Away Team selection Fed and KDF

str8nge1

Noob on the ground more so than space i find my choices of away team members confusing. Should i take all tactical or one sic/eng/tac? As an Fed engineer i am to provide support so dont know if another engineer is needed. I usually take 2 tac and one sic. on KDF im tact so i take one of each. Not sure whether my error is in selection, skills or gear but i usually have to respawn about 3 times per ground mission.

chizhong

I don't use tac boffs in away teams as I don't find their skills all that useful. I go with three engineers and a sci. The engineers are all specced for phaser turrets I&II and support drone I. The sci is specced as a healer, medical tricorder I&II and nanite health monitor I.

I was having trouble with ground combat too, until I went with this build. Once the engineers have popped out all their turrets and drones you get a lot of extra firepower that most mobs can't cope with. If it looks like it will be a tough fight I will have my engineers set up all their turrets first and give them orders to stay put, then I use a sniper rifle to pull the mobs towards all the turrets.

I can't claim I came up this setup myself, I go the idea from reading this thread
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=204014
There are some good ideas for alternate setups there also, if you don't want to go for the engineer team.

victorstella

I bring a science officer with healing abilities, and engineer that can lay mines, a tactical officer with grenades, and whatever else. I used to do the engineer with a turret thing but usually by the time they drop the turret, the fire fight is already over.

lolimpicard

Well, BOffs have traits like characters - and these traits are important on the ground (apart from Efficient).
Rarity decides how good their traits are.

Good general traits are:
Lucky, Resilient, Peak Health, Fury & Aggressive

For melee:
Physical Strength

For ranged:
Soldier

For Science:
Creative

Covert can be good with Tacticals if they use stealth.
A few specific BOffs, like the Breen or Jem'Hadar one - are quite good, too, in regards to traits -
and of course there's the many special abilities of various base races - some of which are very good (Klingons, for example, are pretty decent).

The other thing is ground abilities, altho that's too lengthy.
Science BOffs tend to excell in that regard - while Tacticals excell at dealing damage.
2 Tac 2 Sci, if you have the slots, is quite a good choice. Give the Scis control, area affects + heals and grenades + ranged abilities for the Tacs.
Melee isn't too great with BOffs, from my experience (Ai can't handle it so they die).
Engineers are somewhat underwhelming, altho one is ok if you're no Engineer yourself, so you can strategically place some mines, which is very handy in many situations.
As mentioned above you can also go with the "spam" strategy of using many engineers with as many "pet" abilities as possible, which will generally help spreading aggro over many targets, but it my opinion it's not really necessary.
The very most fights can be won before the first Quantum Mortar strike hits the ground.

Also: Three buttons are good to have:
The one to tell all BOffs to stand in some place.
The one that cancels that. ^
And the one to make them attack a specific target.

Pause is generally unnecessary, even on Elite, but these three are rather handy.
(They are C, V & B with my key layout)

str8nge1

Thanks that helps. i need to learn the keys that command the away team as well. i usually just let them do their thing. doesnt work out most times

bloctoad

When playing my Tac Captain, I take two each Engineers and Science with one as a dedicated medic. If it's a tough fight on open ground, I'll pair them up each with flanking waypoints.

asphe

Set Rally Point (AND Clear Rally Point(s)).

Focus Target.

Both of these can be set ingame via Options.

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You can set an individual rally point (i.e. 'Go here, stupid!' point) or a 'team rally point' for your entire away team. Some of the episode missions actually require this unless you have at least two other players with you. Don't forget to have a key assigned for 'Clear Rally Point' or 'Come here, stupid!' [to set an individual's rally point, highlight the BOff, hit the 'Set Rally Point' command... now you will set the rally point for just that BOff] [probably simpler to set one key for 'Clear ALL Rally Points' and forget about the individual ones]

You can assign BOff abilities/powers to your powers tray (when you press P or whatever keybind to bring up 'Available Powers', click on the 'other' tab). In conjunction with the above, you can tell your 'mortar' engineer to drop his mortars at one location, turrets at another and so on.

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Careers, traits and whatever. Doesn't really matter if you have the above done. In my experience, four TACs gets through Elite difficulty missions the fastest. Four ENGs do it slower but more surely while four SCIs take the longest but will definitely get you there. The best combination depends on the gear (don't do melee, the AI* is imbecilic) and abilities you've chosen. Simply for fashion, I normally take a TAC with the JH set, a SCI with the OMEGA/KHG set, and two ENGs with MACO/Adapted KHG and Adapted MACO/KHG sets. You're fighting a MMO AI after all, it's not rocket science. It's closer to a jigsaw puzzle than a Rubik's cube. Try to choose abilities that either are safe for the BOff to handle on it's own (lol) or ones that you can assign to your powers tray (you CAN set the BOff powers to 'manual', i.e. you have to tell them to use that particular power).

*In Cryptic's defence, most human players doing melee are almost as bad and some are worse.

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Some interesting things you can try... deploy 20+ triolic pattern enhancers at once. This will prove that you did the mission at least 20 times (probably more, if you actually wanted more than one... ). Yes, this works with any devices. A tribble will be used 'automatically'... you can see that this sometimes is NOT a good idea. Besides, deploying 20 pattern enhancers will almost certainly get you a special surprise.

sumghai

In most missions, I bring two junior security officers and a medic as minimum. The fourth is usually a specialist of some sort relevant to the nature of the mission (e.g. a Tac for more firepower, a Sci for more heals).

Only in FE missions do I use department heads.

I also agree that focus fire and rally points are very useful - in some of the RNG exploration missions involving scanning of artifacts near hostiles, I usually put on a Operative Mk X kit, tell me BOffs to hide someone and then sneak up to the artifacts myself - this stops my BOffs from following me and aggroing the mobs.