What kind of shields do you have? Regenerative shields are a trap. They can be good for a hull tanking setup, but most people shield tank (and your setup is heading that direction), in which case it's easy to make up for regen and impossible to make up for capacity. Covariants are best, resilients if you can't get those. Liberal use of tactical team can save you if you take a lot of damage on one facing, but you're short on powers at your level.
Most Orion ships carry fighters - even their frigates can sometimes summon a pair of them. Best way to fight them isn't defensive, but offensive with AOE or point defense. Switch high yield for fire at will and put power to weapons and you should shred those fighters. It might even be worth dropping your torpedo for another beam array at that point. Most ships get the bulk of their DPS from energy weapons, but cruisers more so and engineers especially.
I love fire at will in cruisers. If you're in any situation where indiscriminate fire isn't an immediately bad thing (and in solo missions it's usually a good thing) it's a nice way to lay down a lot of fire on a lot of targets.
I'd suggest trying this setup on your boff skills:
En tac: FAW 1
En Eng: EPTS 1
LT Eng: EPTS 1, Aux2SIF 1 or RSP 1
En Sci: HE 1
This gives you Fire at Will for AOE damage, and a rate of fire buff for single target situations. In the engineering side, alternate between EPTS copies to keep your shield power high all the time. Aux2SIF will give you a hull resist buff and a small hull heal on a short cooldown, RSP will give you the big shield absorb buff that can turn a certain death into a massive heal. Hazard emitters gives you a good hull heal over time - it's not instant but it is one of the biggest hull heals in the game. It also removes a ton of minor debuffs - plasma weapon fires, warp plasma, theta radiation, Har'peng radiation, etc, etc.
For your engineering powers, you could also keep engineering team and switch RSP 1 to EPTS 2. The main idea either way is to always have two copies of EPTS. The shared cooldown between separate copies is the same as the duration, so alternating between the two will mean you'll always have elevated shield power. This way, even running the 100/50/25/25 weapons power preset, you'll have pretty high shield power all the time.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
I do a variation on the above with my Odyssey, With EPS1 and EPW3, backed up by doffs, I can run at ~125 weapons and shields as well as ~60 or so in the rest, makes for a very resilient ship!
Good point about Hazard emitters, I'd forgotten that one and it is probably the best science skill.
I do that in my Excelsior, too. She hasn't been out of mothballs since S5, but I had two copies of EPTW1 and two copies of EPTS2. The shared cooldown between two copies of the same EPT power is the same as the duration, and the shared cooldown between different EPT powers is half the duration, so you can cycle around them to keep both always active.
On a plus note, I was able to complete the Kuvah'magh quest by switching to max weapons, so thanks for that.
Where can I get better armor and weapons? So far, I've upgraded my stuff solely from drops from killing things. I figure there's gotta be a place I can spend my energy credits or dilithium, right?
Anything in particular you want clarified? I lapsed into shorthand there, if there's anything you don't recognize I can expand it out for you.
Save your dilithium for now, stuff's expensive, so it's best saved for endgame. The exchange (auction house basically) at earth spacedock might be a good spot to get stuff.
Best way to get gear is to shop in the mission replay feature (Episodes tab under your journal) - every mission you've already done will scale to your current level and have appropriate rewards. They're the same basic things as the first time, but may be different energy types or modifiers - a photon torpedo the first run may be a quantum torpedo now, or a transphasic later.
Another way to get super easy gear up until tier VIII is through crafting. Send me a PM when you are online and if I'm on the forums or anything, I can craft you something up. Other fleet members can craft as well I'm sure.
Oh, and one thing I like to do is make sure "redistribute shields" is set to a keybind and use it a lot. I have mine set to mouse5, some people set it to a macro that also fires weapons. If you find enemies taking down individual shield facings, it's because you aren't using redistribute constantly. Outside of Elite STFs and PvP, I never lose a single shield facing, if my shields go down, they're all down. Your survivability goes waaaay up.
Thanks for all the ideas. I'll definitely check them out.
Except the fleet bank, that is. I can't bring myself to take from community shares like that, even though that's what they're there for. I couldn't do it in WoW, and I don't see myself doing it in STO. :-/
The stuff in there literally rots 99% of the time. Most of the other 1% is people occasionally purging low quality ones or duplicates to make more space. It's less "taking from community shares" than it is "trashpicking." Nothing in there's doing any good until somebody takes it, and it's all perfectly good stuff.
Yep. Especially for non-level 50 gear, we literally put it in for people to level with. Don't feel bad, I've kitted out ships from the fleet bank while I levelled plenty of times. I even took EC once. All the fleet bank is, most of the time, is the non-white loot people get that's below their level. Shit, just a few days ago I grabbed a plasma dual heavy cannon from the fleet bank for a new Klink LG I was trying to get set up, and that was actually a nice purple MKXI thing.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
Yup, use it. I used it and it helped me out greatly. Now I find I'm depositing more than withdrawing. Use it and don't feel bad, just be sure to give when you get goodies you don't need.
A number of Romulan ships have gone missing in the vicinity of the Azure Nebula, and the Romulans have asked for assistance in locating them. The density of the Nebula renders long-range sensors ineffective, but an encrypted message from one of the captured ships indicates that the Tholians have constructed several bases in the Nebula – they are most likely using them as a staging area to launch a full-scale invasion.
In the Azure Nebula Rescue event, players attempt to rescue as many Romulan ships as possible from the Tholians within a set time limit. To do so, they must disable four tractor beams holding a captured ship in place. Rescuing larger ships will net more points, but they are protected by stronger enemies. Any Vice Admiral or Lieutenant General can participate in this event and rewards are based on how many ships are rescued and how valuable the ships are.
In addition to a modest Fleet Mark reward, players are also rewarded with Romulan Marks, which are used in our new Reputation system (look for another Dev Blog on this system in the near future).
To participate, use the PvE Queue to join either a public or private queue. Azure Nebula Rescue is a space event that is always available, but if you play during certain hourly events (calendar updates to be announced at a later date), you will earn even more rewards. It is also a cross-faction event that is targeted at 5-person groups. You must be a Vice Admiral or Lieutenant General to participate.
So this reputation system sucks up doffs, items, and dilithium in the exact same way that star bases do. I highly recommend that you grind out the mark XII STF stuff right now if you have the ability to because it is a tier 5 reward in the reputation system. Also, you will have to make a choice between contributing to your fleet's starbase vs contributing towards your reputation.
Embassy is a doff sucker, too, though not as extreme. The cumulative pressure on a smaller fleet is going to be crushing, though, especially a new fleet. And they're talking about another holding before season 8 yet.
They're shooting themselves in the foot with the 1000 dilithium recruitment "tax" in light of this. C-store packs won't work for any of this, because you need 90% white and 9% green doffs for this stuff, only a few blues or purples. C-store packs will only work for building your own crew. Only good thing I have to say about it is that there's very little from fleet rewards that I want, so I've been churning FC's for doff packs to try and brute force the worse projects (and making millions selling the leftovers, but now the leftovers are getting stuffed in my mailbox clown car style).
One good thing I'll say, the rewards from the reputation system aren't bad. Some of the passive buffs are nice, and then an active power at tier 5. Progression doesn't seem too awful, the starting projects are 800 and 2000 exp, tier 5 is 40,000. Starting projects aren't bad (only the 800 xp ones take doffs and only 2 each), but they'll probably ramp with tiers like starbases, so I hesitate to say costs are reasonable.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
Embassy is a doff sucker, too, though not as extreme. The cumulative pressure on a smaller fleet is going to be crushing, though, especially a new fleet. And they're talking about another holding before season 8 yet.
They're shooting themselves in the foot with the 1000 dilithium recruitment "tax" in light of this. C-store packs won't work for any of this, because you need 90% white and 9% green doffs for this stuff, only a few blues or purples. C-store packs will only work for building your own crew. Only good thing I have to say about it is that there's very little from fleet rewards that I want, so I've been churning FC's for doff packs to try and brute force the worse projects (and making millions selling the leftovers, but now the leftovers are getting stuffed in my mailbox clown car style).
One good thing I'll say, the rewards from the reputation system aren't bad. Some of the passive buffs are nice, and then an active power at tier 5. Progression doesn't seem too awful, the starting projects are 800 and 2000 exp, tier 5 is 40,000. Starting projects aren't bad (only the 800 xp ones take doffs and only 2 each), but they'll probably ramp with tiers like starbases, so I hesitate to say costs are reasonable.
What's this? The costs for doff smashing/splitting?
I imagine that the first few weeks of the rep system will kill any small fleets if they really are taking roughly the same inputs as fleet building. Ours is coming along though, seems like projects are still filling up, at least it has been a while since I've had the chance to input some of my inbox! Unfortunately most of the stuff I'm after in the fleet provisions is at tier 5, so yeah...in for the long haul here.
I wonder if they see the rep system as a replacement for fleet stuff for the solo player? It might explain the overlap in materials, I'm just hoping that they do take into account some of the play history via accolades or something to give people who have done some STFing already a bit of a heads up.
I mainly mean the 1000 dil charge on the general recruitment 5-pack, which basically cuts alt-farming doffs in half.
There's no cost on splitting, actually, which is a good thing for this whole system. The increased cost on the grinder isn't going to hurt these systems too bad, either, since like I said, the majority of doff inputs are white and nearly all of the rest are green - it'll hurt people trying to build up their crews quite a bit, though.
The input overlap is mainly on dilithium and doffs. Dilithium's still easy to get, and if the devs who've said it's removal from STFs on tribble wasn't intended follow through on fixing it, it'll still be really easy to get. Doffs inputs on reputation are pretty light (you can avoid them entirely if you accept 2000 xp every 2 days instead of 2800), but doffs are already hard to keep up with between building a crew and staffing starbases, so that'll have an impact.
There's actually some stats posted on progression. It'll take ~1600 marks and 80,000 dilithium to hit tier 5 in a reputation, and with the time gating (reputation projects take longer to complete than fleet projects) for perfect progression that's over 30 days, 40 days if you avoid the doff projects. That gives a dilithium load of about 2-2.6k a day.
Marks don't look that bad. An elite STF is giving 20 marks on tribble, but that's a bug - according to borticus it's supposed to be 60 (20 is for normals). Plus 25% if you hit the optional. Tier 1 projects ask for 11 or 17, meaning it'll be easy for the first tier or two to get a big backlog of marks.
The individual difficulty looks like dilithium. But the fleet impact definitely looks like it'll be in doffs, because it's the only input the active fleets are really having trouble keeping up with. Even if fleets and recruitment put some brakes on dilithium, I think they'll still be finishing those inputs ahead of those nasty 160 doff projects.
I'm looking at the 12th fleet's base right now, and their entire project list is full except for doffs in every slot. A couple 80k dilithium inputs, thousands of fleet marks, thousands of commodities, all filled in the first couple hours. But for want of about 200 doffs, they'll probably take 2-3 days to fill out.
Edit: I definitely don't think they see this as a replacement for fleets on solo players. They've put some major permanent passive buffs on there as well as active combat powers. Tier 5 in both is a comparable power increase to what they'd get by bumping the level cap to 55. This is a "required" endgame progression project.
Doffing is a side game with rewards that are mostly self contained - tier rewards are things to help you doff better. Fleets are a step up, a side game with item rewards that are for the most part easily dismissed. Reputations are a side game with direct power advancement for your character, as well as item rewards that for the most part *aren't* easily dismissed.
Edit 2: Also, I'm ignoring the costs of getting your rewards. Some things are automatic, but items need to be created similar to fleet gear. According to Borticus, fully gearing at mk XII will cost similar dilithium and more marks than leveling from 0 to 5 did, so the dilithium load doesn't stop when you hit tier 5. Discount anyone who already has stuff from the old system (I'm only likely to get a mk XII ground set and possibly some weapons for my away teams) that they won't create the second time around.
Either way, I think that embassies will be a bigger hit to starbases than reputations ever will. They're supposed to be smaller than starbases, but that still leaves a lot of room to be expensive, and any overlap with the choke points of starbase progression will resonate painfully.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
edited October 2012
Hmm, interesting. Thanks for the details, I've not had a look on the test server, so been a bit in the dark about the nitty-gritty, it'll be very useful to know what to expect.
*e*
It seems that the sto wiki has a lot of info that I had overlooked. Last time I checked the test server stuff was a bit out of date.
Got to look around an embassy a bit (the map wasn't accessible but the project system was). The costs are almost identical to comparable Starbase projects at the same tier, but the XP requirements are immensely lower. Sub-tiers (Diplomacy and Recruitment) are only 3 tiers and cap at 34,000 XP, main progression is also 3 tiers at caps at 6,000. A maxed-out embassy looks like the time equivalent of a tier 2 starbase, but I'd estimate it's cost equivalent closer to a tier 3 one. There's a lot less unlocks and provisioning attached, so I imagine it'll be a fairly doable job for any fleet that didn't implode trying to start a starbase.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
edited October 2012
I keep trying to donate doffs but am unable. I put the checkmark next to the dude or dudes and hit transfer and goes to the little transferring window, and stays there forever
I keep trying to donate doffs but am unable. I put the checkmark next to the dude or dudes and hit transfer and goes to the little transferring window, and stays there forever
And of course it works right after I post that.
I noticed that happening too. Always happens when the DO I'm trying to donate is out on a mission. Make sure none of them are out and you should be fine.
XBL = MoP54
PSN = PessimistMaximus
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
Y'know that might be it. I figured it'd only show doff's who were available. Silly me.
When Season 7 launches, we will be converting all existing STF items that you have to Omega Marks and Borg Neural Processors using a rate that takes into account how many of these items you have acquired, and not yet spent, on your character.
We’ve reviewed the number of items currently on all characters so that we can ensure a smooth transition to the new system. The goal of the conversion is to make it fair and equitable for everyone and especially reward those that have been playing STFs for “many months” so that you will have a leg up in the new system.
NOTE: All STF “currency” items not spent before Season 7 launch will be converted to the new system!
There are 42 items that will be converted including:
Encrypted Data Chips (EDCs)
Marks of Requisition
Recruit, Veteran, and Elite Requisitions
Rare and Prototype Borg Salvage
Common, Rare, and Prototype Tech
All types of these items will be immediately converted to Omega Marks and Borg Neural Processors when the owning character logs in for the first time after Season 7 releases.
Any items converted this way will go into a storage device which cannot be retrieved until the character reaches Tier 5 in the Task Force Omega Reputation System.
The storage device, called an Omega Conversion Crate, will denote how much of each item is stored for later retrieval and will remain locked until you achieve Tier 5 in the Omega Reputation System. Once unlocked, your character will be able to retrieve the Omega Marks and Borg Commodities that were converted along with a bonus amount of Dilithium Ore.
The Omega Marks (and Dilithium Ore) can then be used immediately to assist in purchasing any unlocked gear set rewards. After reviewing the data, the conversion rate for most players will allow for the purchase of a partial and in some case full set of their choosing. Or, if you’re already fully geared, an option will be available to convert surplus Omega Marks into additional Dilithium Ore.
Cannot quite wrap my head around wether it's better to save or spend now.
Without knowing the numbers, it's impossible to tell for sure. I'm leaning towards spend now, since I'm reasonably sure you won't get as much dilithium later.
Since you don't get your marks until tier 5, it won't help with the immediate grind either way, you're going to be doing your rep work from scratch bothways. It takes 1600 marks to get to tier 5, which is 27 elite STFs or 80 normals (not counting the 25% bonus for the optionals). Doing the elites that's less than one STF per day during the grind thanks to project time gating. That will give you enough elite marks to cover one full set and two pieces of another set. Just doing 2 elite STFs per day will give you enough elite marks for two full sets and a few weapons to boot, and a backlog of nearly 2000 marks for projects. Doing 3 normals a day will feed progression and leave you a small backlog of marks when you hit tier 5. Then there's the project time gating to unlock the gear, giving you more time to grind - all the projects are 2 days, so if you continue the pattern you should be more or less always ahead of the game on marks (Note: this is without splitting time on Romulan marks, but since the gear over there isn't as attractive I expect more people to hit tier 5 and be done).
Basically, I'm thinking that it'll be better to get dilithium now than marks and dilithium later. The time gating should allow you to backlog marks so that by tier 5 you'll have some surplus to burn.
Now, dilithium on the other hand, you'll need for most projects, and as you unlock stuff in the store you then buy it with dilithium. Cashing in now will give you less marks, which you shouldn't be painfully short on, but more dilithium, which you'll need in greater abundance than currently.
Also, remember, embassies. Dilithium demand there will be roughly equivalent of a tier 2.5 starbase over the project time of a tier 2 starbase. Those are manageable costs, but not trivial.
Hang on... am I understanding this correctly in that when S7 launches the Borg Equip on my cruiser and the MAKO equip on my escort will be converted to credits for the new system? Does that mean just Shields / Engines / Deflector, or weapons acquired using EDC as well?
If it is the three items in the main set that will be bad enough as both my ships will be stripped of those sets, but if it is EDC acquired weapons as well I will truly be back at square one. If the credits that gives me dont unlock till tier 5, that will be a right pain in spending EC to rekit two ships.
Nothing happens to the equipment you already have. All the salvage, EDCs, and requisitions you have laying around will be converted to some combination of omega marks and dilithium and then put in a box you cannon open until you unlock tier 5 reputation. The shields, maco sniper rifles, [borg] quantum torpedos, and assimilated transwarp engines you have will be untouched. Well that's not entirely true, the assimilated items will be converted to MK XI. A new MK XII version will be available from the reputation store once you've unlocked them.
Originally Posted by dastahl View Post
Ok, just checked with the designers and here is what they've done for Season 7
- Normal STFs now reward 240 Dilithium + Omega Marks
- Elite STFs now reward 480 Dilithium + Omega Marks + Borg Commodity for MKXII Sets
On the bright side, the choice of wether or not to trade in for Dilithium now or later just got easier.
However, the STO forum angst is amusing. One comment about these changes...
we are now faceing our greatest threat in our very existance!
sic
edit.The forums are so entertaining right now.
This new approach of PWE making money is nothing more than criminal mafia or extortion tactics. It is like your family member is abducted, and in order to have him/her, you need to pay x amount.
Someone has a "Never forget!" signature, likening the recent changes to LTS and vet rewards to 9/11.
Yeah, it did. My original math up the page, 2 elites/day will leave a massive backlog of marks, but won't even begin to cover the dilithium progress. Throwing in one b'tran run per day (2880 with the overlapping dailies) will cover that, but leave you 7 days behind on dilithium for a mk XII set once you hit tier 5. And that's assuming you focus on the Omega rep first and leave Romulans for later. If you do them concurrently, there goes another 2,000 dilithium/day. Even if you're hitting the refining cap every day, after tier 5 you'll only have enough backlog for a mk XII space set and a partial loadout of weapons.
Dilithium's the limiting factor, marks aren't too bad to hit. Almost certainly better to cash in for dilithium now.
There is some differences if you have certain sets though. At least for Borg, it's being split into two sets. So if you have the full Borg set now, the pieces you've got won't go away, but they *will* change. There is no 4 piece Borg now, there is just a 3 piece Borg and you must use the shield. Then there is another Borg set, I think, that includes a torpedo. Or something like that. It isn't "bad" though, just a change, and you don't lose anything you've earned. Many of the sets are changing. The Reman set looks like it might be worth a damn now, for one thing. Kind of exciting. And the new Borg set stuff looks fun, one set has an energy beam weapon that does kinetic damage. And you get to have sets that cross faction, so Feds can get KHG set stats, stuff like that.
Also, early reviews of the new zones have been very positive. And if the STO forums are positive about something, it's probably like drinking sunlight straight from heaven. So it's an exciting time!
The Reman set looks like it might be worth a damn now, for one thing. Kind of exciting.
From the preliminary info I've seen so far, it seems like you can get the Reman space-set from the Personal Reputation system, so that'll probably make some people happy.
The Tau Dewa sector is up on Tribble. If you want, you can check out the 2 important things in this sector - new romulus and the sector red alert (its special, get the daily mission first). Romulan marks and therefor romulan reputation is pretty easy to get with these new missions.
I'm up to 80 ish doffs, most of which are white. Can I upgrade them to greens (or better if they exist)?
How do I get specific doffs? I still don't have a bartender or anyone with resolve?
How important is it to have active duty people? I have a couple doffs that would give me some pretty cool options (tractor beam shield drain). Also, if I have 2 with the same skill, does it fire twice as often?
I found our starbase and have been doing the daily for Fleet Marks. Is it worth my time doing it pre 50?
I'm almost done with the Klingon War quest series. Is it worth doing the quest lines or should I just dor regular quests?
I'm up to 80 ish doffs, most of which are white. Can I upgrade them to greens (or better if they exist)?
How do I get specific doffs? I still don't have a bartender or anyone with resolve?
How important is it to have active duty people? I have a couple doffs that would give me some pretty cool options (tractor beam shield drain). Also, if I have 2 with the same skill, does it fire twice as often?
I found our starbase and have been doing the daily for Fleet Marks. Is it worth my time doing it pre 50?
I'm almost done with the Klingon War quest series. Is it worth doing the quest lines or should I just dor regular quests?
More as I think of them.
You can upgrade Doffs, there are missions at the Starfleet/Klingon acadamy with the Vulcan/Andoran/Tellerite or the Gorn/Nausican/Orion contacts. Also the Starfleet/Klingon Personel Officer.
The mission you want for upgrading is the "Underperforming Officers" one, will let you exchange 5 officers of the same quality for a new officer of 1 higher quality. All of the NPCs that offer upgrades also offer missions to get more officers as well.
Active duty people is extremely handy, but AFAIK you can only have each bonus 1 time, so there is no stacking the same bonus.
I would say it is very much worth it for turning in fleet marks and other requested materials. This earns you fleet credit, which you can exchange along with dilithium for some excellent gear back at the starbase.
I would also highly recommend doing the quest series. They unlock further quests and areas, and often have unique rewards.
If you have the same Doff on Active duty the effects don't stack but each doff gives you an additional chance to get the effect. So if a doff has a bonus 50% of the time and you have 3 of the doffs active, then you get 3 rolls to possibly activate the effect.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
Specific doffs are a little trickier to come by, the most reliable way is via the exchange, but each time you level up a rank in the doff system you get to pick a doff from a short list for free that is green/blue/purple depending on rank. You can then go to the Academy and purchase any doff that you have "unlocked" this way with dilithium. Of special note is the fact that Engineering, Medical and Military ranks allow you to replicate an unique holographic doff which can be very useful in filling out the roster. There are also specific doffs you can fish for with the repeatable missions at the end of the colonisation chains.
One thing that is definitely worth your time is the "Investigate officer reports" daily, that will get you 1440 Dilithium and 50 fleet marks for 30seconds work every day. There are a number of short foundry missions that you can use (I use a bunch by someone called Timebox) to get it done in 1 click.
Completing the story quests will most likely get you better equipment for you, your ship and your bridge officers than you will find in the wild, as well as providing a good source of credits from vendoring earlier rewards (There is a series of missions in the Breen front that give out items worth 100k to a vendor for example).
Doing the stuff around the Tau Dewa sector, I can't help but feel a lot of this feels like it should have been added with FE3.
Some damn challenging things in there. Some huge space battles (usually with the Enterprise to help), had to fight a starbase at one point and could barely make a dent. They make you earn that 50 marks a day.
A few of them are diplomatic, just hit one that's basically the DS9 episode In the Cards. You want item X, have item Y, and wacky hijinx and trades ensue until eventually you trade your way to item X. Galordon Core involved herding Gelki and was even buggier than that fleet action nobody does.
Posts
Most Orion ships carry fighters - even their frigates can sometimes summon a pair of them. Best way to fight them isn't defensive, but offensive with AOE or point defense. Switch high yield for fire at will and put power to weapons and you should shred those fighters. It might even be worth dropping your torpedo for another beam array at that point. Most ships get the bulk of their DPS from energy weapons, but cruisers more so and engineers especially.
I love fire at will in cruisers. If you're in any situation where indiscriminate fire isn't an immediately bad thing (and in solo missions it's usually a good thing) it's a nice way to lay down a lot of fire on a lot of targets.
I'd suggest trying this setup on your boff skills:
En tac: FAW 1
En Eng: EPTS 1
LT Eng: EPTS 1, Aux2SIF 1 or RSP 1
En Sci: HE 1
This gives you Fire at Will for AOE damage, and a rate of fire buff for single target situations. In the engineering side, alternate between EPTS copies to keep your shield power high all the time. Aux2SIF will give you a hull resist buff and a small hull heal on a short cooldown, RSP will give you the big shield absorb buff that can turn a certain death into a massive heal. Hazard emitters gives you a good hull heal over time - it's not instant but it is one of the biggest hull heals in the game. It also removes a ton of minor debuffs - plasma weapon fires, warp plasma, theta radiation, Har'peng radiation, etc, etc.
For your engineering powers, you could also keep engineering team and switch RSP 1 to EPTS 2. The main idea either way is to always have two copies of EPTS. The shared cooldown between separate copies is the same as the duration, so alternating between the two will mean you'll always have elevated shield power. This way, even running the 100/50/25/25 weapons power preset, you'll have pretty high shield power all the time.
Good point about Hazard emitters, I'd forgotten that one and it is probably the best science skill.
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
On a plus note, I was able to complete the Kuvah'magh quest by switching to max weapons, so thanks for that.
Where can I get better armor and weapons? So far, I've upgraded my stuff solely from drops from killing things. I figure there's gotta be a place I can spend my energy credits or dilithium, right?
Save your dilithium for now, stuff's expensive, so it's best saved for endgame. The exchange (auction house basically) at earth spacedock might be a good spot to get stuff.
Best way to get gear is to shop in the mission replay feature (Episodes tab under your journal) - every mission you've already done will scale to your current level and have appropriate rewards. They're the same basic things as the first time, but may be different energy types or modifiers - a photon torpedo the first run may be a quantum torpedo now, or a transphasic later.
MWO: Adamski
Except the fleet bank, that is. I can't bring myself to take from community shares like that, even though that's what they're there for. I couldn't do it in WoW, and I don't see myself doing it in STO. :-/
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
They're shooting themselves in the foot with the 1000 dilithium recruitment "tax" in light of this. C-store packs won't work for any of this, because you need 90% white and 9% green doffs for this stuff, only a few blues or purples. C-store packs will only work for building your own crew. Only good thing I have to say about it is that there's very little from fleet rewards that I want, so I've been churning FC's for doff packs to try and brute force the worse projects (and making millions selling the leftovers, but now the leftovers are getting stuffed in my mailbox clown car style).
One good thing I'll say, the rewards from the reputation system aren't bad. Some of the passive buffs are nice, and then an active power at tier 5. Progression doesn't seem too awful, the starting projects are 800 and 2000 exp, tier 5 is 40,000. Starting projects aren't bad (only the 800 xp ones take doffs and only 2 each), but they'll probably ramp with tiers like starbases, so I hesitate to say costs are reasonable.
What's this? The costs for doff smashing/splitting?
I imagine that the first few weeks of the rep system will kill any small fleets if they really are taking roughly the same inputs as fleet building. Ours is coming along though, seems like projects are still filling up, at least it has been a while since I've had the chance to input some of my inbox! Unfortunately most of the stuff I'm after in the fleet provisions is at tier 5, so yeah...in for the long haul here.
I wonder if they see the rep system as a replacement for fleet stuff for the solo player? It might explain the overlap in materials, I'm just hoping that they do take into account some of the play history via accolades or something to give people who have done some STFing already a bit of a heads up.
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
There's no cost on splitting, actually, which is a good thing for this whole system. The increased cost on the grinder isn't going to hurt these systems too bad, either, since like I said, the majority of doff inputs are white and nearly all of the rest are green - it'll hurt people trying to build up their crews quite a bit, though.
The input overlap is mainly on dilithium and doffs. Dilithium's still easy to get, and if the devs who've said it's removal from STFs on tribble wasn't intended follow through on fixing it, it'll still be really easy to get. Doffs inputs on reputation are pretty light (you can avoid them entirely if you accept 2000 xp every 2 days instead of 2800), but doffs are already hard to keep up with between building a crew and staffing starbases, so that'll have an impact.
There's actually some stats posted on progression. It'll take ~1600 marks and 80,000 dilithium to hit tier 5 in a reputation, and with the time gating (reputation projects take longer to complete than fleet projects) for perfect progression that's over 30 days, 40 days if you avoid the doff projects. That gives a dilithium load of about 2-2.6k a day.
Marks don't look that bad. An elite STF is giving 20 marks on tribble, but that's a bug - according to borticus it's supposed to be 60 (20 is for normals). Plus 25% if you hit the optional. Tier 1 projects ask for 11 or 17, meaning it'll be easy for the first tier or two to get a big backlog of marks.
The individual difficulty looks like dilithium. But the fleet impact definitely looks like it'll be in doffs, because it's the only input the active fleets are really having trouble keeping up with. Even if fleets and recruitment put some brakes on dilithium, I think they'll still be finishing those inputs ahead of those nasty 160 doff projects.
I'm looking at the 12th fleet's base right now, and their entire project list is full except for doffs in every slot. A couple 80k dilithium inputs, thousands of fleet marks, thousands of commodities, all filled in the first couple hours. But for want of about 200 doffs, they'll probably take 2-3 days to fill out.
Edit: I definitely don't think they see this as a replacement for fleets on solo players. They've put some major permanent passive buffs on there as well as active combat powers. Tier 5 in both is a comparable power increase to what they'd get by bumping the level cap to 55. This is a "required" endgame progression project.
Doffing is a side game with rewards that are mostly self contained - tier rewards are things to help you doff better. Fleets are a step up, a side game with item rewards that are for the most part easily dismissed. Reputations are a side game with direct power advancement for your character, as well as item rewards that for the most part *aren't* easily dismissed.
Edit 2: Also, I'm ignoring the costs of getting your rewards. Some things are automatic, but items need to be created similar to fleet gear. According to Borticus, fully gearing at mk XII will cost similar dilithium and more marks than leveling from 0 to 5 did, so the dilithium load doesn't stop when you hit tier 5. Discount anyone who already has stuff from the old system (I'm only likely to get a mk XII ground set and possibly some weapons for my away teams) that they won't create the second time around.
Either way, I think that embassies will be a bigger hit to starbases than reputations ever will. They're supposed to be smaller than starbases, but that still leaves a lot of room to be expensive, and any overlap with the choke points of starbase progression will resonate painfully.
*e*
It seems that the sto wiki has a lot of info that I had overlooked. Last time I checked the test server stuff was a bit out of date.
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
And of course it works right after I post that.
I noticed that happening too. Always happens when the DO I'm trying to donate is out on a mission. Make sure none of them are out and you should be fine.
PSN = PessimistMaximus
Cannot quite wrap my head around wether it's better to save or spend now.
Since you don't get your marks until tier 5, it won't help with the immediate grind either way, you're going to be doing your rep work from scratch bothways. It takes 1600 marks to get to tier 5, which is 27 elite STFs or 80 normals (not counting the 25% bonus for the optionals). Doing the elites that's less than one STF per day during the grind thanks to project time gating. That will give you enough elite marks to cover one full set and two pieces of another set. Just doing 2 elite STFs per day will give you enough elite marks for two full sets and a few weapons to boot, and a backlog of nearly 2000 marks for projects. Doing 3 normals a day will feed progression and leave you a small backlog of marks when you hit tier 5. Then there's the project time gating to unlock the gear, giving you more time to grind - all the projects are 2 days, so if you continue the pattern you should be more or less always ahead of the game on marks (Note: this is without splitting time on Romulan marks, but since the gear over there isn't as attractive I expect more people to hit tier 5 and be done).
Basically, I'm thinking that it'll be better to get dilithium now than marks and dilithium later. The time gating should allow you to backlog marks so that by tier 5 you'll have some surplus to burn.
Now, dilithium on the other hand, you'll need for most projects, and as you unlock stuff in the store you then buy it with dilithium. Cashing in now will give you less marks, which you shouldn't be painfully short on, but more dilithium, which you'll need in greater abundance than currently.
Also, remember, embassies. Dilithium demand there will be roughly equivalent of a tier 2.5 starbase over the project time of a tier 2 starbase. Those are manageable costs, but not trivial.
If it is the three items in the main set that will be bad enough as both my ships will be stripped of those sets, but if it is EDC acquired weapons as well I will truly be back at square one. If the credits that gives me dont unlock till tier 5, that will be a right pain in spending EC to rekit two ships.
Into the Hive is not ground only, as previously stated.
Actually, it is, but there's a space-only counterpart involving a battle against a Borg Diamond.
On the bright side, the choice of wether or not to trade in for Dilithium now or later just got easier.
However, the STO forum angst is amusing. One comment about these changes...
sic
edit.The forums are so entertaining right now.
Someone has a "Never forget!" signature, likening the recent changes to LTS and vet rewards to 9/11.
Dilithium's the limiting factor, marks aren't too bad to hit. Almost certainly better to cash in for dilithium now.
Also, early reviews of the new zones have been very positive. And if the STO forums are positive about something, it's probably like drinking sunlight straight from heaven. So it's an exciting time!
From the preliminary info I've seen so far, it seems like you can get the Reman space-set from the Personal Reputation system, so that'll probably make some people happy.
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
I'm up to 80 ish doffs, most of which are white. Can I upgrade them to greens (or better if they exist)?
How do I get specific doffs? I still don't have a bartender or anyone with resolve?
How important is it to have active duty people? I have a couple doffs that would give me some pretty cool options (tractor beam shield drain). Also, if I have 2 with the same skill, does it fire twice as often?
I found our starbase and have been doing the daily for Fleet Marks. Is it worth my time doing it pre 50?
I'm almost done with the Klingon War quest series. Is it worth doing the quest lines or should I just dor regular quests?
More as I think of them.
You can upgrade Doffs, there are missions at the Starfleet/Klingon acadamy with the Vulcan/Andoran/Tellerite or the Gorn/Nausican/Orion contacts. Also the Starfleet/Klingon Personel Officer.
The mission you want for upgrading is the "Underperforming Officers" one, will let you exchange 5 officers of the same quality for a new officer of 1 higher quality. All of the NPCs that offer upgrades also offer missions to get more officers as well.
Active duty people is extremely handy, but AFAIK you can only have each bonus 1 time, so there is no stacking the same bonus.
I would say it is very much worth it for turning in fleet marks and other requested materials. This earns you fleet credit, which you can exchange along with dilithium for some excellent gear back at the starbase.
I would also highly recommend doing the quest series. They unlock further quests and areas, and often have unique rewards.
MWO: Adamski
One thing that is definitely worth your time is the "Investigate officer reports" daily, that will get you 1440 Dilithium and 50 fleet marks for 30seconds work every day. There are a number of short foundry missions that you can use (I use a bunch by someone called Timebox) to get it done in 1 click.
Completing the story quests will most likely get you better equipment for you, your ship and your bridge officers than you will find in the wild, as well as providing a good source of credits from vendoring earlier rewards (There is a series of missions in the Breen front that give out items worth 100k to a vendor for example).
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
Doing the stuff around the Tau Dewa sector, I can't help but feel a lot of this feels like it should have been added with FE3.
Some damn challenging things in there. Some huge space battles (usually with the Enterprise to help), had to fight a starbase at one point and could barely make a dent. They make you earn that 50 marks a day.
A few of them are diplomatic, just hit one that's basically the DS9 episode In the Cards. You want item X, have item Y, and wacky hijinx and trades ensue until eventually you trade your way to item X. Galordon Core involved herding Gelki and was even buggier than that fleet action nobody does.