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Recap changes?

telbasta7386telbasta7386 Member Posts: 761 Arc User
So as I said in my other thread, I've been away from STO for a while now - last time I played was when the romulan faction was first added to the game.

I've started a new romulan character and a discovery timeline federation character so far, working on learning the ropes again, but I had a few questions about things that may have changed since I last played.

First up are beams... I've read that beam fire at will was nerfed or changed, and noticed that in the tooltip now it has an accuracy and damage reduction when active. People have been saying to only use beam fire at will III because of that, as it has the least debuffs. Similarly, I was looking through the skills and noticed that beam overload now also increases beam damage and crit severity for 10 seconds after being activated, which I dont think it used to do (used to just be the one big blast); so on a beam heavy build, especially something using dual beam banks, is it worth using beam overload as a primary attack now?

I've been thinking about going with a fed science ship or a science-focused escort and running dual beam banks forward, with either turrets or 360 beams on the back hardpoints, and trying to make use of things like energy siphon, tachyon beam, etc. to maximize the dual beam bank damage. Is that a viable option? Alternatively, might go with a cruiser and broadside using all beam arrays and beam overload for the damage boost.

Both of these new characters are engineer captains, since that's my preferred character archetype for ground missions (drone and turret spam, of course), I'm still not entirely sure what setup I'll be using on the romulan though. Still looking at possibly the dual beam banks and turrets/360 beams for that one on an arkif/arkala escort, but we'll see.


And an on unrelated, food-for-thought sidenote... anyone else recall the time when Earth Spacedock was full of federation ships? Nowdays it looks like an alien zoo...

Comments

  • davefenestratordavefenestrator Member Posts: 10,501 Arc User
    edited February 2019
    You can have a max of 3 rear omnis: (crafted or lock box) + (episode reward) + (Borg rep kinetic cutting beam).

    Turrets won't be affected by BFAW and BO so mixing them with beams isn't usually a good idea, though I recall seeing posts about using a Reputation gear set turret in some beam builds to get the rep set bonus. Sorry, I forget which set this was.

    Beam Overload is good for boosting single-target damage.

    BFAW has a couple of advantages that apply when there are multiple targets:
    - All of your beams will fire at targets in their arcs, while beams in BO must have your primary target in their arc or they sit there doing no DPS. Your dual beams only have a 90 degree firing arc so if the enemy moves outside of that DPS drops to 0 from those beams with BO.
    - BFAW can attack and take out fighters, turrets, platforms and targetable torpedoes better than BO since you don't need to keep shifting your target manually

    All that said, I've been using BO 2 instead of BFAW 2 for my Discovery captain with beam arrays and it works pretty well.

    For BFAW, you could put 1-2 skill points into the tac skill that raises accuracy, and you can slot the space trait that boosts accuracy after you miss.

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