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is there an "easy" or "dummy" mode?

warpgirl69warpgirl69 Member Posts: 35 Arc User
I'm only level 7 and I'm already exhausted from trying to keep my BOFFs skilled up and equipped.

Maybe I'm spoiled by CoH and other MMOs where all i had to worry about was my own skills and equipment. I never liked games, even console games, where I had to take care of more than just one toon.

Now I have to equip and level a whole freaking crew... PLUS my ship!

I love Star Trek and this is the ONLY Star Trek out there right now, but the freaking number crunching is seriously killing my enjoyment of just playing
Post edited by warpgirl69 on

Comments

  • dracounguisdracounguis Member Posts: 5,358 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    You can just equip your ship and crew with mission rewards and dropped items. There's no real need to worry about gear and such till you get to Vice Admiral.

    And yes, you probably are spoiled. ;)
  • lazarus51166lazarus51166 Member Posts: 646 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    1. what 'number crunching' are you referring to? its 4 BO's a ship and you with easily obtainable equipment

    2. its not difficult keep yourself geared properly

    3. no there is no 'easy mode'
  • bookreader84bookreader84 Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    You can just equip your ship and crew with mission rewards and dropped items.

    that is the easiest thing, at ur level use whatever u like the name of, trust me its easier there really isnt a lot of number crunching involved if u want some more help pm me ingame @bookreader84 :)
  • lordmalak1lordmalak1 Member Posts: 4,681 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    The default is easy mode, and past level 7 you're in for a big surprise.

    Duty Officers.
    :D
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  • rickeyredshirtrickeyredshirt Member Posts: 1,059 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    There's no real need to worry about gear and such till you get to Vice Admiral.

    And when you reach VA you only really need to worry about your gear and the gear of your ship. You really don't use Boffs at all at endgame unless you are replaying FEs or storyline missions.
  • sl1ckm1stersl1ckm1ster Member Posts: 6 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    The game is already on "easy/dummy" mode by default. Unless you change the difficulty setting things should laughably easy.
  • age03age03 Member Posts: 1,664 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    What you really need to think about is skilling up your BOs and making sure they have the right skills you need.
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  • warpgirl69warpgirl69 Member Posts: 35 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    age03 wrote: »
    What you really need to think about is skilling up your BOs and making sure they have the right skills you need.

    See... this is what I'm talking about, isn't enough I have to worry about giving myself the right skills? I gotta keep track of 4 Boffs and how ever many Doffs?
  • reginamala78reginamala78 Member Posts: 4,593 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    Just takes a little getting used to, you'll be fine. Actually when you've got that Miranda it is a little harder because you have so few options available to do much of anything but slug it out. Once you can start building up some powers and find your preferences, you'll be able to build some tactics around them, and eventually you'll get to the point where you go back to level up a new alt and find it amusing.

    If you're having difficulty of gearing up your boffs, a simple solution is just to pick one well-rounded gear set, like Energy Dampening Armor, a normal personal shield, and a Split-Beam Rifle, and give it to all your BOFFs. Buy white quality on the Exchange, resell it if you don't like it.

    As far as their powers, just pick what powers you want on your ship, then figure out what sort of boffs you need to get that set. This will help. You'll eventually have so much Expertise you'll have a surplus in the millions, so just assume you're going to max everything it out, once you're sure you're keeping a power. In general, use that wiki's charts and these forums a lot. There's a lot of 'so you're a newbie' info around here.
  • lordfuzunlordfuzun Member Posts: 54 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    warpgirl69 wrote: »
    See... this is what I'm talking about, isn't enough I have to worry about giving myself the right skills? I gotta keep track of 4 Boffs and how ever many Doffs?

    Skill up your Bridge Officer is fairly straight forward. The skills ranks for the most part just reduce the cooldown of BO ability. And you don't have to skills up every single skill a BO has. Ships have Stations which have a maximum ranked ability that a BO at that station can use. For example a Lieutenant Science station can only use Ensign and Lieutenant Science Space ability. There is no need to skill up the Lt Command and Command abilities as you can't use them on that particular ship. And a Bridge Officer which only serves on the ship and never the Away Team. There is no need to rank up any ground skill at all.

    Also Expertise points will be in short supply at lower ranks (i.e. you never have enough). But by the time you are Commander, you'll generally have more then enough Expertise to skill up your Bridge Officers.

    And as far equipping yourself, you ship and your crew. Well the missions rewards are more than adequate for equipping yourself and your ship. If there is a particular bit of equipment of weapon that you want multiple of, you replay missions (with a 30 minu cool down between replays) and select the reward again (assuming it's not a unique item. And the really cool thing is that the mission rewards will scale to your current rank.

    For example, one cool weapon you'll be able to get is the Har'peng Torpedo after fighting the Doo... well I won't spoing your surprise. You'll generally get a Rank Vi version of the weapon is your follow the eqipsodes. Well if you want to get second Torpedo for the aft of your ship you can do that. And if you want to get better weapon when you reach max level, well you can acquire Mk XI versions of the Har'Pends at level 50.

    And equipping you Bridge officers, can be done with just drops alone. You can just upgrade your BO's equipment as you are leveling up and get better equipment for them (and yourself if between mission rewards). The game is very forgiving at lower levels even if you are a bit underequipped.
  • stofskstofsk Member Posts: 1,744 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    warpgirl69 wrote: »
    I'm only level 7 and I'm already exhausted from trying to keep my BOFFs skilled up and equipped.

    Maybe I'm spoiled by CoH and other MMOs where all i had to worry about was my own skills and equipment. I never liked games, even console games, where I had to take care of more than just one toon.

    Now I have to equip and level a whole freaking crew... PLUS my ship!

    I love Star Trek and this is the ONLY Star Trek out there right now, but the freaking number crunching is seriously killing my enjoyment of just playing

    As others have said, the game is already on default 'easy' mode. There is a lot of stuff in the game, a lot of complexities and bits of nuance where crunching the numbers can become necessary. But if you just play solo, and stick to normal difficulty (i.e. easy mode), you should be fine IMO.

    If you have any questions just ask. For the standard missions and stuff, what you find is more than adequate generally speaking. Boff skills is where most people will have fun debating.
  • bluegeekbluegeek Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    STO is definitely a micromanager's dream come true.

    But a lot of it is entirely optional.

    If you regularly team up with 4 other players, you'll never even see your BOff's on the ground and won't need to worry about equipping ground gear for them. If you do solo on Normal difficulty, you can mostly get away with just putting any old loot you have on them. I would recommend updating their gear when you hit Commander, again when you hit Rear Admiral, and finally at Vice Admiral.

    Space skills are a different story, but you can keep whatever default skills your BOFF's have and never put in more than 5 or 6 ranks in each. Also, you never have to promote them any higher than needed to fill in all of your BO stations.

    (e.g. No point in promoting a Science officer to Lt Commander if your ship can only seat a Lieutenant, or putting points in any skills you can't actually use.)

    They don't need to equip anything for space.

    You never have to keep more than 4 BOffs current at any given time, even though you may have more in your roster. They can do double duty in space and on away teams. The extras are useful for people who want specialized setups.

    Some equipment levels up with you (though not much) and that will make it even easier... you can equip it and forget about it.
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  • palpha2clearancepalpha2clearance Member Posts: 432 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    i thought until you hit commandet everything before tbat was the easy mode? You do not really need to refine many skills before that. The only exception might be your captains space and maybe some ground skills.....
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  • robeasomrobeasom Member Posts: 1,911 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    The Boff Skills are optional esecially fro Ground as end game there is less use for the BO in colony invasion etc However your Boff space skills will help you 9 out of 10 times so try and think of what kind of captain you are what kind of ship you have and tailor those skills accordingly but that should be more about commander level before then pick what you like
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  • syberghostsyberghost Member Posts: 1,711 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    My boffs are all wearing either my castoff gear, or my "secondary" gear, I.E. gear I might want to switch to without having to go back to my bank. As for their skills, I mostly just make sure they've got ground skills that either draw aggro or buff me, eliminate any that cause me problems, and let them worry about using them.

    The only exception is grenades, in that I'll have a boff use one as a combat opener if Orbital Strike is on cooldown.

    Even the little amount of worry I give to my boffs is optional. Use 'em as walking bank slots if you want. Ignore their mechanics and pretend they have story. Ignore their story and use them as gear. STO gives you tons of things you can choose to micromanage, but they're all optional. Turn the difficulty down to Normal and it becomes totally unimportant whether they're optimized or not.
    Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
  • wildmousexwildmousex Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    Don't think about Bo's, or your ship as separate entities, but as extensions of your own skill set- it's easier that way. I really don't worry about skilling and equipting them untill they start dropping like fly's in a mission - then i just bump the skill's i like them using, and give them whatever drop's I have on hand - usually only need to worry about them every 10 levels or so.
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  • dradymdradym Member Posts: 38 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    keep calm and dont forget to be awesome
  • standupguy86standupguy86 Member Posts: 207 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    warpgirl69 wrote: »
    See... this is what I'm talking about, isn't enough I have to worry about giving myself the right skills? I gotta keep track of 4 Boffs and how ever many Doffs?

    Its not as difficult as it seems. You just need to adjust. Youll realize thru the missions rewards and items picked up. You will have more then enough to equip yourself, your BOffs and your ship.


    The Doffs are easy to keep track of. They dont require any equipment and all you have to do is assign them to side missions for extra mission rewards.
  • ccarmichael07ccarmichael07 Member Posts: 755 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    I never would have believed I would be saying this, but I'd like an easy mode too, especially at Vice Admiral.

    I play games to relax, unwind, and have fun. When I want a challenge, I go play The Secret World for it's puzzles and investigations. But if I want relaxing, mindless fun, I want to be able to settle in and just go with the flow.

    The other night, I did a ground mission. Fully decked in MK XI purples, my BOffs the same, and the ground mob Cardies were blasting me to bits. It was annoying beyond all reason, as the whole time was spent in a near futile effort to keep personal shields up.

    I don't like frustration from this game in particular. I'm more in it for the roleplaying aspect, and I don't want to have to wonder on each mission when I'm going to die because the ground mobs hit like Mack Trucks on Nitrous.

    But, that's just my personal opinion.

    Me, I'd be very much in support of an "Easy" mode, or RP mode, or Story mode, whatever you want to call it.


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  • dracounguisdracounguis Member Posts: 5,358 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    dradym wrote: »
    keep calm and dont forget to be awesome

    For me, that's like saying 'don't forget to breathe'. It just happens w/o my thinking about it! :cool:
  • stofskstofsk Member Posts: 1,744 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    I never would have believed I would be saying this, but I'd like an easy mode too, especially at Vice Admiral.

    I play games to relax, unwind, and have fun. When I want a challenge, I go play The Secret World for it's puzzles and investigations. But if I want relaxing, mindless fun, I want to be able to settle in and just go with the flow.

    The other night, I did a ground mission. Fully decked in MK XI purples, my BOffs the same, and the ground mob Cardies were blasting me to bits. It was annoying beyond all reason, as the whole time was spent in a near futile effort to keep personal shields up.

    I don't like frustration from this game in particular. I'm more in it for the roleplaying aspect, and I don't want to have to wonder on each mission when I'm going to die because the ground mobs hit like Mack Trucks on Nitrous.

    But, that's just my personal opinion.

    Me, I'd be very much in support of an "Easy" mode, or RP mode, or Story mode, whatever you want to call it.
    Ground missions can be annoying to deal with even if you're decked out in purple mkXI gear. There's a lot of different ways to deal with it, like different boff skills etc. What I've found that works is 2 engys, each with shield repair at level 1, 2 turrets and a support drone fabrication, a tac for grenades, and a sci who does nothing but heal. That boff layout is my standard away team configuration and it's served me quite well. I rarely get downed, but when I do my away team has enough dps to take care of business and can then revive me.

    There are other little tricks you can do, like learn to use the environment to your advantage (get behind cover when your shields go down etc). Remember to 'aim' when in shooter mode, and crouch as well. Have a sniper rifle to open with and a pulsewave to close. But generally speaking the boff configuration laid out above does the lion's share for me.
  • sortofsortof Member Posts: 196 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    warpgirl69 wrote: »
    I'm only level 7 and I'm already exhausted from trying to keep my BOFFs skilled up and equipped.

    Maybe I'm spoiled by CoH and other MMOs where all i had to worry about was my own skills and equipment. I never liked games, even console games, where I had to take care of more than just one toon.

    Now I have to equip and level a whole freaking crew... PLUS my ship!

    I love Star Trek and this is the ONLY Star Trek out there right now, but the freaking number crunching is seriously killing my enjoyment of just playing

    Oh boy.

    The game is already in easy dummy mode as it is. What your boffs wear and what skills they have, is irrelevant, at least in normal ground missions. Some space featured episodes might trick you (romulan one's come to my mind) so there you might actually need to learn what skill works and what not. Learnig the game mechanics is much more important in that case than the gear you have. For example knowing that Beam Fire at Will or Gravity Well, or Cannon Satter Volley will counter the Heavy Plasma Torpedo spam a Derri'dex Battleship will use on you. ;)
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  • diogene0diogene0 Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited September 2012
    The easy mode is called pve missions. Normal mode is incredibly easy.
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