Star Trek Online Discussion Thread (now free to play!)

Discussion in 'Trek Gaming' started by daedalus5, Sep 3, 2011.

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  1. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    United States
    In my part of the U.S. it's the 16th. I'm not sure where most of you folks live, though.

    Anyhoo, I'm looking forward to the new Romulan stuff. Very excited!

    Right now I'm conflicted. I'm flying an escort (so I can do more PvP), and while I'm good at the pewpew, flying an escort doesn't feel like flying a starship. Yes, it's the Defiant, and it's got a lot of Trek history, but I prefer flying cruisers. The problem that arises with this is that cruisers don't do much of anything in PvP.

    I've geared everything towards this escort, even using up most of my fleet credits and dilithium to outfit the ship with canons and gear to help me do better in PvP, and I am! In STFs I can obliterate enemies without getting much more than a scratch. In PvP I can do shield melting damage in seconds! But it feels like work now, instead of fun, imaginative, Star Trek play. Does that make any sense? :lol:
     
  2. Timelord Victorious

    Timelord Victorious Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 27, 2006
    Location:
    Germany, Earth, the Solar System
    Ok, here's what you do.

    Log on on tribble, take the Excelsior out of mothballs, or the Sovereign refit if you want to go 24th century, fit her out with either Quantum (180° arc if you have it) or transphasic breen rapid fire torpedos.
    Two launchers front and rear.
    The rest phaser turrets.
    Then you train your tactical officers torpedo skills.
    Get those doffs that reduce your torpedo fire cooldown to an absolute minimum.
    Reduce weapon power to a minimum, torpedos don't need it and the turrets fire at a high enough rate and proc relatively often to shut down subsystems.
    Put enough power into the engines to get a good turn rate and the rest into a balance of shields and aux depending on how important your sci powers are to you and how much shields you need for survivability.
    Respec and max out your torpedo/kinetic weapons, targeting skills, evasive and defense, you don't need a single point in energy weapons anymore.

    Get a tractor beam or two, maybe a tachyon beam if you have the room.
    Engineering should be standard defense, power to shields and engines, aux to structural integrity and a good offense power: warp plasma to shake of all the stubborn escorts in your rear.

    Experiment with the fine tuning of this build.
    Once your satisfied, copy the build on holodeck and have fun in pvp with a cruiser.

    All careers should do well here. Engineers can survive the longest under heavy fire which is important with a torpedo build, as it's not a spike damage build, but deals steady heavy damage over time. Balance between shields, engines and aux should do well.
    Tacticals max out the damage you will do. you have two arcs you can do heavy damage from. Thanks to the warp plasma, you might even be a little better from your rear arc which negates the disadvantage of your turn rate. High power to engines is a must.
    Science can mess with other players systems and distract with holofleet and stuff. High power to aux to maximize your science captain powers.

    This build should also work exceptionally well in a science ship like the Vesta or Intrepid which feels cruiser like enough. The Nebula might also be a very very good choice if you want that cruiser feeling but have more science power.

    This build will not be a fast killer like the best escorts, but you will consistently score high, be competitive and contribute in a meaningful way.

    Maybe get a refit console that compliments your build for an additional power.

    my starting thought behind it is this: While everyone moans about killer cannons and escort zippy flying being mandatory and beams sucking to no end many people forget torpedos as a very canon weapon.
    my inspiration for it was the final battle between General Chang and Kirk/Sulu. No one fired a single phaser shot in that scene. It was all torpedos.
    Sure they lose massive damage against a sliver of shields, but they STILL deal impressive damage over time. Quantums by virtue of having the highest non-heavy torp damage and fast travel rate and transphasics by having a high bleed through (and if you don't care about the name they still look photon torpedo like enough).
     
  3. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 25, 2002
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    This sounds like a plan! I'll get right on that. Thanks Timelord Victorious! :D
     
  4. T J

    T J Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Dec 1, 2004
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    milky way... there abouts
    That's so great I'll giver that a try! Thanks you!
     
  5. Haggis and tatties

    Haggis and tatties Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2002
    Location:
    Glasgow
    I am going to give that try bud, i feel my Excelsior could do more damage but i am not really that great at tuning to this fine a level, so thanks for that.:techman:
     
  6. Timelord Victorious

    Timelord Victorious Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
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    Just keep in mind that torpedos are easily defended against.
    A ship that loads up lots of kinetic armor will be able to shrug off the damage.
    If you encounter such a ship get out of battle, switch to energy weapons, ramp up your weapons power and use DEMIII to melt his unprotected hull.
     
  7. Haggis and tatties

    Haggis and tatties Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
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    Well i found a middle ground, i had been running all beams, but a respect see me doing very nice damage still with beams, but a nice crit hit with torp now and again, still got some fine tuning to do by my wee Exsel is kicking backside in those stfs.

    Oh i dont do pvp, tried it way back in 2010 and all that happened was got shot to bits about 30 seconds after each round on started, never went back...i got the message. lol
     
  8. T J

    T J Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Dec 1, 2004
    Location:
    milky way... there abouts
    Looks like the janitor tripped over the cord... again... expected time for repair... currently unknown... :sigh:
     
  9. T J

    T J Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Dec 1, 2004
    Location:
    milky way... there abouts
    Wow... the downtime is getting worse... You should see the UK people freaking out on the STO forums! They keep saying "Don't do this when we're coming home from work or school, instead inconvience the Americans..." How rude.
     
  10. Haggis and tatties

    Haggis and tatties Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2002
    Location:
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    Ahhhh, i was looking forward to a hour or so refining my build.

    Managed to get a torpedo buff, beam overload II and fire at will III on my tac guy in my Excelsior refit, and i just found out you can assign crew to reduce torpedo reload times.

    Good stuff.
     
  11. LeadHead

    LeadHead Director of Comedy Premium Member

    Joined:
    Oct 3, 2000
    Location:
    The Normandy SR-2
    It is inconveniencing the Americans. The outages recently have almost ALL been during my usual playtimes.
     
  12. Noname Given

    Noname Given Admiral Admiral

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    Well, if you read the neverWinter Derv posts - they basically stated that yes, it was technically Emergency maintenance; because they did state they weren't going to do a Thursday maintenance (they 'rolled' it into the recovery from the last unexpected crash) - and basically, some new/better network hardware arrived that would improve game server performance; and the Net Ops team collectively felt installing said new hardware ASAP would be better for all Cryptic games; so they decided to do it.

    Whether that pans out as a good thing, and fixes a lot of the lag issues players have been seeing across all 3 Cryptic MMOs remains to be seen.
     
  13. Ruaidhri

    Ruaidhri Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
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    Ruaidhri...Toronto in body, Philly in spirit!
    I have no issue with them doing maintenance if there is the possibility that it improves the gameplay experience. You can't please everybody, and when it's something last minute, it's just a reality that someone will be put out.

    As far as scheduled maintenance, that's something they should rotate the timing of so no one geographical area of players is always the one missing out.
     
  14. SilentP

    SilentP Commodore Commodore

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    is in a very lonely Corner of the Circle
    I guess it would be too much for them if they were to just do half hour of downtime every day just as a matter of course, like EVE Online? :p
     
  15. Ronald Held

    Ronald Held Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Good idea but when?
     
  16. SilentP

    SilentP Commodore Commodore

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    is in a very lonely Corner of the Circle
    That game does it at 11:00 EVE time, which I think is 11:00am in whatever timezone Iceland is in. Though they say it's half hour, it usually ends up being about 20 minutes or so, since the workload for each downtime isn't usually immense.
     
  17. Timelord Victorious

    Timelord Victorious Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
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    Location:
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    Cryptic has wiped the Tribble test server clean and opened it up for open beta testing for everybody.
    You can transfer over existing characters or create new ones for all three factions.
    Every faction now starts at level 1 and your first character doesn't need to be Federation anymore.

    I am looking forward to play through the Romulan Republic story as well as the new Klingon content.
    Federation gets new content as well with the new Nimbus III adventure zone.

    Testing on Tribble over this weekend will secure you a testing reward which is usually a unique tribble for a nice stat buff.
     
  18. Hartzilla2007

    Hartzilla2007 Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 15, 2006
    Location:
    Star Trekkin Across the universe.
    If you can actually get in the queue is busted.
     
  19. Ruaidhri

    Ruaidhri Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Location:
    Ruaidhri...Toronto in body, Philly in spirit!
    I had about a 7 minute wait this morning, then played for like 3 hours on Tribble. Started a Romulan and leveled her up to a couple missions after the alliance choice. Probably do a little more tomorrow morning.
     
  20. Timelord Victorious

    Timelord Victorious Vice Admiral Admiral

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    the tribble died in it's wheel again. Server seems to be down once again.
     
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