Yes, us newbies can be annoying, but sometimes a little advice from the vets doesn't hurt, except when the advice is over the head of the newbie. I'm searching the forums to find which way to go, as I too am just starting. I'm not sure if I understand what "tanking" is, unless it means loading up on items. I find it confusing which items, after I earn/buy them, are the best to equip my ship and crew. I think that the color coded header is the clue, but tach, beam, projectile....makes it hard to choose.
Tanking is a simple concept:
1) make all the enemies hit yourself (rather than weaker players who could die from it) and
2) being tough enough to survive this, and buff enough to keep the enemy mad at you through the damage (which makes things mad) done by other players.
Tanking is not much used in star trek. It is a seriously important concept in many other traditional fantasy games.
Best gear is not how start trek works. Star trek works by creating a "build" that has synergy. That is, say you slap on 5 disruptor weapons and 2 tactical consoles that increase disruptor damage.... those work together. Then you might earn (at high levels) a set of gear that adds more disruptor damage. Then you make sure all your weapons are "beams" or "cannons" rather than a mix, and your officer skills can buff the one weapon with some special attacks specific to that type of weapon (for example, shooting everything in sight with beams, using fire at will). That does not mean disruptors are the best weapons, it just means you can make a nice build with them by stacking disruptor damage. Same goes for most of the skills in the game, you build gear and a ship that make you really, really, really good at just a few things (most folks, one of these few things is damage dealing). It turns out that if you do insane amounts of damage, nothing lives long enough for anything else to matter much, so "tanking" and "healing" as a dedicated job are not as critical in this game.
color coding is important, it indicates quality. The ranks from low to high are "white", "green", "blue", "purple*" (there are a couple of shades of purple, but by that point you will understand which is better anyway). Quality does 2 things: it improves the base values (so a blue gun and a green gun that are otherwise nearly identical, the blue does slightly more damage per hit), and secondly, you get 1 modifier for each quality level over white. So a white gun has nothing, a green might have accuracy, a blue might have accuracy and damage, and a purple might have accuracy, damage, and critical hit chance (and some purples have 4, but you get the general idea). Some mods are better than others, too -- accuracy is a good modifier, and once you can critically hit often, crit damage is good, etc. Damage is good at lower levels, but is possibly weakest at 50. There are a lot of complexities to gear at higher levels... early on, use what you find or get from misisons as best you can. You may repeat missions, so if you find your gear falling behind, you can for example repeat a mission 4 times to get copies of a blue ship weapon to gear up a little. You can also buy some white quality gear on vendors, and sometimes, that is all you need.
there are only 3 real classes of weapons: beams, cannons, and "projectiles". Projectiles work with either of the other two types, or you can try to make an all projectile build (not recommended at 50 for new players, its ok below 50 and ok at 50 with experience at the game, but not right away at 50). So you might have 3 cannons and a torpedo or 3 beams and a torpedo, if you like. The one thing to not do is mix and match cannons and beams if you can avoid it; sometimes an aft cannon (turret) is all you can do though.
Comments
Tanking is a simple concept:
1) make all the enemies hit yourself (rather than weaker players who could die from it) and
2) being tough enough to survive this, and buff enough to keep the enemy mad at you through the damage (which makes things mad) done by other players.
Tanking is not much used in star trek. It is a seriously important concept in many other traditional fantasy games.
Best gear is not how start trek works. Star trek works by creating a "build" that has synergy. That is, say you slap on 5 disruptor weapons and 2 tactical consoles that increase disruptor damage.... those work together. Then you might earn (at high levels) a set of gear that adds more disruptor damage. Then you make sure all your weapons are "beams" or "cannons" rather than a mix, and your officer skills can buff the one weapon with some special attacks specific to that type of weapon (for example, shooting everything in sight with beams, using fire at will). That does not mean disruptors are the best weapons, it just means you can make a nice build with them by stacking disruptor damage. Same goes for most of the skills in the game, you build gear and a ship that make you really, really, really good at just a few things (most folks, one of these few things is damage dealing). It turns out that if you do insane amounts of damage, nothing lives long enough for anything else to matter much, so "tanking" and "healing" as a dedicated job are not as critical in this game.
color coding is important, it indicates quality. The ranks from low to high are "white", "green", "blue", "purple*" (there are a couple of shades of purple, but by that point you will understand which is better anyway). Quality does 2 things: it improves the base values (so a blue gun and a green gun that are otherwise nearly identical, the blue does slightly more damage per hit), and secondly, you get 1 modifier for each quality level over white. So a white gun has nothing, a green might have accuracy, a blue might have accuracy and damage, and a purple might have accuracy, damage, and critical hit chance (and some purples have 4, but you get the general idea). Some mods are better than others, too -- accuracy is a good modifier, and once you can critically hit often, crit damage is good, etc. Damage is good at lower levels, but is possibly weakest at 50. There are a lot of complexities to gear at higher levels... early on, use what you find or get from misisons as best you can. You may repeat missions, so if you find your gear falling behind, you can for example repeat a mission 4 times to get copies of a blue ship weapon to gear up a little. You can also buy some white quality gear on vendors, and sometimes, that is all you need.
there are only 3 real classes of weapons: beams, cannons, and "projectiles". Projectiles work with either of the other two types, or you can try to make an all projectile build (not recommended at 50 for new players, its ok below 50 and ok at 50 with experience at the game, but not right away at 50). So you might have 3 cannons and a torpedo or 3 beams and a torpedo, if you like. The one thing to not do is mix and match cannons and beams if you can avoid it; sometimes an aft cannon (turret) is all you can do though.