Ship Traits

supremeadmiralz

Ever since ship traits came into existence with the release of tier 6 starships, the amount of grinding required to reach high-end DPS levels has gone through the roof. Assuming each desired trait comes from a C-store ship, it would take roughly 4.5 million dilithium to purchase five traits via the dilithium exchange, at the current prices. That translates to 562.5 days of refining dilithium with one character, which is utterly ridiculous! However, if the desired trait comes from a lock box ship, you can purchase it from the Lobi Crystal Consortium. If you do this, you will need 900 Lobi Crystals, which come from opening lock boxes. The average Lobi Crystals per box is about 5, which translates to 180 lock boxes opened. Assuming you bought the master keys required to open the boxes from the C-store, this costs a whopping 22,500 zen! Yes, you can always purchase zen with real money, but many players of the STO community are free-to-play and will not pay to enhance their experience. One possible solution would be a traits store, a new tab that sold only the ship traits for around 500 or 1000 zen each. Either the purchased trait(s) would be automatically transferred to the available ship traits section or the current ship would have it's mastery reset and the fifth mastery level would grant the new trait. As I bring this letter to a close, I would like to say that I am a big fan of Star Trek Online and don't want to see it get ruined. I simply want to help however I can, and I hope this letter was not written in vain.

postinggum

Few things:
Most end game players that stick have multiple toons, I have just 6, some 50+, I'm not making this up. Levelling additional toons during double XP weekends to level 50 is MUCH quicker than getting your first to level 60. So really your calulation should be divide to allow for three toons at least.

The dil-zen exchange rate boomed a few months ago, from memory October-November a bunch of projects that gave big lumps of dil finished and fleets were finishing their research lab, so dil supply jumped up and fleet usage crashed. Last year after the summer event I was getting two T6 ships a month via dil-zen-ship and having a spare week in which toons could be bought dil stuff from fleet and rep stores, funding eight T6/T5 end game ships. My feds have reciprocity, AHOD, emergency weapon cycle and subwarp sheath and it cost me no money, whilst my roms have subwarp sheath and weapon cycle, plus reciprocity from the exchange but are so far denied AHOD. The exchange rates varies, long term players have seen it below 100 to approaching 500, join the game at the wrong time and dil-zen is a slow slog; also 20% ship discount weekends come up on the release of big ships in a fairly predictable manner, with this your price drops by 20%.

Thats divide by 3 and multiply by .8, so actual time taken to get 5 traits is under 5 months.

For dps not that many traits are killer: reciprocity and AHOD help cooldown a lot, subwarp sheath gives armour penetration for constanly fast moving ships and emergency weapon cycle boosts any energy weapon build. So really you'd want 2-4 cstore traits, and thats if you slotted both AHOD and reciprocity which some don't by choice. For zooming around FAWers pedal to metal 2 is essential and free, whereas for park n shoot ships pedal and subwarp sheath are useless. For partgen sci or torpers I doubt anything can boost them the way energy builds are helped.

If you need two-four traits rather than five then the time needed for high deep traits is 2-4 months, it'll take way longer than that to get through the specializations.

The freebie Nandi and Krenim sci are very good ships, the big Breen isn't my sort of thing but was fine to fly for a bit.

Upgrading to mk 14 gives weapons a huge boost, done during the double upgrade weekends its not super expensive.

Pilot skill and who you play with puts a ceiling on dps, the dps league(s) runs feature very heavy debuffing of targets and players that practise those runs over and over, give those guys cheap ships and they'd still hit high damage figures, play in a Sunday evening pug and you'll probably be in for a struggle. Don't look at 50K+ as something you should be doing in pugs, also be confident that 15k is plenty for most end game content; noting that lower dps players can be really help a group with crowd control and heals.

DPS does not cause fun.

nuclearwessle

So you figure that youd want/need AHOD and Emergency Weapon Cycling at the very least. So you'd need to buy 2 C-Store ships. The other 2 slots can be filled with event ship traits or lockbox traits. The thing is, lockbox traits arent as far out of reach as you'd think. If you buy the ship off the exchange with EC you can get one pretty fast, unless what you want is an Annorax or Vonph. If you run events that reward Dil, marks, and a R&D pack you can rack up a good amount of EC pretty fast between the dilithium you accumulate (which converts into keys that get sold), and the mats from the R&D packs. Not several days fast, but not months either.

Oh, and if you are a KDF or ROM you can get reciprocity without having to buy the ship.

As for which traits that would be, that depends on build, but there are a ton of serviceable traits. And really what make a trait great rather than serviceable is mostly synergy with your build. I have a build that the most important trait is the veteran ship trait.

And, as stated by others, alts make things orders of magnitude faster. Not just the dil refinement per alt, but the doff missions, admiralty, and the like. Seriously, running the Crystalline event with 10 alts gets you 300,000 dil straightaway plus the dil per individual run and marks turn-ins.

supremeadmiralz

wardcalis wrote: »

your forgetting about dropping real $. just because it's free doesn't mean you should take advantage of cryptics generosity and hard work. get lifetime at least, thats 400zen a month and lets you effectively refine 9k a day. you only have yourself to blame for grinding. there are plenty of free t6 ships.

I did briefly address spending real cash, please read my post again.

postinggum wrote: »

Few things:
Most end game players that stick have multiple toons, I have just 6, some 50+, I'm not making this up. Levelling additional toons during double XP weekends to level 50 is MUCH quicker than getting your first to level 60. So really your calulation should be divide to allow for three toons at least.

The dil-zen exchange rate boomed a few months ago, from memory October-November a bunch of projects that gave big lumps of dil finished and fleets were finishing their research lab, so dil supply jumped up and fleet usage crashed. Last year after the summer event I was getting two T6 ships a month via dil-zen-ship and having a spare week in which toons could be bought dil stuff from fleet and rep stores, funding eight T6/T5 end game ships. My feds have reciprocity, AHOD, emergency weapon cycle and subwarp sheath and it cost me no money, whilst my roms have subwarp sheath and weapon cycle, plus reciprocity from the exchange but are so far denied AHOD. The exchange rates varies, long term players have seen it below 100 to approaching 500, join the game at the wrong time and dil-zen is a slow slog; also 20% ship discount weekends come up on the release of big ships in a fairly predictable manner, with this your price drops by 20%.

Thats divide by 3 and multiply by .8, so actual time taken to get 5 traits is under 5 months.

For dps not that many traits are killer: reciprocity and AHOD help cooldown a lot, subwarp sheath gives armour penetration for constanly fast moving ships and emergency weapon cycle boosts any energy weapon build. So really you'd want 2-4 cstore traits, and thats if you slotted both AHOD and reciprocity which some don't by choice. For zooming around FAWers pedal to metal 2 is essential and free, whereas for park n shoot ships pedal and subwarp sheath are useless. For partgen sci or torpers I doubt anything can boost them the way energy builds are helped.

If you need two-four traits rather than five then the time needed for high deep traits is 2-4 months, it'll take way longer than that to get through the specializations.

The freebie Nandi and Krenim sci are very good ships, the big Breen isn't my sort of thing but was fine to fly for a bit.

Upgrading to mk 14 gives weapons a huge boost, done during the double upgrade weekends its not super expensive.

Pilot skill and who you play with puts a ceiling on dps, the dps league(s) runs feature very heavy debuffing of targets and players that practise those runs over and over, give those guys cheap ships and they'd still hit high damage figures, play in a Sunday evening pug and you'll probably be in for a struggle. Don't look at 50K+ as something you should be doing in pugs, also be confident that 15k is plenty for most end game content; noting that lower dps players can be really help a group with crowd control and heals.

DPS does not cause fun.

Alright, so the time to get them is now 5 months. I would like to get them in about a month if possible, 5 months is still a bit much. Also, I'm not asking for DPS advice, my record is 69k in a Fleet Phantom (also on a pug run), with my only decent ship traits being reciprocity and PTTM. I may not be an expert like 150k+ people are, but I know my way around the DPS world.

nuclearwessle wrote: »

So you figure that youd want/need AHOD and Emergency Weapon Cycling at the very least. So you'd need to buy 2 C-Store ships. The other 2 slots can be filled with event ship traits or lockbox traits. The thing is, lockbox traits arent as far out of reach as you'd think. If you buy the ship off the exchange with EC you can get one pretty fast, unless what you want is an Annorax or Vonph. If you run events that reward Dil, marks, and a R&D pack you can rack up a good amount of EC pretty fast between the dilithium you accumulate (which converts into keys that get sold), and the mats from the R&D packs. Not several days fast, but not months either.

Oh, and if you are a KDF or ROM you can get reciprocity without having to buy the ship.

As for which traits that would be, that depends on build, but there are a ton of serviceable traits. And really what make a trait great rather than serviceable is mostly synergy with your build. I have a build that the most important trait is the veteran ship trait.

And, as stated by others, alts make things orders of magnitude faster. Not just the dil refinement per alt, but the doff missions, admiralty, and the like. Seriously, running the Crystalline event with 10 alts gets you 300,000 dil straightaway plus the dil per individual run and marks turn-ins.

Still, making viable dill slaves requires more work and time, as does getting EC by practically any means, and actually using those dill slaves daily.

postinggum

If buying zen when its 15% discounted, used on a 20% ship sale weekend -38% more ship for your buck, also when buying 6k zen+ theres some additional bonus quantity. This literally just happened the weekend of the new flagships. IMO if committing to becoming a very high dps player spending $50 to save a huge grind isn't bad value, its as though you've had a very extended demo period before paying to play seriously without hassle. As for the risk of new traits that trump existing one, they've released most ships in their T6 format

EC like dil has markets that go up and down, the EC rich player can Ferengi their way to more and more EC. Prices vary during the day, during the week, according to lockbox releases and calender events, also things that are sold in bulk can be split for profit or in the case of crafting materials turned into valuable upgrades, and thats without sneaky market manipulation.

A high dps player playing can make 500k per run doing elite queues, that way you play with other good players and build up some ec, once you have ec you can make ec. Hint those rino runs are pretty quick.