Hi all I just made a Klingon tactical officer, and I'm wondering what class of ship I should use.
should I use a Raider, Raptor, Battle Cruiser or Warship. And please tell me why. I'm guessing I won't be using a Battle Cruiser or Warship due to their slow turn rate and speed ( much like the cruiser in fed ).
Comments
(BTW you can buy a decent Mirror Universe Battlecruiser and Raptor on the exchange meaning you should spend your General level free ship token on the Bird of Prey).
I do, love the Pach but it don't hit like the Qin (the mirror Qin gives you better shield survivability).
The Fl. Somraw is on my shopping list, AFTER I see what the holidays bring, as well as this talk about new fleetships.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Don't get me wrong. The Klingon carriers and cruisers are fun, and have some nice advantages over their federation counterparts, and the Klingon raptors can be set up to have a higher dps then a bird of prey. But while all these ships are fun and effective the BoP is the better choice.
Because of their universal officer slots you are likely to out dps raptors. How? You can not fit more damage buffing abilities or weapons, but you can fit all the DPS you need to take 2nd on the DPS charts with the advantage of enough survival abilities to make up the difference while the raptor captain is waiting to re-spawn.
But carriers can fit big guns and carry smaller ships with more guns to boot! Hold on there, yes carriers can bring a lot of fire power to the fight, but their bridge officer slots limit the kinds of abilities they can take and their lack of agility, coupled with the loose control they have over their pets makes them slow to adapt to changing circumstances. By the time their full fire-power is brought to where it is needed BoP and Raptor captains will often have cleaned up already.
Hold on, but the Mighty Vorcha Retrofit.... No. Just No. The Vorcha retrofit is a fantastic cruser, I love it. But in terms of efficiency the bop is better. Yes in a theoretical situation it will tank better then the bird of prey but you will never encounter a situation in which this is necessary.
The bird of prey has the greater potential to do damage, it has the greater ability to get that damage to where it is needed faster and it has a battle cloak. Like the Vorcha Retro it can take a beating, if not quite so much, and like the Vorcha retro it can dish out the damage (substantially more) but if you do start taking more agro then you are comfortable with the Vorcha will not be able to hit evasive/power to engines and cloak. Once the vorcha is firing it is committed.
So presuming you are now interested in a BoP hear is a solid build for the Hegh'ta. There are many fantastic ones but the bop gives you a lot of freedom so you can go horribly wrong with it if your inexperienced in STO.
Dual Heavy Cannons Forward, Turrets aft. All same Damage type.
Positron deflector. Normal Engines. Resilient shields.
3X Damage type enhancing consoles.
1X Neutronium Alloy Console, 2X Field Emitter Console,
3X Field Generator consoles (or 3X Shield emitter amplifier consoles if on a strict budget)
Tactical Commander: Tactical Team, Tactical Team, Cannon Rapid Fire, Cannon Rapid Fire.
Engineering Lieutenant Commander: Emergency Power to Engines, Emergency Power to Shields, Auxiliary to Structural
Science Lieutenant: Hazard Emitters, Tractor Beam Repulsers
Science Ensign: Polarize Hull
This build gives you everything you need to survive and to do consistent damage. With doffs to shorten the recharge speed of tactical team you could swap the 2nd for an attack pattern beta and do more damage, but this may not be worth the expence to you if your working on a budget.
The 'tractor beam repulsers' could be exchanged for a 'transfer shield strength' if you feel you need more survivability but the repulsers are a fantastic utility ability. Just be carfull how you use them, you can save the day in many scenarios by using them correctly, but using them incorectly (pushing things people are trying to kill out of their range) will get you bitched at... a lot.
Correct usess of tractor beam repulsors include but are not limited to:
Pushing enemies away from things you need to protect, using evasive or power to engines and flying directly at them to push them as far as possible.
Taking out heavy plasma torpedos, mines, fighters or tricobalt devices for you while you sustain your fire upon a primary target.
Adding extra damage against imovable objects like borg cubes and transwarp conduit.
Pushing away destroyed ships who's warp cores are about to go critical.
Pushing back an enemy you have just overtaken to buy you time to turn around and hit their forward shield.
The list goes on... Just be situationaly aware, because when your pushing interfears with some one elses plans for an npc they will shout at you.
Short answer; no. Not with that ability build, and not for most purposes.
The build I outlined above uses turrets and cannons of the same damage type in order to get the biggest bonus possible from your bridge officer ability slots and your console slots. Turrets count as cannons so when you hit cannon rapid fire every weapon on your ship gets a damage bonus, with levels 2 and 3 of rapid fire there will only be a period of 5 seconds between each use so you will have grate sustained damage.
By choosing to use just one energy type for these weapons (disruptor/anti-proton/plasma/etc) all your weapons can also benefit from all your tactical console slots damage bonuses.
If you replace a cannon with a torpedo tube you benefit from less weapons power drain, but that weapon wont benefit from your tactile consoles or your officer abilities. Torpedos provide high spike damage at the cost of low dps to begin with so your going to take a significant DPS hit overall.
If you relay want to use torpedoes you could fit a tricobalt device launcher to the rear of the bop. Replacing a turret cuts your dps by significantly less then replacing a cannon and although tricobalt devices take a long time to re-arm they do hit hard enough to be worth turning away from the enemy for a moment.
Thanks for the help
I have a question about the engineering skills, may i ask what are they used for?
It really comes down to build. The brel is a pvp beast in both dhc mode and transphasic torp mode(a build that only really works on a brel thanks to the enhanced bc), yet is fairly useless in high end PVE due to paper thin hull and shields.
The qin is all around good for everything, and pre s7 was my go to elite stf ship, but now with the borg hitting harder and dot procing like a TRIBBLE I have settled into my borty.
I know I know, a tac in a cruiser..but with 5 tac slots and an all single cannon build it puts out dps that beats most escorts, and has the shield and hull to allow me to solo those cubes again without going boom.
Edit - typed pvp when I meant pve. oops. fixed.
Yes, they are arguably better for leveling (which I assume you are doing) because they can do and take more damage than a BoP.
But BoPs are definitely more fun to fly and a lot more flexible.
At 50, stick with either than Hegh'ta or buy a Mirror Qin off the exchange (usually a little under a million). Pretty much any other decent ship your going to need to deal with the Zen store.
...keep your fingers crossed for a fleet Pach.
<wink><wink>
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Emergency power to engines:
Not as decent a speed boost as evasive manovers but you can use it more often. By using this skill and evasive manovers at the same time it is possible to move faster then some one at full impulse with the advantage of having no power drain.
In pvp having an extra speed boost can mean the differance between a kill and eating their engine trail.
In high end pve where your team has to split up, the extra speed boost lets you get to the other side of KA or Cure fast enough to compensate for other group members not doing
their job.
On one ocasion, when i was auto-teamed with some particularly bad players, I was able to singlehandedly take out all generators, transformers, the cubes that spawn and hold back the probes on one side of khitomer accord elite while the rest of my team did very little of anything on the other side. I credit this achevment, in part, to emergency power to engines, though a grate deal of luck was involved as well.
Emergency Power to shields:
Exactly what it says on the tin. Basic shield heal and resistance boost. Very important for PVE where a huge part of the damage done to you is kenetic, so you need to keep your shields up. Remember to keep using tactical team along with which ever shield heals you chose to use in order to redistribute your shield power to the facings that need it.
Auxilery Power to Structual:
Relativly quick to re-use hull heal. Also imparts a damage resistance bonus, which you probably need if your healing your hull. The amount of hull healed is greatly effected by your auxilery power level so it may be worth boosting this before hitting the button. The advantage of this skill over enginering team is that it wont start a global cool down on tacticle team.
I've been browsing around the forums, and I've found a lot of people using 2 tacs for BoP.
So I'm thinking about exchanging the ensign sci for a tac. please correct me
I just received this bug, i can't put any BO in any station. But here is the weird thing, i have all my abilities in my hot bar. almost as if all my BO are in the highest ranking station.
I'm using a tier 3 Bop, so all my BO can use 3 of their abilities! What do u suggest i should get?
The Norgh Bird of prey at commander level does not fit into a comfortable progression path toward the Hegh'ta bird of prey because in order to make the most of its ability slots you must train skills at levels lower then you would train them for the Hegh'ta.
Your ability shopping list should include one hull repair skill, one shield repair skill, two tactical teams and as much DPS as you can fit into the remaining ability slots.
Bare in mind that there was a time when abilities of the same level would be on the same cool down. Many builds on the forum have not been updated to reflect the new flexibility this change brought.
To get the most out of the Norgh I would chose:
Tactical Lt Commander: Tactical Team, Cannon Rapid fire, Cannon Rapid fire,
Tactical Lieutenant: Tactical Team, Attack Pattern Beta
Science Ensign: Hazard emitters
Science Ensign: Transfer shield strength.
If I wanted to avoid re-training officers latter I would chose.
Engineering Lt Commander: Emergency Power to Engines, Emergency Power to Shields, Auxiliary to Structural
Tactical Lieutenant: Tactical Team, Tactical Team
Science Ensign: Polarize Hull
Science Ensign: Hazard emitters.
STO is very forgiving, you can effectively fly a ship in any number of ways and do well. My builds are efficient and competitive but if there is a weapon or an ability you want to use purely because it has 'cool factor' go ahead and do so. This is a game so you should make the choices that lead to the most fun for you.
I put together competitive builds that take into consideration not just the numbers on a wiki page, but my experience of how well abilities function in the game. (I have 30 boffs on my main character, every combination of abilities you might think of, I have probably tried). Many builds you see on the forums are pure number crunching. Which is important, but when all people look at are DPS and resistance values many useful abilities are ignored.
As to your bridge officer bug. It sounds like quite a nice one to have. You might be better served by keeping it under your hat then posting about it on the forums, you will only get it fixed sooner by doing so.
As i turned into a captain, i got a new ship. as soon as i changed to use the ship, the bug was gone. i am going to level up to 40 pretty fast, in 2 days i went from 20 to 30. I just wanna prepare all my BOs for the hegh'ta. I think im going to have 2 science, so i can 'tank' a bit more
How would i get Cannon rapid fire for cmd level? I got cannon rapid fire for LTCMD and LT, and i got a omega 3 for CMD
A tactical captain with 6 levels of the 'starship energy weapons' skill can train bridge officers in the cannon rapid fire ability. You should find the button to do so on the character profile window, somewhere in the vicinity of the promote button if I remember rightly.
You can find charts showing the different abilities available to bridge officers and how they are obtained hear:
http://www.stowiki.org/Bridge_officer_abilities
In begin i also used cannons, but died a lot. Problem is that when you use cannons you don't move and stay in same position almost all the time, what heavly debuffs your defense. To survive in this cannons case you need a bit stronger than BoP ship. After i understood this, i started to focus on defense (dodge) and i built high dodge build, which in my opinion is best way to survive with BoP, but such strategy requires to switch to Beam arrays, what i did.
Basically as faster you move as better your defense is, if you stay you get this bonus at all negative -xx. Same game mechanics works for any ship. Also i added Aegis set, which gives +5 defense and +5 defense if you're moving + 1 dyson eng console (res all) with +2,5% def. And while i fight i move on full speed, doing crazy maneuvers around enemies
With such build i almost never die on Crystalline [elite] and very rare at alll. Just Undines annoying with their slowdowns and they're probably hardest for my BoP... Then i simply try to stay away from them, to fight from very far range, to not get caught by their Gravity Wells or other their junk... I also use pattern Omega, to free my BoP from snares, same as evassive maneuvers, to not loose defense boost, so good works evassives doff...
if about my build:
Ship: Fleet HoH'SuS Bird-of-Prey - 4 tac consoles was choice priority
Set: Aegis
Weapons: Front - 3x beam arrays + torp, Aft: 1x beam array, Kinetic cutting beam; Possible to not use torp launcher if you wish.
Consoles:
Engineering : Fleet neutronium +HullHP, Energy Signature Dampener [+ResAll]] (for extra dodge), Assimilated console;
Sci: Field Gen (i use green one from episode), Shield Refrequencer [+PowIns]] (very optional, high dodge build can survive almost without shields, Power insulators MK XII (i rly hate shield drain
Tac: 4x for Energy weapon
Boffs:
TT1, APB1, FaW3, APO3
TT1, TS2, FaW3
EPtS1, ET2
HE1, TSS2
Doffs: Projectile, Tactical team cd, Evassives, Voth Diplomat - to drain energy with Team abilities.
I hope it will help for someone and sorry for broken english
The Mogh is a little beast as well. Enough turn rate (specially if you equip a RCS console) to act as an escort, and enough firepower to get rid of anything fast and with "style" lol. Besides the console is one of the most useful consoles of the game.
And the Heth'a is just the BOP of excelence. I love Bops, since i am an escort player, and i love to have all my weapons in the forward bank (that is how it looks like when you use a BOP) lol. A Bop is a killing machine, with other style, but a killing machine.
They actually changed this, so that Science Team, Engineering Team, and Tactical Team no longer share cool downs. That was changed a while back, so you can now use a mixture of them, and they can be used at the same time.
If you have double of one skill, like 2 Tactical Teams, then when you activate one, it will put the other one on cool down.
Therefore, if you want a better hull heal, Engineering Team is a really good choice for instant heals. Science Team is also great for a large, instant shield heal also.
It is a challenge to not die especially when doing elite STFs, but it is still possible as I have done it many times. You just need to develop the right tactics and to know when to run away so that you can heal up before going back into battle. Having said that players die in elite STFs regardless of what ship they fly; sooner or later their ship will be destroyed.
Flying a BoP means you need to choose your battles though. I have done 3 out of the 4 Borg elite STF with my Hegh'ta. The only one that I have not done is the Borg: Hive Onslaught Elite. It is a meat grinder, but the main reason why I do not play that mission is because everyone needs to co-operate and be on the same page. I am not in a fleet and I do not PUG. I simply queue up PvE missions with random players. That works for most PvE missions, but not Hive Onslaught.
Additionally, I do not do Storming the Spire Elite since you can get swarmed by at least 10 Voth ships firing antiproton weapons at you. Happens every single time since season 9 on my engineering Fed toon flying a Sovereign heavy cruiser.
Lastly, I avoid The Breach elite In season 8.5 it was a good challenge. However, in season 9, it is simply a nightmare even for escorts and cruisers with fleet and rep system equipment.
Flying a BoP all the time is not for everyone. But I like doing so.
A Bop is a really hard ship to fly, its a real challenge. I agree with that lol.
BoPs are very satisfying to fly. They require skill and talent to maximize their effectiveness. I'm not very good yet with the BoPs I have but I'm working on it. Came to them late and am just now realizing what I've missed.
Playing effectively with any of the BoPs is the mark of an excellent STO player, IMO.
Unfortunately, cloaking is not very effective against Borg. BoPs can still be attacked when cloaked. Borg Sphere also have a tendency to use A2E to chase and catch up to fleeing starships.
I picked those up as well. Thinking about a change of pace. I am slowly kitting out the MU Qin with weapons I am getting from the Romulan Rep system. The MU Vor'cha is still in the box though. I think the MU Negh'Var would be a better fit for me. However, it costs substantially more. I bought the MU Vor'cha for around 600k EC. The lowest price for the MU Negh'Var as of last night was 6.2 million EC vs. 850k EC for the MU Vor'cha. Missed my chance to get the MU Negh'Var for 5 million around 4 weeks ago.
the guy who said you need beams on a BoP so your not sitting target really needs to practice flying a BoP more its speed and turn rates make it ideal for cannons.
as for slow turn rate on cruisers like the feds have forget about that Klingons have Battle cruisers ours can actually turn. my go to ship is the vorcha. and it is devastating in PvE.
my BoP build is listed here is stricky set up for killing Undine right now so don't apply to everything but you can get the idea from it.
and my Vorcha build is here. two different doff and tray layouts depending on the enemy. and in PvE I haven't found anything it didn't not do good with.
In addition to the above poster being correct they changed the global cool down awhile back.
2 copies of engineer team.
2 copies of sci team
2 copies of tac team
you can keep all 3 up with very little down time. or use just one copy of each with 2 purple doffs for each and have same effect.
if fighting borg a copy of hazard emitters held in reserve is pretty much a must have. it cleanses their debuff.
mirror neg is much better than the dil neg but I am still not a fan. tried it out and then discharged it after a few uses.
mirror vorcha is pretty decent but don't compare to fleet vorcha.
IMO best mirror ship if your going that route is the raptors.
Norgh BoP is an excellent BoP with its boff rankings. but its gonna cost you .