxes that are dropping for me, I have to make a separate listing for every single lockbox. Then get mails saying that they all sold to the same person at about the same time. Which tells me that the buyer would have preferred to be able to buy them all in a single transaction if there was some way to sort the results by price per unit.

I can see how the developers reached this result. It mainly comes down to cobbling the exchange together without much thought about how it should operate.

[Simon_Jester]

double post, meh:...

Do I need to play through the Delta Quadrant to get the Iconian War Arc?

I think you can just arbitrarily press "begin" on the Iconian War arc before that point, but I'm not sure. I'm not the kind of person who does that.

One detail about the exchange that I really hate is that it punishes people for trying to sell things in bulk.

On any search, a maximum of 400 results will be shown. If there are more than 400 items for sale that match the search criteria, the least expensive (total cost, regardless of stack size) will be shown.

Here's what this means: If there are 400 people selling something for 1,000 ec each and you list two of them in the same listing for 1,800 (900 each) then your listing won't show in the results. If there are less than 400, but more than a page worth, your listing will be hidden on a later page because it's sorted by the total price of the listing.

What this means is that, when it comes time to sell the lockboxes that are dropping for me, I have to make a separate listing for every single lockbox. Then get mails saying that they all sold to the same person at about the same time. Which tells me that the buyer would have preferred to be able to buy them all in a single transaction if there was some way to sort the results by price per unit.

I can see how the developers reached this result. It mainly comes down to cobbling the exchange together without much thought about how it should operate.

Uh... actually, you're missing something important.

In the Exchange option there is a "list by ascending price per unit." In that mode, the price listing looks at the number of items in a stack and divides total price by number of items. It totally exists, and works. I've used it literally hundreds of times. It's in the top left of the Exchange window, at least for me.

Unless your target market is "people who are dumber than a squirrel," they will be using that option, because otherwise they're going to constantly be spending 2000 EC for one of a thing they could buy for 500 EC each if they were willing to pay for a stack of five. I know this from experience because I routinely sell large stacks of R&D materials, and people buy them almost immediately because they are cheap per unit even if the total price is in the hundreds of thousands of EC.

You're unhappy that this feature doesn't exist... but it does exist, and has existed for years.

Have you actually experimented with the Exchange, rather than just reading the manual?