Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[Simon_Jester]

It's not that you get a lot of EC out of it, it's just that it seems like such a silly, silly thing to do. If throwing something away with a single click from anywhere in the game would net you more EC than selling it on the Exchange at your listed price... why bother?

[Lord Revan]

oh? I heard decent AP ones went for 14 mil EC (aka 4 mil above my cap even if I had reached the EC cap) or so.

Er... are we talking about antiproton mag regulators or antiproton weapons?

Okay, mag regulators are more expensive than the corresponding consoles of other damage types, true- probably because so many people covet antiproton weapons as damage dealers. Here's the catch, though.

Each increase in rarity or mark on a mag regulator increases its damage bonus by roughly 2%. Thus, for instance, a Rare Mk XII mag regulator boosts 28.1%, while an Uncommon Mk XI regulator boosts damage by 24.4%.

So the question you have to ask yourself is, how much is the damage boost worth? If I bought the four cheapest mag regulators on the Exchange at this very moment, I'd spend a total of 185000 EC for two common and two uncommon Mk XII consoles, with total damage boost of 101.2%.

Or I could pay 50k for another two Uncommon Mk XIIs instead of 40k and 45k for two Commons. Total damage boost is now 104.8%, and I paid an extra 15000 energy credits for it. Total cost is 200000 EC. Paying 15000 EC for an extra 3.6% damage seems reasonable.

But to do better than THAT, I need to either buy Rare Mk XIIs, or Uncommon Mk XIIIs.

...

If I swap out a Rare Mk XII for one of the Uncommons, total price of the set of four goes from 200k to 350k EC, while the damage boost only increases from 104.8% to 106.7%. Paying 15k EC for an extra 4% damage sounded good... does paying 150k for another 2%?

Buying four Rare Mk XIIs to replace the four Uncommons will set me back 950k EC. So going from four Uncommon Mk XIIs to one step up from there costs me an extra three quarters of a million EC. And in exchange, my damage bonus from tactical consoles goes from 104.8% to a whopping 112.4%.

Buying four Ultra Rare Mk XIIs would cost me 3590k EC for a damage bonus of 120%. Compared to that relatively cheap set of Uncommons, I've shelled out an additional three point four million EC in exchange for a damage output increase of roughly 15% over my base damage.

And let's not even talk about Mk XIII regulators. As I write this there are two Ultra Rare Mk XIIIs for sale at five million EC apiece. There are also some Rare Mk XIVs on sale for 4.45 to 4.5 million. Either way they provide a damage bonus of a whopping 31.9%...

In other words, they perform about 6.3% better in relative terms than the Ultra Rare Mk XII that costs roughly 85% less. And the Ultra Rare in turn performs about 6.7% better than the Rare Mk XII that costs about 78% less, and the Rare performs 6.8% better than the Uncommon that costs about 75% less.

...

And if we start thinking in terms of dilithium costs, well... the closest way I know to equating EC and dilithium costs is to look at how both convert to Fleet credits, or to assess them in terms of contraband prices (since in effect you can buy 2000 dilithium ore for five units of contraband, and you can buy five contraband on the Exchange). Fleet credit prices indicate that 1 dilithium is worth 100 EC. Contraband prices have been down since they quintupled the cooldown on the Turn In Contraband duty officer mission, and you can get 2000 dilithium for just over 150000 EC at the moment, indicating a market value of 77.5 EC/dilithium.

Being generous, then, the cost of that massive array of Ultra Rare Mk XII mag regulators measured in equivalent dilithium is going to be something like 36000 dil. Almost all of which is spent buying that last extra 8% of damage output.

Clearly, pursuing the highest possible damage bonuses results in you hitting the point of diminishing returns.

...

Now, there are a lot of situations where this makes sense.

Say, if you're a person with leveled-up captains that have good crafting skills who can make up three million EC in a few days of selling Superior upgrade kits.

Or if you're a person who actually spends significant money on the game, in which case that three million EC corresponds to roughly sixty or seventy cents of real money as soon as you start selling keys on the Exchange.

Or if you are desperately struggling to raise your DPS because it's a penis length substitute for you.

...

But by and large, in my honest opinion it is just not worth it to invest in the most powerful possible tactical consoles, unless you are already in a maxed-out endgame condition and are deliberately trying to 'optimize' your damage output beyond the already-formidable levels your ship can probably achieve on its own.

So I say, buy second-best, use a battery of Rare Mk XIIs on the Exchange. It costs so very, very much less and gives you results that are almost as impressive.

tbh it was something I had overheard in our sort of "fleet chat" (actually a private channel consisting of all of the fleets in our armada and our KDF armada as well), at the time I didn't have decent enough weapons to really check the prices.

PS. My normal DPS is so low that there's no point in trying to use as penile compensation (or do I feel the need to do so)

[EnterpriseSovereign]

With the fleet spire consoles, there's simply no need to shell out huge quantities of EC for high-end mag regulators.

Each spire tac console costs 8,500 dil and 50,000 fleet credits. These start out at Ultra Rare Mk XII and give 31.9% dmg and 1.6% crit chance. At XIV it becomes 35.6% and 1.8%, respectively. And at epic that rises to 37.5% and 1.9%.

As for high-end fleets struggling for credits, that's what the armada system is for since it benefits all involved: it gives the more advanced fleet the opportunity to earn fleet credits, while the lesser fleet benefits from the supply of materials. When it comes to supplying commodities it's worth seeking out the cheapest vendor as the ship's replicator is the most expensive way to go.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, 50000 fleet credits and 8500 dilithium corresponds to a price of 5.85 million energy credits, so those spire tactical consoles are NOT cheap*. However, spire tactical consoles provide the added advantage of that 2% or so bonus to critical hit chance, which is far, far more important than a small boost to damage.

*(although since it's usually possible to get one fleet credit for LESS than 100 EC if you put your mind to it, it's not quite that bad).

[Lord Revan]

As I stated before getting the Fleet consoles is only a matter of time but I'd rather get some cheap(ish) AP +dmg consoles then wait until I got 3-4 fleet consoles before swapping to AP. (I'm running a phaser build atm) and also decreases the change I accidently vendor some the AP weapons I've stored due to my ADHD.

[mr friendly guy]

Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.

I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.

[mr friendly guy]

Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.

I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.

The dreadnought has a 15% exotic bonus. Plan to get the ship to full mastery and use that slot for my more science based ones. So far only trying out the dreadnought, but I believe I have slotted 2 consoles into it (one from this ship and one from another 31st century temporal ship).

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.

I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.

The dreadnought has a 15% exotic bonus. Plan to get the ship to full mastery and use that slot for my more science based ones. So far only trying out the dreadnought, but I believe I have slotted 2 consoles into it (one from this ship and one from another 31st century temporal ship).

As I'm more tactically-focused I've gone for the Command Battlecruiser pack, expending the majority of my Zen. I feel a bit lightheaded now

[mr friendly guy]

As I'm more tactically-focused I've gone for the Command Battlecruiser pack, expending the majority of my Zen. I feel a bit lightheaded now

My situation is a bit of a strange one. I started of as a science toon, but since it was my first time playing STO it was easier to build up his tactical skills and play like a tactical. So far I haven't seen the need to play as another toon, although I might try a Romulan build later on. I have since collected lots of ships and can make them competitive at Elite level against the game (maybe not so much against other players). I haven't felt the need to respec everytime I try a different build. So I basically have the command bundles, the pilot ships and now the temporal ships. I have also collected the Dominion ships, all Herald ships and now all Na'khul ships. I haven't played much with ships which are classified as raiders, but oh boy, their flexibility in BOFFs allows me to try different configurations. It certainly is more flexible than the Herald Baltim raider.

In fact currently turned a Na'khul raider into a powerful science ship, with a giant plasma weapon and isokinetic cannon. Round up battle cloak and roll the ship and trajector jump, I could most likely get out of situations I can't handle and regroup. Or until my science abilities which consists of Commander subspace vortex (xindi lockbox), Lieutenant commander gravity well, Lieutenant commander destabilizing resonance beam, and quantum entanglement kicks in. It handles well on missions at advance level, and my mastery of the ship is only at tier III.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************

On another note, I have noted AP mag regulators seem more expensive than comparable energy boosters on the exchange. I have managed to sell my newly crafted level 12, very rare AP mag regulator within a day at just under 1 million EC. Unfortunately sometimes I just end up with rare instead of very rare when I craft. They don't make as much profit.

[Simon_Jester]

Mag regulators are more expensive because they're in higher demand, because everyone and their cousin is using antiproton weapons for the crit severity boost.

[Lord Revan]

I did find regulators at a decent price (about 60k or so) and I've switch to an AP build now. Now just to start replacing those with the fleet rep consoles and I should be pretty (swapping my current free ship for a T6 would be nice too).

[mr friendly guy]

Mag regulators are more expensive because they're in higher demand, because everyone and their cousin is using antiproton weapons for the crit severity boost.

I pretty much am stocked up with antiproton boosters from my fleet. My ships that use antiproton beams though aren't the stock standard ones with crit, since I use ones for bonuses. I must say when I first started playing, the advice on this board was either phasers or polarons for the proc to weaken the enemy ships. Now it might be antiproton and I might have to create a dedicated antiproton ship, which is going to cost me shit loads of dilithium for the beam arrays.

So far I have been experimenting with polarons because of the bonuses with various polaron arrays/cannons which form parts of sets.

Hmm. Its time to start cranking out those level 12 very rare Mag regulators.

[Simon_Jester]

What I'm getting at is that lots of other people use antiproton weapons, because the increased critical damage results in high DPS (or is believed to result in high DPS). I honestly have no idea if that is or isn't true. But antiproton weapons are arguably the single most popular damage type for space combat, especially at high levels. Which easily explains why high-end mag regulators are even more expensive than comparable damage-boosting consoles for other damage types.

Also, are you buying the parts for those Mk XII mag regulators on the Exchange, or making them from your own dilithium? Because I'm not sure it turns out so amazingly profitable if you use your own dilithium.

[mr friendly guy]

What I'm getting at is that lots of other people use antiproton weapons, because the increased critical damage results in high DPS (or is believed to result in high DPS). I honestly have no idea if that is or isn't true. But antiproton weapons are arguably the single most popular damage type for space combat, especially at high levels. Which easily explains why high-end mag regulators are even more expensive than comparable damage-boosting consoles for other damage types.

Also, are you buying the parts for those Mk XII mag regulators on the Exchange, or making them from your own dilithium? Because I'm not sure it turns out so amazingly profitable if you use your own dilithium.

Just crafting them using items I have accumulated over the last year from playing. I have a 70 + percent chance of getting a very rare mark 12, otherwise I get a rare mark 12. I don't bother upgrading them beyond that and just sell it for slightly less than 1 million EC. EC has traditionally been what has limited me getting upgrades, unless one goes to a gold farmer. Dilithium while harder to get in game (at least for me) is easy enough to get if you are willing to expend real money. Several times I just buy zen from cryptic (rather than from steam so you get bonus zen) and then change it for dilithium on the exchange. Yeah I know, grinding as oppose to instant self gratification, but hey, you got the money, why not spend it?

[Elheru Aran]

As noted earlier, while I suppose you can really max out your DPS with AP, the gain from what I understand is only marginal. Sort of like say you can do 100 DPS with an all-phaser setup, but with antiproton you can do... 103!

*shrugs* that might be inaccurate, but that's how I understand it. Recent revamp to a phaser build aside, I don't really care about min-maxing.

[bilateralrope]

I just decided to get semi-serious about my ship build. So I switched to disruptor beam arrays + disruptor induction coil consoles.

Sure, antiproton might give me more DPS. But the disruptor proc would boost the damage of anyone I'm flying with and I like the look of disruptor beams better than antiproton.

Ground combat has got boring, mainly because I've got a selection of games that do third person combat better. Including Star Trek: Click the F to sprint. So ground combat loadouts are me making do with whatever drops as the only interesting things that have happened on the ground are:
- Orbital strike kills. Even while underground or aboard someone else's ship.
- One Breen boss that just kept insta-killing me with no animation at all.
- Bridge officer with cover shield who didn't want me shooting enemies. She doesn't get to beam down any more.
- NPC dialog that I can't read, either due to speech bubbles off screen or combat forcing me to click through it in a hurry because the enemies started shooting when the text box popped up.

[Simon_Jester]

As noted earlier, while I suppose you can really max out your DPS with AP, the gain from what I understand is only marginal. Sort of like say you can do 100 DPS with an all-phaser setup, but with antiproton you can do... 103!

*shrugs* that might be inaccurate, but that's how I understand it. Recent revamp to a phaser build aside, I don't really care about min-maxing.

It's something like that, but a lot of the strategies for high DPS revolve around maximizing critical hits.

Because there are a lot of ways to increase critical hit chance and they all stack linearly (each 1% bonus is as good as the ones before and after it). And because critical hit chance is a purely passive statistic which doesn't require you to constantly activate a series of bridge officer powers or other things, so DPS increases due to deadly criticals are "always on."

So, it's relatively easy/advantageous to cultivate your critical hit chances. And once you start doing that, there is synergy between high critical hit chance and high critical damage chance. The power of having both of those together isn't just additive, it's multiplicative.

So antiproton weapons' high critical damage gives them excellent synergy with the high critical probability builds that so many of the 'gunner' types were using anyway. Meanwhile, none of the other damage types have that kind of synergy, because their special effects are totally random and outside your control. A non-antiproton weapon has a flat 2.5% chance of having its "proc" affect the enemy, while an antiproton weapon gets a flat damage bonus as a "proc" every time you score a critical hit. If you ramp up your critical hit chance high enough, that means you can benefit from this much, much more often than you would benefit from any other damage type.

So the more of a DPS power-user you are, the greater your incentive to switch away from other damage types and towards antiproton weapons. If you aren't already doing a bunch of things to increase critical hit chance it won't matter, but if you are, it will. Conversely, once you make the decision to use antiproton weapons, all your various ways of increasing critical hit chance become just that much more valuable.

[Elheru Aran]

Just seems like a lot of work to do when you could be, I don't know, playing the game? That kind of minor incremental improvement in your stats is nice, I guess, but all that kind of takes away from the fun of the game IMO.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's not incremental necessarily, as I understand it, it can get to the point where switching to antiproton weapons means you immediately do like half again as much damage.

Plus, a lot of people sat down and decided in advance that they wanted ships with high firepower, and if you want to maximize firepower, picking up antiproton weapons is a logical choice. It's also a choice the game designers made fairly easy, because there are multiple reputation builds that supply antiproton weapons, a variety of consoles and so on for them, and a number of missions that drop them.

Nobody should be demanding that anyone else 'go antiproton.' But there are good reasons why, among players who have a choice of which damage type to use, antiproton is arguably the most popular choice.

[I say this as someone whose only reallly maxed out 'endgame' character who's got a fairly full selection of reputation equipment, sets, and so on uses phasers. ]

I just decided to get semi-serious about my ship build. So I switched to disruptor beam arrays + disruptor induction coil consoles.

Sure, antiproton might give me more DPS. But the disruptor proc would boost the damage of anyone I'm flying with and I like the look of disruptor beams better than antiproton.

Those are both good and respectable points. You can do high DPS with any damage type- it's simply

- Orbital strike kills. Even while underground or aboard someone else's ship.

Yeah, that's always amused me. On the other hand, disabling orbital strikes would be a very serious nerf for engineers.

- Bridge officer with cover shield who didn't want me shooting enemies. She doesn't get to beam down any more.

!

You do realize you can just train your bridge officers in different skills and set them to do something else; if you want her summoning medical generators or turrets instead of cover shields, you can do that.

- NPC dialog that I can't read, either due to speech bubbles off screen or combat forcing me to click through it in a hurry because the enemies started shooting when the text box popped up.

Yeah, that's problematic. Though usually when it's important you can open it again (it doesn't go away until you've read through it), and you can always check your logs (press L) to reread what was said.

[bilateralrope]

You do realize you can just train your bridge officers in different skills and set them to do something else; if you want her summoning medical generators or turrets instead of cover shields, you can do that..

Yes, I could do that. I probably should.

On that note, which types of bridge officers with which skills would be a good general purpose away team ?

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

My opinion is that it's desirable to have at least one bridge officer with the ability to heal damage, because that does a lot to keep your other bridge officers fighting. That's normally a science officer (they have all the medic abilities), but engineers have shield heals and can build medical generators that heal anyone standing within a several-meter radius.

Aside from that, I'm not so sure.

[Elheru Aran]

Grenade abilities are quite useful, I've found. I was SO annoyed when I upgraded from an Attack kit to a Strategic one and it took away my grenade ability.

[bilateralrope]

Three of my duty officers managed to screw up an assignment so badly that they were put in sickbay. Two of them are R&D holograms. That says a lot about the quality of medical care aboard my ship.

Also of note is that Clock of Need is my runabout. My cruiser, the only ship I've flown today, is the Unknown Waters*. Which means that my runabout has a "sickbay".


*Which, in honour of the Olympics, has its warp trail sometimes go green for no determinable reason

In an unrelated note, this sums up the kind of time padding busywork I keep running into on the ground.

[RogueIce]

Also of note is that Clock of Need is my runabout. My cruiser, the only ship I've flown today, is the Unknown Waters*. Which means that my runabout has a "sickbay".

Yeah, that's a known thing. It generally goes in alphabetical order for things like that, so if your ship was the Anonymous Waters (for an example) it would more than likely display properly.

I have no idea why they would program it like that. Probably because back in the day your Shuttle wasn't always on the character menu. So it just picked the top "ship slot" name and displayed that. Now that it is, you get this result.