Basic Build Help - Returning Player

baronvonboom

Hey Captains

Returning player back a few weeks with a new tac cappy & just getting to grips with everything again, had a couple of questions re basic beam setups & rotations if possible as a lot of what ive found elsewhere is either outdated or a tad jumbled.

1) Just looking for what would be considered a basic rotation of boff skills for tac cap with beams (jem dread cruiser), spam, long term buffs etc I know it varies cap to cap but just generic is good for me to work around.

2) Read some articles on dps league re beam setups & a2b builds but they either dont seem to work properly or dont make any sense to my pea brain so if anyone can shed some basic info on how it works with gcd & how it should appear when using would be appreciated. ( I have blue doffs for both a2b build & the other power weapons one)

3) FAW + Cannon skills for infinite uptime? combined with what ive asked above how is that possible?

TLDR: Im a mess, my ships a mess, help me

Any help is very much appreciated.

Cheers

Boom

seaofsorrows

Your 'basic rotation' has a lot to do with the Aux2Bat build you're trying to run.

You say you have the Duty Officers for Aux2Bat? Because that's the first thing people miss. If you don't have any technicians on active duty then A2B does not work. You should have 3 Technicians active, preferably Blue or Purple Rarity.

The way A2B works, is that activating Aux2Bat lowers cooldown timers, so if an ability is on cooldown and you hit A2B with Technicians on duty it will lower the time remaining before you can activate that ability again. For that reason, Aux2Bat is the last thing you want to activate on your rotation. You want to fire off everything, then hit that A2B to lower the cooldown on all of it.

That being said, my normal rotation is to activate all my weapon buffs and power ups, then my fire at will, then once all that is going, hit A2B. So for me it's Emergency Power to Weapons, Kemocite Laced Weaponry, Attack Pattern Beta, Tactical Team, Fire At Will, and then Aux2Bat to reset all those cooldowns.

This is my FAW Jem Dread. It's nothing special, it's pretty generic but it works well.

Generally speaking, I put all my tactical stuff that I want up all the time on a key bind. I hit that bind to activate all of it and then use A2B to cool it down. This works pretty good, just make sure you don't put things like heals on that bind, you want to save those for use when you need them most. STO Keybind is a pretty easy to use tool, you can just put the entire rotation on one key and then activate it quickly or 'spam' it as we say. If you map Aux2Bat in the bind, make sure you activate it last in the order.

Hope that helps answer a few of your questions.

baronvonboom

Thats perfect tyvm

I just found it weird last night when testing as it either didnt seem to work as well as described or not at all despite me having the doffs slotted. Rota wasnt far off what i was doing with my first bind being similar minus the kemo as i dont have that, another for just forward facing attacks/buffs, long cd ones & the heals i just had solo.

One of the other things was it mentioned using 2 x A2B & spamming them, how so when using one the other is instantly on cd as well? Same as it saying slot 2 FAWs etc?

Plenty more questions im sure but appreciate the answer & dont want to frazzle you with questions youve probably answered a million times by now lol

seaofsorrows

The reason you slot 2 of an ability is to manage it's cooldown. All abilities have a 'global cooldown,' this is the minimum amount of time before that ability can be used again. For Fire At Will as an example, the global cooldown is 15 seconds.

Normally, if you use Fire At Will and then you just sit there and wait for it, the cooldown is 30 seconds. If however, you have a 2nd Fire At Will, it's cooldown is half of that or 15 seconds (it can never go lower then 15 seconds.)

So lets say you have Fire At Will III and Fire At Will II. When you use Fire At Will III, it's cooldown goes to 30 seconds. Using Fire At Will III puts Fire At Will II on cooldown as well, but that cooldown is only 15 seconds. So you can wait 15 seconds and then activate the 2nd copy. After 15 more seconds, you can then use Fire At Will III again.

On an Aux2Bat build however, you don't double up abilities because it's not needed. Aux2Bat can bring your abilities down to the global cooldown (15 seconds) so slotting a 2nd copy is simply a waste of a slot. As you can see in my sample build, I don't have 2 of any of my abilities slotted. Duplication is not used on Aux2Bat builds, you would use that on a build that used a different cooldown method.

For this reason, Aux2Bat is best used on ships like the Jem Hadar Dread that have limited Tactical Seating but plenty of Engineering or Universals. On a ship that has heavy tactical seating, Aux2Bat is usually not the best option.

baronvonboom

Bits of info like this are exactly what i need, thank you so much:)

seaofsorrows

No problem man, if you have any more questions please feel free to ask.

baronvonboom

Putting your advice & help into practice an its helped loads this evening.
That STO Keybind is magic & has helped everything with some other m+k binds.

Thanks again:)

seaofsorrows

Nice, glad to hear you're doing better!

annemarie30

and pay attention to your traits. if you are not using anything that used part gens, don't slot the traits that boost it, that sort of thing.