The go to tactical boff skills are typically 1 or 2x Tactical Team I. Then you standard spread fire / empowered fire, then attack patterns beta and omega.
Science would typically be hazard emitters, polarize hull plating, extend shields, gravity well - maybe science team.
And Engineering you go Engineering Team I, Emergency Power to Shields, Emergency Power to Weapons, Rotate shield Frequencies and Directed Energy Modulation.
The guiding principal behind the choice of offensive boff skills in all three trees is to choose skills that directly or indirectly boost or improve power levels or outright boost or multiply weapon damage.
Hence DEM and EP2x - even EP2S has an all subsystem power boost.
In terms of specializations: This is COMPLETELY driven by the ships you obtain. e.g. Only ships with a TRIBBLE/Temporal seating will benefit from having a BOFF trained into Temporal, and usually they are NOT Universal/Temporal. So, as and when you get a ship with a specialized BOFF seating or two, then consider training some of your BOFFs appropriately.
Be aware that your captain will need 10 points in the specialization himself in order to use the training manual on a BOFF.
As a general rule you DON'T want two copies of each BOFF skill. Tactical Team being the principal exception. Tactical Team is pretty special as its not in builds as much for its damage boost or other listed effects so much that it , while active, automatically rebalances your shields (without interrupting the firing cycle of your weapons).
There are a number of traits you can select, and active space DOFF abilities that cause, the cooldowns on skills to be reduced in certain circumstances and its generally better to use these to reduce cooldown intervals rather than slotting multiple copies of skills.
For example, there is a build design called "Auxiliary to Battery" with relies on having two copies of the Engineer BOFF ability Auxiliary to Battery slotted, and used as often as possible. Paired with this you have 3 very rare "Technician" class DOFFs set to active space duty. Technician DOFFs reduce ALL bridge officer cooldowns whenever A2B is used, and 3 VR Technicians will reduce almost all skill cooldowns down to the global cooldown, so you then only need 1 copy of anything.
And just so you don't think you always need two Tactical Team I slotted - with enough cooldown reduction - via traits or special DOFF mechanics like aux2bat - you can scale back to only 1.
RA11A: You don't technically need the extra bars on the screen if you are using keybinds to trigger them. Having visibility just lets you see the cooldowns. Which is to say, while you can move it, I don't think you can change its orientation.
RA13: If you have slathered a temporal T6 ship in VR Mk XII gear and have a slightly good BOFF skill selection you should be getting close to, if not more, than 20k dps. This will make you more than welcome in adv queues where I often see players with 8 - 14k dps. That said, theres usually always 1 or 2 guys doing 40-80k dps also so you will never pull the group down.
Your starter "adv" queues would be Crystalline Catastrophe and Infected Space: The Conduit
The first two Act III ground open missions on Kobali award Iconian and Delta. The Undine space battle instance accessed from the Solanae Dyson Sphere is a rich haul of Counter Command. @winters83 covers pretty much how to get all the marks in his lets play (linked above) - its quite worth watching as he covers the mechanics that you need to know in the instances to not mess up the optionals and annoy the other participants.
RA14 - Dilithium mining and tour the galaxy are two dailies that I do not have the patience for.
RA15 - of course the target subsystem attacks work in PvE. NPC ships have a very simple skill selection but are otherwise modeled in combat the same way as PC ships so subsystems can be drained / disabled in the expected way.
ihatepwe answered most of the new question so i will just add on
BO9- As stated above but you may want to try other build like tractor, etc just to see if you like it.
BOFF specialization depends on the ship. The Temporal Special Agent Pack that you got have Temporal, so you should concentrate on that first. Temporal skills are mainly Damage OT, Speed OT or Heal/Reflect OT (TIme effect skill). So unless you are using time skills better use the tac/sci/eng skill.
RA14- Some ship is Flagship Star Crusiers can double the transwarp time. Science path on the skill tree for 5 points got transwarp cooldown time. Duty officer Astromatrics Scientist will reduce the recharge time on this ability. Trait: Well Travelled will reduce 20% of cooldown on transwarp time.
Impulse engine with [SecSpd]/x2 Modifier will increase speed. http://sto.gamepedia.com/Impulse_Engine . Almost all impulse engine increase sector speed check the link under Flight speed to many to type here.
So it a matter of how much you want to spend to increase sector speed
What sort of build/ship do YOU want to be playing at the end of the leveling process? Or more importantly have to found any particular tactics/play-styles that you really enjoy and would like to take further.
It might seem like a long way off and you maybe have no idea but so far most people have covered a lot of general advice and we really need to get some idea of what you're aiming for to be able to give you specific ideas for what to acquire.
I see from your initial post that you have the Temporal pack, which has a good variety of ships with different styles.
What sort of build/ship do YOU want to be playing at the end of the leveling process? Or more importantly have to found any particular tactics/play-styles that you really enjoy and would like to take further.
It might seem like a long way off and you maybe have no idea but so far most people have covered a lot of general advice and we really need to get some idea of what you're aiming for to be able to give you specific ideas for what to acquire.
I see from your initial post that you have the Temporal pack, which has a good variety of ships with different styles.
LoL.......don't pressure. Let him finishing asking all the questions.
What sort of build/ship do YOU want to be playing at the end of the leveling process? Or more importantly have to found any particular tactics/play-styles that you really enjoy and would like to take further.
It might seem like a long way off and you maybe have no idea but so far most people have covered a lot of general advice and we really need to get some idea of what you're aiming for to be able to give you specific ideas for what to acquire.
I see from your initial post that you have the Temporal pack, which has a good variety of ships with different styles.
LoL.......don't pressure. Let him finishing asking all the questions.
I'm not pressuring.
But asking endless chains of questions about literally everything in the game is only going to lead to info overload eventually. I'm all for helping new players but at present we are practically acting like an encyclopedia for the OP answering endless questions, a lot of which we all had to learn through gameplay. All this info is available in the game or on the wiki.
Give us something more specific to get our teeth into and we can give some more specific answers. That way we can offer guidance on a path to take and what exact gear choices are open, rather than just listing off every detail of the game.
The horizontal bar stays horizontal but can be downsized to 1-3 rows, upper left corner.
The rare rep tokens can be crafted in the third (down) rep area for 100 rep marks, or you can get them from some, elite or advanced queues, if there is an elite option, advanced can be a long load time at certain times of the day. In general ground missions are easier to farm special, rare tokens, IMO.
Maco, and borg sets both are good for extra speed in tour, there are a couple ways to increase this including the bottom of the skill bars. Someone who specializes in tour can chime in with the best way to max that.
Target sub-system is just a free level 1 attack for science only ships, but both beam fire at will and beam overload are better options, however for specific builds, like torp boats with uni-beams in the back it's a nice little bonus to try to get shields off line.
Random general questions are always good, and there will always be people to answer questions in this subsection but I have to agree with lordsteve, breaking this up a bit would make it more searchable for other new players, no criticism intended.
Been a bit since I was last on the forums due to a variety of things.
I pretty much wanted to thank everyone who had given me so much feedback. Due to ie (keybindings, builds,etc) i was able to greatly increase my efficiency in game and really enjoyed it much more then I have. going with the disruptor weapon style and all that, I feel i'm decent.Not great but much better then before.
So once again thanks everyone.
Right now I grinded out and did more work and finally figured I'd buy a ship set to go with my weapons, and I recently unlocked the new carrier ship. Once more, a whole new mess for me to understand hah. So two new questions -
1N - So for general ship sets (not weapons, more deflector, etc etc) my understanding that the best reputation set would be the Iconian Resistance Starship Technologies? I plan , if one looks through the thread, make a general build type. Something I can transfer from one ship to another as I unlock them. From my research the Iconian one is best fordamage and can fit on all ships. Is that true?
2N - Also with the carrier, now I apprently have pets, woo. Due to the AoY character I grinded and all, I can get those Ultra Rare Elite pets from reputation. So which would be better for general carriers (well specifically the Vorgon Ryn'kodan Carrier) but any new carriers I may get down the line. From reputation, I have access to Ultra Rare Elite Scorpion Fighters, Ultra Rare Elite Tholian Widow Fighters, and the basic carrier pets I have (Vorgon Echentis Frigates). Later I plan to make my main ships (tyhats accessable to all my characters) as Temporal Dreadnaught cruiser. however, those will only be blue quality ships (no access to a fleet yet)
So once again I appreciate all answers, and i'm curious. I'd love to compile the data everyone gave here to me and make a noob guide for noobs, by noobs sort of thing. If so could I post that somewhere here?
I feel, at this point, it would not be appropriate to respond to new questions at the end of an old thread.
If you wish to post a guide, The Academy is probably the best place to get it noticed, so a moderator can notice it and have it moved to "Player Guides" where it can die^H^H^H be found by noobs.
Comments
Science would typically be hazard emitters, polarize hull plating, extend shields, gravity well - maybe science team.
And Engineering you go Engineering Team I, Emergency Power to Shields, Emergency Power to Weapons, Rotate shield Frequencies and Directed Energy Modulation.
The guiding principal behind the choice of offensive boff skills in all three trees is to choose skills that directly or indirectly boost or improve power levels or outright boost or multiply weapon damage.
Hence DEM and EP2x - even EP2S has an all subsystem power boost.
In terms of specializations: This is COMPLETELY driven by the ships you obtain. e.g. Only ships with a TRIBBLE/Temporal seating will benefit from having a BOFF trained into Temporal, and usually they are NOT Universal/Temporal. So, as and when you get a ship with a specialized BOFF seating or two, then consider training some of your BOFFs appropriately.
Be aware that your captain will need 10 points in the specialization himself in order to use the training manual on a BOFF.
As a general rule you DON'T want two copies of each BOFF skill. Tactical Team being the principal exception. Tactical Team is pretty special as its not in builds as much for its damage boost or other listed effects so much that it , while active, automatically rebalances your shields (without interrupting the firing cycle of your weapons).
There are a number of traits you can select, and active space DOFF abilities that cause, the cooldowns on skills to be reduced in certain circumstances and its generally better to use these to reduce cooldown intervals rather than slotting multiple copies of skills.
For example, there is a build design called "Auxiliary to Battery" with relies on having two copies of the Engineer BOFF ability Auxiliary to Battery slotted, and used as often as possible. Paired with this you have 3 very rare "Technician" class DOFFs set to active space duty. Technician DOFFs reduce ALL bridge officer cooldowns whenever A2B is used, and 3 VR Technicians will reduce almost all skill cooldowns down to the global cooldown, so you then only need 1 copy of anything.
And just so you don't think you always need two Tactical Team I slotted - with enough cooldown reduction - via traits or special DOFF mechanics like aux2bat - you can scale back to only 1.
RA11A: You don't technically need the extra bars on the screen if you are using keybinds to trigger them. Having visibility just lets you see the cooldowns. Which is to say, while you can move it, I don't think you can change its orientation.
RA13: If you have slathered a temporal T6 ship in VR Mk XII gear and have a slightly good BOFF skill selection you should be getting close to, if not more, than 20k dps. This will make you more than welcome in adv queues where I often see players with 8 - 14k dps. That said, theres usually always 1 or 2 guys doing 40-80k dps also so you will never pull the group down.
Your starter "adv" queues would be Crystalline Catastrophe and Infected Space: The Conduit
The first two Act III ground open missions on Kobali award Iconian and Delta. The Undine space battle instance accessed from the Solanae Dyson Sphere is a rich haul of Counter Command. @winters83 covers pretty much how to get all the marks in his lets play (linked above) - its quite worth watching as he covers the mechanics that you need to know in the instances to not mess up the optionals and annoy the other participants.
RA14 - Dilithium mining and tour the galaxy are two dailies that I do not have the patience for.
RA15 - of course the target subsystem attacks work in PvE. NPC ships have a very simple skill selection but are otherwise modeled in combat the same way as PC ships so subsystems can be drained / disabled in the expected way.
BO9- As stated above but you may want to try other build like tractor, etc just to see if you like it.
BOFF specialization depends on the ship. The Temporal Special Agent Pack that you got have Temporal, so you should concentrate on that first. Temporal skills are mainly Damage OT, Speed OT or Heal/Reflect OT (TIme effect skill). So unless you are using time skills better use the tac/sci/eng skill.
RA14- Some ship is Flagship Star Crusiers can double the transwarp time. Science path on the skill tree for 5 points got transwarp cooldown time. Duty officer Astromatrics Scientist will reduce the recharge time on this ability. Trait: Well Travelled will reduce 20% of cooldown on transwarp time.
Impulse engine with [SecSpd]/x2 Modifier will increase speed.
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Impulse_Engine . Almost all impulse engine increase sector speed check the link under Flight speed to many to type here.
So it a matter of how much you want to spend to increase sector speed
So......
I'm going to ask you a question:
What sort of build/ship do YOU want to be playing at the end of the leveling process? Or more importantly have to found any particular tactics/play-styles that you really enjoy and would like to take further.
It might seem like a long way off and you maybe have no idea but so far most people have covered a lot of general advice and we really need to get some idea of what you're aiming for to be able to give you specific ideas for what to acquire.
I see from your initial post that you have the Temporal pack, which has a good variety of ships with different styles.
LoL.......don't pressure. Let him finishing asking all the questions.
I'm not pressuring.
But asking endless chains of questions about literally everything in the game is only going to lead to info overload eventually. I'm all for helping new players but at present we are practically acting like an encyclopedia for the OP answering endless questions, a lot of which we all had to learn through gameplay. All this info is available in the game or on the wiki.
Give us something more specific to get our teeth into and we can give some more specific answers. That way we can offer guidance on a path to take and what exact gear choices are open, rather than just listing off every detail of the game.
The rare rep tokens can be crafted in the third (down) rep area for 100 rep marks, or you can get them from some, elite or advanced queues, if there is an elite option, advanced can be a long load time at certain times of the day. In general ground missions are easier to farm special, rare tokens, IMO.
Maco, and borg sets both are good for extra speed in tour, there are a couple ways to increase this including the bottom of the skill bars. Someone who specializes in tour can chime in with the best way to max that.
Target sub-system is just a free level 1 attack for science only ships, but both beam fire at will and beam overload are better options, however for specific builds, like torp boats with uni-beams in the back it's a nice little bonus to try to get shields off line.
Random general questions are always good, and there will always be people to answer questions in this subsection but I have to agree with lordsteve, breaking this up a bit would make it more searchable for other new players, no criticism intended.
Been a bit since I was last on the forums due to a variety of things.
I pretty much wanted to thank everyone who had given me so much feedback. Due to ie (keybindings, builds,etc) i was able to greatly increase my efficiency in game and really enjoyed it much more then I have. going with the disruptor weapon style and all that, I feel i'm decent.Not great but much better then before.
So once again thanks everyone.
Right now I grinded out and did more work and finally figured I'd buy a ship set to go with my weapons, and I recently unlocked the new carrier ship. Once more, a whole new mess for me to understand hah. So two new questions -
1N - So for general ship sets (not weapons, more deflector, etc etc) my understanding that the best reputation set would be the Iconian Resistance Starship Technologies? I plan , if one looks through the thread, make a general build type. Something I can transfer from one ship to another as I unlock them. From my research the Iconian one is best fordamage and can fit on all ships. Is that true?
2N - Also with the carrier, now I apprently have pets, woo. Due to the AoY character I grinded and all, I can get those Ultra Rare Elite pets from reputation. So which would be better for general carriers (well specifically the Vorgon Ryn'kodan Carrier) but any new carriers I may get down the line. From reputation, I have access to Ultra Rare Elite Scorpion Fighters, Ultra Rare Elite Tholian Widow Fighters, and the basic carrier pets I have (Vorgon Echentis Frigates). Later I plan to make my main ships (tyhats accessable to all my characters) as Temporal Dreadnaught cruiser. however, those will only be blue quality ships (no access to a fleet yet)
So once again I appreciate all answers, and i'm curious. I'd love to compile the data everyone gave here to me and make a noob guide for noobs, by noobs sort of thing. If so could I post that somewhere here?
If you wish to post a guide, The Academy is probably the best place to get it noticed, so a moderator can notice it and have it moved to "Player Guides" where it can die^H^H^H be found by noobs.