tank build advice?

telbasta7386

Never made a tank ship before, i mostly do science builds with a few characters running escorts for beam or torpedo boat builds.

I'm currently working on leveling up an all borg-themed character after getting ahold of the Borg command juggernaut, and i think it'd be a really good candidate for a tanky build given its size, trait, and the Borg proclivity for redundancies and hard to kill ships.

I still want to keep it as borg themed as possible - im running assimilated plasma dual beam banks and one torpedo up front (will eventually be the omega force plasma torpedo) and assimilated plasma arrays on back (will eventually run omnis, maybe altamid plasma and the kinetic cutting beam). I want to use the borg space set from omega if possible, and im running the assimilated torpedo and borg cutting beam uni consoles as well as the one that was included with the ship.

I'm thinking of working on lukari rep early on to get some of their boosts to hull and shield healing, in addition to the omega rep. Im also looking into possibly using 2pc of the discovery space reputation set (tilly & stamets mods) for the hull regen bonus.

As far as abilities, not sure if I'll go for a gravity well 1 on the ltcom uni slot or do double engineers so i can more easily run an aux2bat setup.

Any advice on boff layout, traits, or particular consoles to shoot for?

peterconnorfirst

https://www.sto-league.com/beam-ships-in-the-current-century/

PvE Tanks are 90% FAW DPS ships with the remaining 10% centered around aggro grabbing and survivability.

The link has has all that is needed in it.

In my case the 10% consist of the following items:

- reverse shield polarity with the doff that extends the duration
- disco rep shield and core
- history will remember ship trait
- reiterative structural capacitor

That’s suffice for the most part. If you really want to get into it look up the protomatter tac consoles from colony and/or the +threat sci consoles from embassy. Otherwise be carful to fortify and by doing so ruin your build too much. If you are too low on DPS you end up having a turtle, not a tank.

Ships with attract fire cruiser command have a good advantage. Oh and dont forget to turn on threatening stance. Have fun!

szerontzur

"Tanking" is a bit ambiguous, so I'm going lean towards a pro-active healing setup with damage negation. How much damage you 'tank' is largely dependent on how much threat you can push out unless you're in a solo situation.

Ironian Rep has an excellent passive console that boosts healing and damage; Sustained Radiant Field

Iconian Rep also has the Energy Refrequencer trait at T2 that will turn your energy attacks into hull heals. Undine/CC rep has the Nanoprobe Field Generator rep trait at T4 that will give you 25~30% shield hardness(and has a very borg 'adaption' feel to it) - when combined with other stuff, it will severely reduce all incoming (shield) damage.

Otherwise, I recommend going Pilot Spec Primary for the immunity procs, directional defenses, and general survivibility.

I'd also recommend slotting Aux2SIF and Transfer Shield Strength if you're serious about damage-soaking. Cycling TSS alongside Hazard Emitters should keep you going through anything less than a dozen enemies focusing you at once. If not, you may want to invest in some SIF Generators/Emitter Arrays(Fleet Embassy Emitters have Threat Mods and heal procs). Aux2SIF is a rapid-fire hull-heal with armor resists that is great for 'holding the line' once you start taking serious damage.

You're going to want some Aux power for your heals, so I'd probably suggest avoiding an Aux2Bat setup if that's what you're going for. Photonic Officer is probably the route you'll want to go for cooldown reduction; it means your uni seats would go towards sci with very little wiggle-room.

For Starship Traits, I don't know what all you have available, but I find these three are generally the best 'bang for your buck':
History will Remember - Makes you tougher, do more damage, and generate more threat; bonuses last until you change maps.
Temporal Insight - Damage Immunity on Demand; ignore warp core explosions or trigger/cheese objectives under fire that would normally cancel progress on damage. Delta Recruit reward; might be hard to obtain.
Emergency Response Teams - Deceptively potent emergency healing system; can turn just about any ship into an almost unkillable monster(and gives cloaking ships a shield while cloaked). Requires an event ship; might be hard to obtain.


There's definitely a lot more to add, but even this much should be overkill for most situations in the game. Also, if you wanted to transition into a non-selfish/AoE healing playstyle, I've recently gone through (re)building two healboats, so I can offer plenty of fresh advice on that front as well.

telbasta7386

I have history will remember but not the others. I didnt even think about aux2bat killing aux power for heals lol, ill avoid that and go with photonic officer and grav well 1 for some control i guess (have improved grav well also). Unfortunately the borg command ship only has 2 science console slots so i wont be able to get much in the way of control expertise. Still, it's fun pulling enemies together with grav well and hitting them all with that amazing plasma disintegrator weapon the ship has.

I dont think it has command auras, so no draw fire, but it does have the command inspiration abilities.

darkbladejk

Any t5, t6, and even quite a few t4s can be made into tanks, just a matter of what you load them with and how you fly them. The big question would be what ship you want to use. It's also not always the stats you have that matter as a tank as much as it is your ability to maintain them. I've tanked in ships as small as the Aquarius before. There are also different kinds of tanks and no one size fits all best approach to tanking. There are some tanks that are built more for short term engagements, and some for more long term engagements. As far as what's best depends on what you need in that moment. If everything is dying super fast, a long term focused build may not be as productive since alot of the extra heals won't be needed. The opposite would be true about taking a short term focused build into a more long term focused queue.

Far as stats go tanking is essentially a spectrum of Threat Generation, Damage Negation, and Damage Recovery. You need to be able to crank enough threat to get the enemy's attention. After that you want some damage negation so you're not just taking the full brunt of things, and some recovery so you can stay alive. You can tilt your ship towards one part of the spectrum or the other but you don't want to go too far. With tanking there are multiple roads to get you to where you want to go. What is going to be best will be dependent on what you want. I go over the tanking spectrum on my youtube channel to kind of give folks an idea of some of the different powers available should you want another perspective on it. I don't like giving folks cookie-cutter builds but will give you the build I have for my Borg Juggernaut below so you can maybe pillage some ideas. FAW tanks are simply one of the more common, but you can do cannon/turret tanks, science tanks, and other variants.

For the ship itself this is how my build breaks down.

-Fore weapons: Experimental Romulan Plasma Beam, Advanced Piezo Plasma Beam, Altamid Kelvin Torp, Assimilated Plasma Beam Array, Ferenginar Plasma Beam.
-Aft Weapons: Assimilated Plasma Beam, Ferenginar Plasma Beam, Altamid Omni.
-Devices: personal preference

-Engineering consoles: Protomatter Field Projector, Ablative Hazard Shielding, Bioneural Infusion Circuits, Tachyokinetic Converter.
-sci consoles: Regenerative Integrity Field, Temporal Disentanglement Suite
-tac consoles: vulnerability locator x5
-universal console (t6x): Altamid Swarm Processor.

Shields: Sol Defense
Impulse: Sol Defense
Deflector: Sol Defense
Warp Core: Kobali Field Stabilizing

Starship Traits:
History Will Remember, Delta Prime, Weapon Emitter Overdrive, Emergency Weapon Cycle, Overpowered and Overgunned, Entwined Tactical Matrices

Personal Space Traits:
Terran Targeting System, Elusive, Intelligence Agent Attache, Redirected Armor Plating, Repair Crews, Fragment of AI Tech, Context is for Kings, Go Down Fighting, Last Ditch Effort, Beam training.

Space Reputation:
Precision, Advanced Targeting Systems, Energy Refrequencer, Tyler's Duality, Advanced Hull Reinforcement

Miracle Worker Primary, Strategist Secondary

Skills:
LT: 1 2 1 2 3 0
Lt Cmndr: 2L 2 2L 2L 2 2
Cmndr: 3 0 0 2 3 3
captain: 1 1 0 3 3 0
admiral: 1 2 1 0 0 2

Stations:
Cmndr Tac/command: tac team 1, AP Delta, FAW 3, Suppression Barrage 3
Lt tac/miracle worker: torp spread 1, narrow sensor bands 2
Lt Cmdr Eng: Emergency to Engines 1, reverse polarity 1, emergency to weapons 3
Lt Cmdr Uni: sci team 1, hazard emitters 1, grav well 1
ensign uni: eng team

Doffs:
Adak'ukan x3 - threat boost when using Delta
Explosives expert - taunt/placate on torps based on threatening stance
zemok jenro - reduced recharge for AP delta, beta, omega
emergency conn doff - resets or reduces cooldown on evasive maneuvers when emergency to engines is activated.


That's what I'm running for my build at the moment. Overall I get large amounts of my damage reduction from the space set, along with traits. i can also debuff them dramatically with my weapons and boff powers. I can also cheese a much higher threat multiplier with History Will Remember plus the Adak'ukans and other effects. Overall I can get up to a 900-1000% modifier on my threat without having to slot threat boosting consoles. Idk how much of that stuff I listed you actually have but if you are interested in a variant of that build I can help you adjust some of it if you don't have the item/trait.

I guess the big question I should ask is what you want to do with the ship. Are there any questions in particular I can potentially answer for you?

legendarylycan

tacking on to everything else, you also have the hull image refractor console from the...kelvin divergence box, i believe? it pairs excellently with colony protomatter tac consoles

there's also a console off the europa, i believe it was

augmented dictator games actually just released a tank build for the lego ambassador that you can look over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_8mW59Q_kw

it contains both the things i mentioned as well as many other useful things for tanking​​

protoneous

When using a dedicated build, roughly what portion of a team's damage would a PvE tank be taking when playing that role? Just looking for some idea even though the answer might very well be 'as much as possible'.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

peterconnorfirst

> @protoneous said:
> When using a dedicated build, roughly what portion of a team's damage would a PvE tank be taking when playing that role? Just looking for some idea even though the answer might very well be 'as much as possible'.



I was tutored a bit by @tunebreaker on tanking back at the day and remember him saying that the moment you surpass 60-70% attack ins you do your tank job.

Now I often see tanks boast about 90%+ which is all fine and good. Problem is just that whatever you do your success will always depend on how much your team is letting you go for it. (Not to mention the map; we only have very few where tanking makes even sense at all.)

Better more +Aggro elements in a Diamond group? Better more self sustain elements in a weak pug? What to do about players attacking stuff more than 10km away from you? What’s with other tanks nearby, do I want to beat them or the map?

I doubt there is a universal answer for this as far as build adjustments are concerned. One really has to look here in what kinds of teams one ends up on average. Only then the attack in number in combination with how often you die and how fast the maps get concluded can give you a better idea as to how successful you are as a tank.

If you are new to it, better only make mild adjustments on your build with a few pronounced items at first and then see how it is going.

spiritborn

While I've not tanked in STO, I have tanked in WoW, SWTOR and FF14 and it's generally is "as much as possible" for how much damage you should be taking away from the team.

When talking general and not STO specific you essentially got 3 factors to consider, sustain, mitigation and threat. Threat is obviously important since if you haven't got aggro they're shooting at someone else and the other 2 factors don't matter.

Though there is such a thing as too much focus on threat after all it doesn't matter if you got so much threat in your opening salvo that there's no hope for others pull aggro if you die the moment the mobs turn their attention to you (death resets threat after all).

As for the other 2 well others have explained the STO specifics better then I ever could (I run "jack of all traits" builds in STO), Sustain means things like your HP and ability heal damage you've gotten, while while mitigation means your ability to not take damage (in STO that means your defense stat and your resist stats), now how much you focus on one of these depends on your team and playstyle, in other games your generally have dedicated mitigation and dedicated sustain tank class but STO is flexible enough that any career can be either depending on the build.

Generally when it comes to tanking my advice is my philosophical then direct build advice, but something to remember when coming up with a build is that tanking is selfless job, you're not there for yourself, you're there for the team so focus on things that make the team work better (even if only by being the shield that allows those high DPS but fragile escorts to do that high DPS).

foxrockssocks

Well in my experience, for most advanced PUG content, you can get aggro reliably by just running FAW and threatening stance. In short, though, you need to work out how you want to tank and be willing to adjust and change to get it working the way you want.

What I find the best role for a tank to do is to focus on tanking all the garbage. Anything anyone is focusing their damage on you might not hold aggro on, but then you don't need to because it is likely going to die quick. However if that fragile escort is getting pounded on by three spheres while they pew pew at a tactical cube, they are going to have trouble, so you should want the spheres on you instead. But that means you have to be able to handle the damage.

There are a lot of ways to do that of course. Mitigation is probably best, all things considered. Healing becomes significantly more powerful the less damage you take. Shield mitigation works best, but is totally unreliable against the Borg and some others. It is also harder to raise shield resistance, so ultimately you probably want armor. However if you can super charge your hull regen and hull capacity, that can be all the healing you need in many cases.

Of course the specifics greatly depend on the ship you use. Romulan ships work very well as tanks with stuff like the Valdore console, and that changes the build calculus. For the Borg Juggernaut, being full command you can find suppressing fire works well for tanks. Just keep in mind that what works for one ship may not work on others.

And you also can't completely ignore your damage output. Running full power to weapons and using the EWC trait if you have it should be standard. You don't need to push for every last drop of damage, though.

telbasta7386

Looks like the borg command jugg doesnt have command aura abilities, just the inspiration abilities. I might look into using a couple of the signature amplifier consoles from my fleet's embassy to help with threat a bit, if needed. I may have to aim for a few more sources of mitigation/healing from traits and abilities than usual since I want to stick to borg-themed gear, and the assimilated space set and technology set don't really offer much in the way of defenses. Our colony isnt at t5 yet (getting there though, about halfway through t4 right now) so the tactical consoles are out, but I'll probably just run some generic plasma consoles until we get those. I've already picked up swarmer matrix, plasma wave, hull image refractors, etc. for this character so console space is gonna be limited as is.

For traits I'll have emergency weapon cycle, history will remember, the trait that comes with the ship (hull regen, i found out last night it even procs off of the passive heal from assimilated plasma weapons!), improved gravity well (cant seem to not use that in any of my builds, i love gw too much), and i'll have a couple trait slots left over, maybe for entwined tactical matrices, best hope for the empire, calm before the storm, or something else along those lines.

I want to fit 2pc tilly and stamet's but I'll end up having to lose one of the assimilated set pieces... not sure where would be best. The tilly shield is pretty good from what i hear.

peterconnorfirst

telbasta7386 wrote: »

borg command jugg

One of my two tanks use that one as well. The lack of attract fire is a bit of a downside but nothing too wild if you like the ship as much as I do on my liberated borg char. Give it a shot with a single +threat console if at all at first. Good dps with lots of faw will give you enough aggro in pugs easily. I only have trouble when I run into verry dedicated other tanks with my borg jug. They often use the discoprise or styx who happen to have the cruiser command beneficial for this playstyle.

foxrockssocks

My D'Khellra tanks quite well with none of the cruiser commands and no fleet stuff. Unless you're running with a super DPS crowd or other serious tanks you should be fine on threat.

darkbladejk

to slightly echo and expand on what foxrockssocks said above, cruiser commands are nice to have but they're not required for tanking. One of the things that can be a bit overwhelming at first is just how many options you actually can have and do have as a tank. In my Juggernaut build above the 3rd Adak'ukan makes up for the fact that I don't have cruiser commands. With cooldown reduction I am able to sustain my Attack Pattern Delta with very little down time. In doing so I can maintain a 900% threat multiplier without having to touch threat boosting consoles. History Will Remember, Threatening Stance with the skill tree boost, plus the 3 Adak'ukans equal out to 900% boost to my threat. Roughly meaning that my attacks will be putting out 9 times that amount of threat on average the exact same attack would do coming from a non-tank.

With tanking there are multiple roads that get you to the goal. The key difference is what you have to do in order to traverse each road. Where as my build is more bursty on healing with some HoTs and damage reducers in the mix, someone like Fox above me might rely on less bursty healing and more HoTs and damage reducers. idk what he actually runs but you get the idea.

As far as what tools you want to include in your toolkit, that's going to depend on what kind of stuff you want to tank overall. We can make recommendations of what we would do all day long, but ultimately what we might do may not be what you specifically want to do.

szerontzur

darkbladejk wrote: »

As far as what tools you want to include in your toolkit, that's going to depend on what kind of stuff you want to tank overall. We can make recommendations of what we would do all day long, but ultimately what we might do may not be what you specifically want to do.

Yup, I completely agree on this. I personally wouldn't run Grav Well on the B-Jugg, but I get why people would want to(and it's great that people want to add their fun flavor!). If I were to run something sci-offensive that eats a starship trait, I'd rather run Improved Tach Beam for the 10km AoE Full Shield Heal every 20s~. I'm also big on Transfer Shield Strength + Nanoprobe Field Generator for the 50%~ shield hardness before any other modifiers, but I notice a lot of other people seem to completely ignore/not make use of it. (When combined with SB3, that means enemies are dealing less than 25% of their damage to you in most cases.)

The difference in preferences is also the reason I brought up the potential AoE healing approach(and it seems thematic for borg to rapidly repair stuff).. because you can effectively achieve the same thing as a tanking setup with a superhealing build that just keeps everyone alive/buffed. Granted, I am a little biased/hyped at the moment because of my recent work on healboating. It's been a paradigm shifting experience and I had a lot of fun keeping all manner of squishy BoPs alive over the last event. I suspect there's a lot of room to tie some of the tricks into dps and tanking builds to.. well.. further break(trivialize) the game/meta.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

darkbladejk

If colony is an issue my fleet can get an invite on fed side should it be needed for the OP. If fleet level is an issue there's more than enough of us here to take care of that.

Unknown

This content has been removed.