If you'd like to "Boldly Go" to the ends of Star Trek Online gameplay and progress beyond Normal STFs into Advanced and Elite STFs, this thread is for you.
As it stands, STFs and R&D are the bottlenecks to this progression. Many of us anticipated this and saved up significant amounts of R&D materials prior to the release of Delta Rising. We've been upgrading our items from MK 12 to Mk 13 to Mk 14, but steadily our supplies are running out and demand is out stripping our reserves.
A new equilibrium needs to be established on our part to stabilize our R&D resources. Those with significant income could spend their cold hard cash on Zen and R&D boxes for resources and dilithium. For the rest of us of modest means, I anticipate a future wave of frustration at the bottleneck of progression in moving into Advanced and Elite STFs, so let's be aware and proactive of the situation.
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Here are the harsh truths about Advanced and Elite STFs:
1) You need DPS. Lots and lots of damage output even if you specilize as a "tank" or "sci ship". What this means is ultimately very rare Mk 14 lvl gear. This does not mean you need ultra rare or Gold, but very rare Mk 14 will be the new "minimum". And here's the rub, you need R&D matertials to even upgrade to Mk 14 which you can only get in STFs that require this same Mk 14 gear. Catch 22 anyone? But take solace. There are other ways to improve DPS without significant gear or cost. See the recommendations and resources at the bottom.
2) Advanced/Elite STFs require you complete ALL the optionals. Translation = coordination and communication. Find fellow fleetmates, hop on Teamspeak, and be prepared to fail at first. I anticipate it will be 3-6 months before people have learned the newly required tactics to run an Advanced or Elite mission without signficant communication.
3) Prioritize your resources and time.
-Head to your local Academy and ALWAYS run the doff mission "Request R&D Assistance" when available.
-You'll also need tons of Rubidium, so break to harvest Rubidium anytime you see a node.
-Focus on learning and doing the following Advanced STFs:
- Borg Disconnected (Argonite)
- Crystalline: Catastrophe OR The Vault: Ensnared (Radiogenic Particle)
- Infected Space Borg STF (Trellium-K)
- Defend Rh'Ihho Station (Craylon Gas)
- Bug Hunt ELITE (as it stands Elite is as easy as Advanced) (Dentarium)
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http://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/2j2fuq/basic_dps_guide_the_path_to_10k15k/Bridge Officers/Duty Officers:
Keep the following abilities running with maximum uptime:
Tactical Abilities: Attack Patterns
Weapon Enhancements
It is always best to double up on your tactical abilities; either by seating two of each.
An example of an easy to use and cheap early tactical rotation would be as follows: Attack Pattern Beta (APB) x2, Beam Fire at Will(FAW) x2
Always activate APB at the same time as FAW.
Engineering Abilities: Emergency Power to “X”
Seat the highest level of Emergency Power to Weapons(EPtW) you can fit on the ship. A cheap option would be to double up your EPtW. Example on a ship with only a LT engineer go with: EPtW1, EPtW2
Science Abilities: Exotic Damage
If you have room to seat these after seating heals: Gravity Well, Tractor Beam Repulsors (with or without attractor DOff) and Tyken’s Rift can do some additional damage.
Skill Tree:The following is the core of a DPS based Skill Tree:
http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/?build=corebuild10k_0You have some free skill points to spend however you like, but the core items shown in that link are required.
Power Settings:Set weapon power to max (125).
Gear:Beam Arrays with [CrtD] mods.
Only Tactical consoles in your tactical console slots, nothing else AT ALL. Ideally, very rare fleet spire Vulnerability Locator.
EPS consoles.
Solanae set is free and easy to get at End Game.
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http://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/2j824g/some_basics_of_ship_building/Note: The below rules apply to building for PvE content that is not NWS - NWS builds are different, and here is one of the better build guides for it.
Those confused by the terms below may wish to visit the build anatomy section of the /r/stobuilds wiki.
General rules for ship building:
Know your basic builds.
Emergency Power abilities are very strong, and constant uptime on two is central to nearly all builds. Some dps-oriented engineering-light builds go with a ‘half-dragon’ build, using simply two copies of EPTW, and some daring people (not romulans) use none, but most ships are much better with a chained version.
Generally speaking, which one to pick (for most pilots) comes down to the following questions:
Do I have any EC whatsoever to spend on doffs? If not, dragon is most likely where you should start.
Does my ship have seating for at least 5 tactical abilities, while still having engineering and science stations? If so, you should generally not use A2B, as auxiliary power is very strong, and there is then room for effectively two copies of TT, two copies of weapon abilities, and two attack patterns.
Does my ship have 2 carrier bays that aren’t frigate pets? If so, then you should generally not use A2B, as aux power greatly speeds up hangar bay recharge time, and having no pets out will hurt most carrier’s damage significantly, even if it’s not for a very long portion of time.
Does my ship have a science focus? If so, then you generally should not use A2B, as auxiliary power greatly increases the effectiveness of science abilities.
If you’re on a ship that said no to the last 3 questions, then A2B is probably a good build core on that ship.
Note: the above are general guidelines. Some people, well experienced at ship building and flying, may differ from them (including Alexey Rykov and DamonTCS), but they exist for a reason, and will generally serve you well.
Abilities that should be on nearly every ship (note - if your ship is an A2B build, and it says “should be on global cooldown/should be chained/two copies”, A2B is doing that for you already)
Tactical Team
This ability does a great many things, all of them great. It removes boarding parties for 10 seconds, automatically rebalances your shields for 10 seconds, clears tactical debuffs for 10 seconds, and gives you a slight damage buff. This ability should be kept on global cooldown via either two copies or conn officers (2 of rare quality or higher recommended, of the reduce tactical team cooldown variant). There is no reason to run this at any rank higher than one.
Main weapons type special attack, two copies
First of all, most ships should be using one weapon type. All beam arrays is the general highest dps configuration (or, alternatively, on ships with 3 or 2 rear weapon slots, frontal dbb’s with rear 360 degree weapons), followed by dual heavy cannons and turrets (all cannon-type weapons), followed by torpedos. Some ships will chose to fly with frontal dual heavy cannons and a torpedo (generally the gravometric photon). (Note - nearly all ships use a rear-mounted kinetic cutting beam - that is different, as it isn’t affected by weapon special attacks).
If you’re using beams, you will likely want two copies of fire at will, as beam:overload is not very useful in PvE.
Cannons are generally preferred with Cannon: Scatter Volley, though Cannon: Rapid Fire is not far off.
For torpedos, Torpedo:Spread is nearly the unanimous choice of pilots, as ships using torpedos are already suffering from relative dps performance as it is, and aoe abilities will nearly always out-dps single-target abilities.
Generally speaking, you want as high ranks of this as possible, with one exception: Attack Pattern Omega.
Attack Patterns
Not required, but very handy, especially on tactical-heavy ships. Attack patterns should always be activated with your weapon special attacks, even if that means delaying one of the other a few seconds.
There’s 4 basic combinations, one of which is specific to ships using dual heavy cannons.
APB1/APB3: The cheapest method available (interms of boff and duty officer slots), this simply debuffs your target.
APB1x2: Only for use on ships with CSV3/CRF3 (as CSV3/CRF3+APB1 is better than APB3+CSV1/CRF1), this is also just a debuff.
APB1, APO1, APO3. Another method that uses no duty officers, this one staggers a single copy of APB inbetween two copies of APO.
APB1, APO3. The “zemok build”, this uses one or two VR conn officers who have the power “reduces cooldown on APO/APD/APB by 15%”. As this duty officer is very strong, one typically costs 30+million ec fed side and 50+million ec kdf side. Builds using cannons/torpedos require two of those conn officers to work, while builds using fire at will only require one (as the FAW global cooldown is different from the CSV/CRF/TS global cooldown)
Emergency Power Abilities
Mentioned at the start of this guide, nearly every ship running energy weapons needs EPTW chained, and most ships do well with EPTS as a filler. Some science ships may wish to run a drake EPTW/EPTA build, and some slow-turning ships may wish a drake EPTW/EPTE build. Generally, when given the option, make EPTW the higher-ranked power.
Some heal abilities
There are 7 bridge officer heals, all with different strengths/weaknesses. Nearly every ship needs one or two to stay alive, and tanks will likely want 4-5, while healers may want all 7.
The shield heals are Reverse Shield Polarity, Extend Shields, Transfer Shield Strength, and Science Team. All of them scale with shield emitters, Transfer Shield Strength scales with Auxiliary power, and Extend Shields scales (in terms of the resist it grants) with shield power.
Science team has an advantage on some ships that it does not scale off of auxiliary power, and that it has a much lower global cooldown (15 seconds vs 30 seconds) and base cooldown (30 seconds vs 45 seconds) - as a general rule, when it is a question of ST vs TSS, if you can keep ST on global cooldown (via doffs, A2B, or duplication), or run at less than 75 aux the majority of the time, ST is a better heal, otherwise, TSS is a better heal. Science Team is also a powerful debuff clear, which will become fairly important as you begin to face enemies that use multiple debuffs.
Extend Shields the only heal that cannot be self-cast, and Reverse Shield Polarity is a self-cast only ability. RSP is also an unusual heal in that it heals based on incoming damage for it’s duration, so taking no damage makes it worthless, but on a ship under fire, it will keep any shield facings under fire at full strength (which TT will automatically use to fill the rest of your shield facings).
The hull heals are Engineering Team, Auxiliary power to the Structural Integrity Field (A2SIF), and Hazard Emitters.
A2SIF starts at lieutenant, and has a few advantages over engineering team - it has a base cooldown of 15 seconds, and grants a rather significant damage resistance bonus for 10 seconds. Engineering team, however, is a major debuff clear, and has better raw scaling. Much like the ST vs TSS debate, ships that can keep ET on cooldown or that run at 75 or less auxiliary power most of the time should use ET, while otherwise A2SIF is generally superior. Also, of note, A2SIF cannot be used on traditional A2B ships whatsoever, as A2SIF and A2B share a 10 second global cooldown, and a traditional A2B ships need to be activating A2B every 10 seconds.
Hazard Emitters has a much longer cooldown (45 seconds, 30 second global cooldown), and is a heal over time and debuff clear over the duration. It’s strongly recommended on most ships, at some rank.
Gravity Well
Classically considered the ‘mother of all science abilities’, it’s a very strong ability. It pulls all nearby enemies towards the center, holding and doing damage. Nearly every ship build with at least a lt. commander science uses one of these, and for good reason.
Now, clearly, there are more good abilities than the ones listed above. The above do, however, make for the core of a solid build.
Power Levels:
Power levels are for sure important - typically, ships with energy weapons need to be running a setting of 100 weapons power, typically, science ships or tanks want a large amount of auxiliary power, and typically, tanks want a large amount of shield power as well.
Weapons power affects energy damage, and is the one category where having more than your max available power can make a difference, a term known as overcapping. This is, on nearly all ships, the most important power level. On ships that use purely kinetic weaponry (all torpedoes and mines), this will make no difference, however.
Shield power affects innate shield resistance and shield regeneration, and the DR granted by Extend Shields and Rotate Shield Frequency. It should be kept above 50, but how far above that depends on your ship’s needs.
Engine power affects turn rate and flight speed, and flight speed (up to a cap) grants defense. For nearly all people, the 75 necessary to get an AMP proc is all that’s even wanted.
Auxiliary power affects a lot of science abilities, the engineering abilities Auxiliary to the structural integrity field, auxiliary to batter, and auxiliary to dampners, in addition to the intel ability subnucleonic carrier wave. It also affects the nukara T4 reputation traits. For most ships, this is the second-most important power level.
The rest of it comes to picking out the gear focus that you want - typically, you want all of your energy weapons to do the same type of damage, you want all your science consoles buffing your primary science ability/abilities, and you want all tactical consoles of the +energy type (or +projectile type for pure torpedo boats) in your tactical stations. It also helps to look for set bonuses (such as the protonic arsenal 2 or 3 set, the romulan singularity harness 2-set, the AMACO/KHG 2-set, or others) that boost the focus of your ship.
The vast majority of ship building comes down to the above: a good bridge officer/duty officer layout, good gear synergy, and good piloting skills.
