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Captain skill set/respec
princedimwit
Member Posts: 230 Arc User
Every skill I want to focus on and be good at and be able to train my boffs in should be maxed out, right?
Someone told me that all my skills should be between 3 and 5 because of some skill point payout. I don't really care about that. All I care about is protecting my ship against really powerful factions. I want to be able to hang in a firefight in a Dominion DSE against the "boss" ships and not worry about blowing up after 20 seconds. And I'd really like to contribute more to my fleet and Red Alerts when they come up.
Someone told me that all my skills should be between 3 and 5 because of some skill point payout. I don't really care about that. All I care about is protecting my ship against really powerful factions. I want to be able to hang in a firefight in a Dominion DSE against the "boss" ships and not worry about blowing up after 20 seconds. And I'd really like to contribute more to my fleet and Red Alerts when they come up.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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also. those 3 points wont make you that much better at taking on a "boss" ship. in order to take on a 'boss' ship and not worry about blowing up you need more than just maxxed out skills. you need great gear and great BO's that can help keep your hsip survivng longer.
http://home.comcast.net/~amicus/Skill%20Point%20Effects.htm
It did help me considerably to decide on where to put my experience.
Taskforce 47 Falkenwacht (Federation) / Greifenreiter (KDF)
(at) deianirrah
Free Gear and where to get it
which ship are you flying and which career is your main captain? So we can help you with your build.
this is my current ship. It's pretty good actually. I took the advice of someone who told me to check out the Mirror Universe requisition packs. I got three or four of them and tried out all of them. This one seems to suit me the best. I managed to wipe the board clean in a Cardassian/Dominion DSE and my shields barely faltered.
My BOffs have attack pattern alpha and delta, reverse shield polarity, tactical initiative, and a bunch of others I can't remember and can't access right now because the server is down for shard maintenance. I don't remember the names of two of them but one is the starfleet star emblem, you activate it and it redistributes shields and counters most anything. The other really important one is the straight line where if you activate it, you can target multiple enemies at the same time.
Your build is pretty bad. Here is some standard advice:
Weapons: Get rid of the beam arrays. Standard builds for an escort usually have at least 3 dual heavy cannons in the front and 3 turrets in the back. The fourth front weapon can be another dual heavy cannon, a torpedo, or a dual beam bank depending on what boff skills you like to use. Some people swap out a turret in the back for a beam array or a mine; but again, this depends on what boff skills you like to use.
Tactical Consoles: Choose the same energy type for all your energy weapons. Stack tactical consoles that buff that energy type. Your current tactical consoles are completely unfocused.
Engineering Consoles: Equip 1 or 2 armor consoles in your engineering slots. Since you are flying an escort, you also get decent benefit from RCS accelerators. However, you might just want to start with 2 neutronium consoles.
Science Consoles: Equip at least one field generator. For the rest, equip universal consoles that buff your damage such as the Borg console. Another option is to equip science consoles that buff the special effect of your energy weapon. For example, tetryon and polaron weapons benefit from flow capacitors and plasma weapons benefit from particle generators.
Deflector, Engines, Shields:
1. Get rid of the Jem'Hadar engine. Equip a hyper-impulse engine to start with. Most people have at least 50 in engine power with the right skills and don't benefit from combat impulse engines. The Jem'Hadar deflector is probably not buffing anything you use either. And you definitely don't have any polaron weapons to take advantage of the Jem'Hadar 2-piece bonus.
2. The Reman shield is OK to start with. You may want to get the MACO shield or fleet elite shields if you can.
3. Some people like to multiple equip pieces from the same set to get the set bonuses. You may want to try the Borg engine and deflector for hull healing or the Omega engine and deflector for tetryon glider.
Tactical Abilities: Take two copies of tactical team 1 and use them to distribute your shields whenever possible. (With the proper doffs, you only need one copy of tactical team 1.) Use cannon rapid fire (CRF) for attacking a single enemy and cannon scatter volley (CSV) for attacking multiple enemies. You may want to have two boffs and swap between them depending on what you face: one with two copies of CRF and one with two copies of CSV. You should probably have at least one copy of attack pattern omega. For another attack pattern, you can choose between beta, delta, or another omega. If you have equipped a torpedo, take high yield torpedo for attacking a single enemy and torpedo spread for attacking multiple enemies. If you have equipped a dual beam bank, take beam overload.
Engineering Abilities: Take two copies of emergency power to shields and use them to buff your shields whenever possible.
Science Abilities: Take hazard emitters and transfer shield strength. For your third science ability, I suggest polarize hull, tractor beam, or science team. It really depends on what you are facing, so you may want to keep multiple boffs and swap between them.
Skill Points: Keep in mind costs when deciding how to spend your skill points. Higher tier skills cost more than lower tier skills. For example, lieutenant level skills cost only 1000 skill points per bar while admiral level skills cost 3000 skill points per bar. Also, the yellow bars give less benefit than the green bars, and the red bars give less benefit than the yellow bars. While the red bars are not worth it in many cases, you probably want to max certain skills such as starship weapons training. And unless you are flying a specialized torpedo boat, you probably want to max starship energy weapons and put some skill points in starship energy weapon specialization. You probably want at least 6 bars in starship warp core efficiency and starship warp core potential. It is also important to spend skill points on your main survivability skills: starship hull repair, starship shield emitters, structural integrity, and starship shield systems.
Power Levels: For your main attack setting, you probably want to max weapons power and have high engine power. You also probably want a high engine power setting for running away and a high auxiliary power setting for healing.
Say, are there videos which demonstrate how to trick out your ship?
I don't know of any videos. The following page is pretty useful for figuring out how much benefit you get from skills:
http://home.comcast.net/~amicus/Skill%20Point%20Effects.htm
The skill planner below is also pretty useful:
http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/
The dual heavy cannons - they're useless unless the enemy happens to be right in front of you. There's no charging headlong into a fleet and wiping them out. Aft turrets...don't even get me started. Pew.............pew..............pew. Useless.
I like my beam arrays.
I can't figure out the builder. It has be spend half an hour entering everything I have including my skills (which has a glitch, I can't enter them all the way I have them) but it doesn't give me any tips on how to better my character or my ship.
I may just have to start the game over and start from scratch. I think I effed something up royally along the way.
LOL, your flying your ship like a cruiser then, you'de be better off buying one. Escorts are very maneuverable and your killing that advantage by equipping beams. Take the DHC's and stick to your targets rear until he's dead, or you need to repair.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
The problem here is how you're flying. An Escort is not a cruiser. It doesn't do all around fields of laser death. What it does and does well is focused forward fire. With DHCs on the front and turrets on the rear, ALL your weapons will fire at your target, as long as you keep it in front of you.
Beams vs Cannons is an age old discussion. Essentially though, beams have a wider firing arc which is useful for slower turning ships. Cannons have a far narrower arc, but do a LOT more damage. As for the turrets, they might not do much damage, but they can fire at the same time as the DHCs.
If you are alone, pick your target, zoom up behind it, slow down to match speed and rip it to shreds. Speed up, pick next target. Rinse and repeat. If a cruiser is taking all the flak for you, then yay! Get within 3km and destroy the target (cannons do much more damage at close range). Keep an eye on your target's target though. If it looks at you, burn every defensive you have and hope it dies quick or get the heck out of its range (tac cubes love excorts, they are crunchy and pop so very easily).
Browse youtube, see how other captains fly escorts. Learn and adapt. Most importantly, have fun doing it. But having said that, flying a beamboat escort won't win you many STFs, others will have to carry the weight as you will be doing below par DPS for a glass cannon.
This is a semi-random assortment of tips that I hope will be of some assistance. Although I will say that if you want to restart, that's fine, but it seems to me more likely that you did not TRIBBLE up so much as you're just new. We all were. It happens.
It would also help if you showed us your skill point allocation - even if you just take a couple of screencaps and upload them, it gives us a better idea of where you stuck your points.
That said, onward...
If you like beam arrays, then you're going to be better served with a cruiser. I would suggest a Mirror Assault Cruiser. However, note that your damage is going to suffer, as is your turn rate, although with patience you can get a pretty good amount of damage out of a cruiser.
The most basic escort attack strategy leverages the ability of escorts to mount dual cannons and dual heavy cannons. They are, in the cannon configuration, intended to focus all their firepower towards the frontal art. The turrets are there so that you aren't completely helpless in other arcs, and so that you can also contribute their firepower to the front (which is helped by use of cannon skills).
Cruisers, likewise, leverage the beam arrays to make up for their slowness, and tend to focus on broadside tactics.
The skill builder is not designed to give you tips; it's designed to be a planner, so you can show others your skills and plan things out without having to tempt fate with hitting the 'Accept' button in your skill spec screen. It doesn't care if you put in the worst build in the world.
Also, unless you're spec'd into flow capacitors you would be better served with phasers or disruptors. Tetryons and polarons AFAIK need flow capacitors to really be able to leverage their special ability. Antiproton is stupid-expensive for someone with a low budget (even with a high budget it's more expensive than it's worth a lot of the time), and plasma is generally disliked, although with the rep system that might change since the Romulans apparently have some good equipment that hybridizes disruptors and plasma.
Do NOT be using equipment any lower than Mk X at endgame if you can help it; Mk X white quality gear on the exchange is pretty cheap, and you can even buy some of it at your factional headquarters. I'm a little shocked to see you were carrying a Mk VIII photorp. Ideally though you should be looking for Mk XI blue or better in general for just about everything, but to start out it's better to just make sure you're at or above Mk X white.
I echo the poster who said you should choose one energy type, and stack the consoles for it. This is a VERY solid way of allocating tactical console slots. Science consoles are often best served to hold shield boosts unless you're a science specialist.
At your level, it is probably best not to go trying "creative" builds, e.g. throwing in random turrets and dual beam banks and cannons and anything else you can find. What would, IMO, serve you best, is a build along the lines of the following:
* Escort
- 3 DHC, 1 torp front (photon or quantum)
- 3 turrets back
- All energy weapons of the same type, phaser or disruptor
- All tac console slots filled by a console that supports the energy type
- Tactical skills including cannon rapid fire or cannon scatter volley; rotate these, and two copies of tactical team.
* Cruiser (likely Mirror Universe Assault Cruiser)
- 3 beam arrays, 1 torp front (photon or quantum)
- 3 beam arrays, 1 torp back (photon or quantum)
- All energy weapons of the same type, phaser or disruptor
- All tac console slots filled by a console that supports the energy type
- 1 or more RCS console (Mk XI blue or better) to help you adjust to the much more sluggish turn rate
- Rotate two copies of emergency power to weapons, emergency power to shields, and tactical team
If you are not familiar with how power works, learn about it. There are good posts on the forums. Unfortunately power is not overly intuitive and is easily missed by new players (it took a long time for me to figure it out), but it's a very important part of space combat. Even if all you do is set it to offensive configuration and forget it, it's still important to know about it to understand why certain bonuses are important and why certain things work the way they do (e.g. polaron power drains).
Also, LEARN HOW TO USE KEYBINDS. There are good tutorials on them. It takes a little bit of time and effort to write an effective one. Personally I take all the skills I want to constantly rotate, stick them on row seven of my tray, and bind and 'fire all weapons' to my spacebar. It makes life a lot easier.
Furthermore, from the sounds of it you are a tactical captain. Unless you are spec'd into your science skills, save perhaps for some of your repair abilities, are going to be a lot less powerful than they should be. If you want to spec into science, you should IMO wait until you're more experienced. Science abilities can be very powerful but they require you to spec into some somewhat expensive skills that have very little use outside of science skills, and that takes away from the basic combat-maneuverability-survivability skills found in the engineering and tactical areas. If you want to keep this particular ship, I would consider strongly putting healing abilities into the science bridge officer slots until you have a better idea of the basics of combat.
Also, you said you have mirror universe requisition packs, or used them - there are six, not four. Did you try the cruisers?
In any case, good luck, and don't get too discouraged immediately. If you desperately need cash there are some Foundry missions dedicated to giving you tons of enemies to kill for lute (I believe one of them is Admiral Bobo, and another is Battleship Royal Rumble), much of which can be sold on the Exchange or turned in for vendortrash, which ought to boost your cash reserves decently, and Tour the Universe can help as well.
You're flying an escort. It has the maneuverability to make use of dual heavy cannons, which is probably the strongest weapon type in the game. The reason why turrets are recommended in the rear is that they can fire in the same direction as the dual heavy cannons and are buffed by the same cannon abilities. The goal is to fire all your weapons at the same time in the same direction buffed by the same abilities. If you don't like pointing your ship at the enemy, then you should probably fly something else besides an escort.
The skill planner doesn't give tips. It's to help you plan how to allocate your skill points.