Core Componets of a FAW/A2B Build?

endorfinator · November 2013

I have been playing very casually for a few months now and have not put much time into perfecting my characters. I have heard a lot about FAW/A2B builds recently and would like to know more about this, so that I can take my characters to the next level of STO. Any help or advice is much appreciated, thanks.

tonyalmeida2 · November 2013

endorfinator wrote: »

I have been playing very casually for a few months now and have not put much time into perfecting my characters. I have heard a lot about FAW/A2B builds recently and would like to know more about this, so that I can take my characters to the next level of STO. Any help or advice is much appreciated, thanks.

TBH the core components in a FAW A2B build are the doffs. The what you want to do is first obtain a ship that would run a2b and bfaw well, AND have room for a dem I prefer the Scimitar. Next what you want to do is load that ship up with some beams. Personally for pve I prefer rompla, however they aren't miles ahead of fleet pla/dis/ap beams so if you can get those, they're fine. Next you need to obtain some doffs, you need technicians for a2b to reduce the cd on your boff powers and marion for reduced drain. With a2b and technicians you will be able to get most abilities down to global cd therefore making it useless to run multiple copies of the same ability, thus making you able to slot more abilities. Stack the ship with fleet/rep gear, rom boffs with sro, and critical/embassy consoles and you're on your way to success.

reginamala78 · November 2013

The idea is to use Fire At Will to effectively double the damage output of a ship loaded with beam arrays, Attack Pattern Beta to reduce the damage reduction of all those targets at once, and Auxiliary To Battery with Technician doffs to reduce the cooldowns such that you have this active pretty much continuously. Beyond that, its mostly a question of just maneuvering into a decent spot to hit multiple targets, and stacking various things to control all that drain, the most popular being Directed Energy Modulation (which bypasses shields to hit that APB-weakened hull) boosted with the doff Marion Frances Dulmur (which negates drain for the first 8 seconds of DEM's cycle). Keybind it all together to your spacebar, pick a good spot, and rack up the DPS by spraying against anything in range.

Bare minimum
Two Lt-level engineering slots to allow for two Auxiliary To Battery 1, plus minimum 2 purple-quality Technicians for their proc.
Three tac slots to use Tactical Team, Fire At Will, and Attack Pattern Beta. The higher ranks of FAW and APB allowed, the better.
3 or more tac consoles
Emergency Power To Weapons, for drain control

Popular Extras
Directed Energy Modulation
Reverse Shield Polarity
Emergency Power To Shields
Assimilated Module + Kinetic Cutting Beam, for drain control
Plasmonic Leech

Needless to say, its primarily for tac-heavy cruisers due to the engineering-heavy emphasis, though some other ships enough engineering slots can do it as well. The best ships for this are the Scimitar (which dominates by allowing APB3 and FAW3, plus Romulan boffs), the Avenger, the Regent, the Excelsior, and their Fleet variants. The Galor and Monbosh lockbox ships also do it exceptionally well, but given that the fleet ships do it just fine for much cheaper, the lockbox ships aren't quite as common.

You can also do a weaker version on the Odyssey, Galaxy-X, Support Cruiser, Assault Cruiser, Standard (but not Fleet) Vor'cha, Bortasqu, Ha'apax, and Haakona. Due to the lower tac stations limiting you to APB1+FAW1, they won't be as effective however, but still quite capable. A couple of engineering-heavy escorts and carriers can do so as well, but they're pretty uncommon, and usually when people are talking about an A2B-FAW built, they're talking about a cruiser.

These aren't the only ways to combo APB, FAW, and A2B of course, but this is the currently-most-popular way.

ladymyajha · November 2013

If you've been playing casually, you may want to consider selling your first born, second born, and third born children for EC, since the Marion DOff costs the GNP of the entire Federation in EC to purchase.

reginamala78 · November 2013

ladymyajha wrote: »

If you've been playing casually, you may want to consider selling your first born, second born, and third born children for EC, since the Marion DOff costs the GNP of the entire Federation in EC to purchase.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) these days with the upcoming drain-reducing warp cores and cruisers' new drain-reducing auras, combined with the energy boost from A2B and EPTW, Marion is now more a bonus than a requirement.

errab · November 2013

reginamala78 wrote: »

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) these days with the upcoming drain-reducing warp cores and cruisers' new drain-reducing auras, combined with the energy boost from A2B and EPTW, Marion is now more a bonus than a requirement.

True,

Marion is slowly becoming the icing on the Cake and his price is starting to fall but is still kind of up there.

I picked up one for my a2b build last week for 30 million EC and that was down from the 45 million that it was going for earlier than that.

asraschaal · November 2013

Also to note you can get the purple technicians required from the B'Tran exploration chain.

jetwtf · November 2013

Get your weapons power overcapped, plasmonic leech, and use the weapon cruiser command and you wont need Marion for drain resistance. My tac's Regent doesnt have him and weapons power rarely hits 110 and thats just before the leech kicks in. Once the leech is running it is a solid 125. Marion would do nothing for it and would be a waste to get him and a wasted DOFF slot now on my ship since weapon damage from power levels max's out at 125 power and any power over 125 is just a drain buffer.

ussultimatum · November 2013

1) Overcapping.
2) Weapon Power Drain Resistance.

Overcapping:

EPTW
2 Piece Adapted Omega
Plas Leech

Weapon Drain Resistance:

2 Piece Adapted Omega
Cruiser Commands: Weapon Systems Efficiency.

You can listen to the forum mob, or you can take it from someone who actually does testing.

I'm no stranger to spending ECs, I have about 6 different Tac characters with 2 to 3 Attack pattern DOFFs, Marion Etc.

The point of all this? Don't buy Marion. It will not grant you any kind of significant improvement on this type of build.

At most, maybe *maybe* if your timing is consistently impeccable - you might be ablt to eek out an extra 1%.

Marion means more to spike builds (Beam overload).

reginamala78 · November 2013

ussultimatum wrote: »

*etc*

The irony of course being that you aren't listing anything the 'forum mob' hasn't already pointed out.

errab · November 2013

I'd also like to make the argument for adding the trait inspirational Leader to an A2B build due to the nature of the build and how fast you can cycle Bridge Officer Abilities.

ussultimatum · November 2013

reginamala78 wrote: »

The irony of course being that you aren't listing anything the 'forum mob' hasn't already pointed out.

This is not the only thread on this subject.

Many posts in this thread are focused on the trimmings.

The reality of what needs to be done for a build like this to perform is weapon power overcapping, and weapon power drain resistance.

jetwtf · November 2013

My post was all about overcap and drain resist... Oh and why Marion is not required.

I've said it many times Aux2bat is all about negating the beams weapon drain. Allot of people think theres something special about it and especialy Marion is often called OP for some crazy reason. I suppose they think Marion actualy adds DPS, not an 8 second 200% drain resist. That drain resist he does is just about covering from first shot to leech kicking in to overcap anyway.

Marion+DEM+BO on an escort with 3 DHC and 2 turrets using CRF is a great combo for an alpha strike and weapons power still there after for follow through shots. But who does that?

mwhitaker · November 2013

Now, I've been with this game for almost 2 years, and I'm not mechanically handicapped, but could somebody please explain a2b builds to me in layman's terms? I just don't get them. People are always yelling at me to try them all over ESD (we keep along the beaten path on my favorite homeworld of Qo'NoS) and I try exactly how they say to set my boffs up (with blue tech doffs and all, since I'm poor

) and I just can't catch on. These builds are horrible. I find myself exploding every ten seconds, because I can't heal at all since I look down and my aux is offline. Now mind you I refuse to run weapons power any lower than max. That's just not going to happen. But how do people manage not to blow up when their aux is always down? What's the big advantage of having slightly shorter cool downs when you're a listing hulk of imploding tritanium in space before you know what hit you? I get the feeling that those that use these builds have no other idea of how to effectively set up a ship. Perhaps I could show you...

rmxiii · November 2013

You can get purple Technicians (Ten of Ten/Two of Twelve) from B'Tran Support/Expansion

Also Aux2Batt Build do not heal much if at all. They rely on the cruiser bulk to survive as the kill. On my Aux 2 Battle Build I've even replaced Hazard Emitters with Feedback Pulse to up the damage a little when my Aux is running. (It helps I have the Warp Core Eng that has 40% to remove debuffs when I use EPTx) Most also run the Reverse Shield Polarity to help out and get a little breather and the Fab Eng that extends RSP time as well. I run mine in an Excelsior so i have an extra Eng Ens BOFF slot so that used for an Engineering Team 1 when I need an emergency heal as well.

On mine I cycle both EPTw and WPTs and I have no problems surviving

mwhitaker · November 2013

Well that explains it. No healing. Don't know how people are surviving with these builds. Oh wait. They're not. These must be all the ******* I find exploding every 20 seconds in elite stfs, thinking they're so high and mighty while my simple and effective raptor build keeps me sawing down nanite spheres before they have time to take advantage of my incompetent accomplices' hurry-up-and-blow-the-generators tactic. I see why this is such a craze on ESD. ESD is full of the game's worst players, while the rest stick to sensible places like K7 and Ganalda

reginamala78 · November 2013

Or you combo high shield energy and EPTS (and adaptive shields, if you like) to have such high shield resistances that nothing can hurt you to begin with. Then if something actually DOES hurt you, battery-boosted heals, RSP, or even Science or Engineering team. Its not THAT fragile.

shadowwraith77 · November 2013

mwhitaker wrote: »

Well that explains it. No healing. Don't know how people are surviving with these builds. Oh wait. They're not. These must be all the ******* I find exploding every 20 seconds in elite stfs, thinking they're so high and mighty while my simple and effective raptor build keeps me sawing down nanite spheres before they have time to take advantage of my incompetent accomplices' hurry-up-and-blow-the-generators tactic. I see why this is such a craze on ESD. ESD is full of the game's worst players, while the rest stick to sensible places like K7 and Ganalda

Funny I never explode using an aux2batt build! It's all in the ship, boff skills, gear and well your own skills that allows you to survive.

rmxiii · November 2013

Mostly when I die in my Aux2Batt Excelsior, its mostly because both the Borg Shield Neutralizer and killed my shields and the Borg Tractor Beam kept me hugging the cube so when the Cube blows it it end up taking me out with it, but that doesn't happen very often. (Probably would happen a lot less if I was faster to use or remembered to use Evasive Maneuvers.)

As it stands in system space I have 26.1% resists against everything on my ship, 8.4K Shields and 53.7K Hull.

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/index.php?build=rhvaurek_3674

This is my current Aux2Batt Excelsior

Science one switches from the Hazard Emitters 1 / Polarize Hull II to Polarize Hull 1 / Feedback Pulse setups depending if I want more healing or damage. (not much in either case though)

pulserazor · November 2013

Core element is the desire to play the latest janky meta game exploits, and the ability to entertain yourself while playing in a way that takes no skill or thought, that has no real need or use for strategy.

Good luck!

Core Componets of a FAW/A2B Build?

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