Not sure if this will make sense as I am new as well. Well, I came back after three years ..anywho.
I have used the foundry to help level and found a google link about 2 foundry quests that help me level, are fun and also give me dil.
In foundry, search for a quest called " Investigate Officer Reports". I think you can also find it in your available quests in your quest log. Well, find that and then hail and accept.
Then search for "Sword of the Kuvah Magh" ,hail and accept.
I did those 2 quests along with some non combat foundry quests in between story missions and have always stayed on par for the quest levels.
Not a bad idea except that I'm "Free To Play" not a Subscriber so I can't access the Foundry:(
Make sure to select your faction and career type, dont worry about filling in the ship type or gear. Underneath Faction-Career-Rank are several buttons: Space-Ground-Skills-Specialization-etc etc. Click on Skills and start filling that out to how you have it right now and how you plan on having it once you reach level 50. If you want to do primarily space stuff then you will want to spend 300K points on space skills and only 66K ground skills. But on the other hand if you want to do mostly ground stuff then you can put up to 100K max points into ground skills and that will leave you with only 266K space skill points. Once you are done filling it in save it and post the link on here. Once we've seen how you plan on spending your skill points we will see how we can fix it. It may be necessary for you to start the character over if your skill points are done really poorly. You can respec your skill points but a respec token costs 500 zen. If you are still only level 20ish it might just be better to restart a new character and delete the existing one you have. But wait until we've critiqued your skill points before you go deleting anything.
Ok I'll post this info as soon as the servers come back up after Maintenance.
I have always found shield cap > regen as shield heals are so powerful. So I would get the shield cap console (prefer, late game, dyson rep one) if you are going to use such a thing. Honestly, at late game, most (PVE) ships look something like ...
tac consoles -- pure damage X3, X4, or X5 depending on how many slots you have.
engineering -- fleet turn/armor X 2 or X3 depending on the ship
and 3 or 4 universal rep consoles. By this point you are nearly full and might have room for one toy console or flavor console to support your build. The "spare" console could be the shield capacity one, but usually you can find something better.
Make sure to select your faction and career type, dont worry about filling in the ship type or gear. Underneath Faction-Career-Rank are several buttons: Space-Ground-Skills-Specialization-etc etc. Click on Skills and start filling that out to how you have it right now and how you plan on having it once you reach level 50. If you want to do primarily space stuff then you will want to spend 300K points on space skills and only 66K ground skills. But on the other hand if you want to do mostly ground stuff then you can put up to 100K max points into ground skills and that will leave you with only 266K space skill points. Once you are done filling it in save it and post the link on here. Once we've seen how you plan on spending your skill points we will see how we can fix it. It may be necessary for you to start the character over if your skill points are done really poorly. You can respec your skill points but a respec token costs 500 zen. If you are still only level 20ish it might just be better to restart a new character and delete the existing one you have. But wait until we've critiqued your skill points before you go deleting anything.
Ok I'm not sure this is exactly what you were looking for but .....
Not a bad idea except that I'm "Free To Play" not a Subscriber so I can't access the Foundry:(
???
Foundry Missions should be accessible to all players. I am F2P and I do a Spotlight Foundry Missions (generally rewards 1.4k to about 4k dilithium depending on length; 20 hour cool down) along with the Investigate Officer Reports (960 dilithium; 30 minute cool down) every day I play STO for all my toons. However, there is a level requirement before you can access them so you just need to level up more before Foundry Missions becomes available to you.
The Foundry Mission that was mentioned, "Sword of the Kuvah Magh" is a pretty good mission with a mix of space and ground combat. The mission is pretty easy and does not take very long to complete; usually 15 minutes. The mission gives you 1,440 dil when completed tack on the Investigate Officer Reports mission (for doing Foundry missions) will give you another 960 dil for a total of 2,400 dil. Not bad for around 15 minutes of play.
However, I found that if I complete the mission in 25+ minutes the reward increases to 2,639 dil for completing the Foundry mission. Tack on the 960 dil for the Investigate Officer Reports mission and you get a total of 3,599 dil. I tend to kill time by doing things like washing the dishes or whatever so that when I finally complete the mission over 25 minutes have past. Note that if you stay away too long then you are labeled "AFK" (away from keyboard) which can, but not always reset the clock on how long you have been playing the mission. Generally at the 5 minute mark I go back to my PC to do something like press "I" to open up my inventory, then I go back washing dishes or whatever else I am to kill time.
This basically means you are killing 10 minutes to get an extra 1,199 dilithium which works out to receiving 120 dilithium per minute. You will not get more than that though. Out of curiosity I allowed the mission to continue to run for a full hour before finally completing the mission. The dil reward remained the same.
There is Foundry mission that rewards up to approximately 4k dilithium when it is complete in 25+ minutes. The mission is called something like "Purity part 1: Of Thought" which involves a bit of space combat, but it is mostly ground combat. The mission generally takes 15 minutes to complete for the 1,440 dil reward so "killing time" is necessary to max out the dil reward. The dil reward seems to decrease over time with this mission. Initially this Spotlight Foundry mission rewarded a max of 4,040 dilithium but with continuous replay of this mission the reward has decreased a little bit down to around 3,980 and has stabilized there.
The combination of "Purity part 1" and "Investigate Officer Reports" will give you about 5k dilithium in total. Not bad for 25+ minutes even though you need to kill some time.
And for the sake of accuracy I'm currently lvl 18 1/2 lol
That is still pretty salvagable so no need to delete the character. In your first post you mentioned that you are a Tac captain. I'm assuming you will want to go with a vanilla build like an escort or cruiser and not some oddball science skill heavy tac captain build. You should still go into that skillpoint calculator and mess around a bit. If not to share with us at least so you can plan out your future build without having to worry about any accidents which will end up costing respec tokens/zen.
Here is a build that i put together that you can use as a guide. When you first click on the link it will be blank. Underneath the Faction-Career-Rank buttons you will want to click on the Skills button to look at the info i filled out. Now I took the info that you provided and filled those in and then i filled the rest of it in. NOTE - i filled in the 66000 ground skill points needed but i only filled in 290000 of your space skill points. You have 10000 points that you can spend wherever you want. If you ever decide you want to get a plasmonic leech you can put points into Flow Capacitors in tier 1 which makes Plasmonic Leech more effective. Plasmonic Leech is a console you can find on the exchange and it drains enemy power and gives you power to all subsystems. The amount of power drained depends on your Flow Cap skills. But right now the PL console is going for i think 30million energy credits. Even if you dont plan on getting it right now just save 9000 points and set them aside so that when you do get the PL console then you can max out your Flow Capacitor skills.
That is still pretty salvagable so no need to delete the character. In your first post you mentioned that you are a Tac captain. I'm assuming you will want to go with a vanilla build like an escort or cruiser and not some oddball science skill heavy tac captain build. You should still go into that skillpoint calculator and mess around a bit. If not to share with us at least so you can plan out your future build without having to worry about any accidents which will end up costing respec tokens/zen.
Here is a build that i put together that you can use as a guide. When you first click on the link it will be blank. Underneath the Faction-Career-Rank buttons you will want to click on the Skills button to look at the info i filled out. Now I took the info that you provided and filled those in and then i filled the rest of it in. NOTE - i filled in the 66000 ground skill points needed but i only filled in 290000 of your space skill points. You have 10000 points that you can spend wherever you want. If you ever decide you want to get a plasmonic leech you can put points into Flow Capacitors in tier 1 which makes Plasmonic Leech more effective. Plasmonic Leech is a console you can find on the exchange and it drains enemy power and gives you power to all subsystems. The amount of power drained depends on your Flow Cap skills. But right now the PL console is going for i think 30million energy credits. Even if you dont plan on getting it right now just save 9000 points and set them aside so that when you do get the PL console then you can max out your Flow Capacitor skills.
Ok good i was hoping i didnt have to start over! And, dont know how I missed it but my Flow Capacitors is Maxed ...Thanks for all the help I will work towards this build.
So now all i need to do is to go back & retrain my Bridge Officers according to the aforementioned ......
If you are dying at lower levels it usually means you have not yet figured out the power of defensive officer skills. This may require going back to base to retrain your officers, which costs a tiny bit of EC (a couple thousand IIRC, might be just a few hundred, cant recall).
The staples for defense...
- tactical officer tactical team: this moves your shields instantly from the sides where you are not being shot to the sides that you are being shot on. If you can arrange to have most of the hits coming from one direction, the effectively gives you 4x shield capacity on that one facing.
- power to shields and science team. These heal your shields. One or the other, or both, whatever your ship can seat as lowbie ships are very limited. Engineering power to shields allows science seat for...
- hazard emitters! This clears off nasty hull burning plasma from evil romulans or borg, and it also heals your hull. It also clears off shield drain attacks.
going forward try not to max out any captain skill. ROUGHLY (I dont have exact values and am feeling rather lazy atm) the first 3 points gets you about 50% of the total value of that skill. The next three points get you about 85% of the skill. 85% of a skill is GREAT for most things and perfect for a generic, well rounded build. That is, its better to do 85% damage and 85% hull defense and 85% drain resist and 85% engine power and so on and on than to have 100% damage and 100% turn rate with no defense unless you are trying to make a specialty dps glass cannon build or something (you should not be doing this unless you feel you really know what you are doing, in which case, you would not be here...). Those last three points cost you a LOT to go from 85% to 100%, and those SAME three points could get you 50% in something else instead of 15%..........
Also, speaking of some skills you can AVOID in the tree --- you can avoid the skills that add power to systems WHEN THE SYSTEM IS LOW. Eventually, many days and levels from now, you will have gear and stuff that will ensure you never have ANY system with low power. The big bonus you get at 25 power setting today in whatever system may not reach zero but it will approach it over time and someday you will only be getting a few points (5-7 or so) of power in a system, or even 0 in a system, which makes those points in those skills entirely WASTED. Just skip them. Higher ranks there are skills that add power to systems and THOSE are necessary to take --- read the text of the skills and see which ones are which --- its there if you read it close you can tell them apart.
going forward try not to max out any captain skill. ROUGHLY (I dont have exact values and am feeling rather lazy atm) the first 3 points gets you about 50% of the total value of that skill. The next three points get you about 85% of the skill. 85% of a skill is GREAT for most things and perfect for a generic, well rounded build. That is, its better to do 85% damage and 85% hull defense and 85% drain resist and 85% engine power and so on and on than to have 100% damage and 100% turn rate with no defense unless you are trying to make a specialty dps glass cannon build or something (you should not be doing this unless you feel you really know what you are doing, in which case, you would not be here...). Those last three points cost you a LOT to go from 85% to 100%, and those SAME three points could get you 50% in something else instead of 15%...........
That it misleading and actual impact varies from skill to skill. For example on many beam boats the final three points of flow caps will increase your damage more than all nine points of weapon specialization combined. Flow caps increases how fast your power recovers from each volley weapon specialization just gives a small bonus chance to crit. There are many other examples too.
The hard part is figuring out which skills are good for what build. For example, even a small boost to crit will be worth it if you're using antiproton's or have lots of crit damage boosts. And the boost to power recovery means more to a ship with eight beam arrays than to one with some torpedoes and the experimental romulan beam (no energy drain).
Here's a link with some more specific examples and a link to a tool for helping decide when to pay for rank 9:
Actually, the opposite advice is better. Because of the upgrade system, it is cheaper and you have a vastly higher chance to get violet/gold gear by opening the boxes at mark 4 and upgrading from there compared to waiting for mark 12. Some people even have dedicated characters frozen at level 15-19 just for opening weapon boxes.
You can, however, just buy the boxes on the auction house for 1/10 the price of a key. So, still not worth opening a box.
Edit: and if you're avoiding the upgrade system, it's cheaper to just buy the gear you want instead of a box or a key.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Well this is all good advice for the future but as of right now I'm still only lvl 18 so my biggest concern at this point is choosing which lvl 20 ship I want & how/where to get Mark VI weapons roflmao!! Which will probably be the heavy escort or its refit
what is the best setup for this. I have two each of the Very rare, DO from the mine stoe and almost all my DO's are very rare. the best I can do is approx. 30 % crit, 60% suc and 10% fail. but most of the time I fail. do you know what DO's are best for this. both (motherlode) assignments.
That it misleading and actual impact varies from skill to skill. For example on many beam boats the final three points of flow caps will increase your damage more than all nine points of weapon specialization combined. Flow caps increases how fast your power recovers from each volley weapon specialization just gives a small bonus chance to crit. There are many other examples too.
The hard part is figuring out which skills are good for what build. For example, even a small boost to crit will be worth it if you're using antiproton's or have lots of crit damage boosts. And the boost to power recovery means more to a ship with eight beam arrays than to one with some torpedoes and the experimental romulan beam (no energy drain).
Here's a link with some more specific examples and a link to a tool for helping decide when to pay for rank 9:
It is not misleading, you are getting into specialty builds and I specifically said the 6 in many skills build is generic. Everything you say is correct and that link is awesome, but he may not yet know what type of ship he wants to fly at max level. The generic build will do well enough in PVE in any ship available, and is more than fine for new players to use until they have sampled a variety of ships and know endgame details well enough to make a specialty build.
Repeating my earlier advice, do not pick the cruiser, as you will soon get a free cruiser from an episode reward anyway. The escort sounds like a good fit for your style.
As for where to get weapons, etc... the best source is replaying old episodes. The rewards will shift to be appropriate to your current level, so it's simply a matter of finding an episode that rewards the type of item you want. This way, they are not only FREE but you may get other loot and XP along the way. For examples:
'Skirmish' - rewards a blue quality Covariant or Regenerative shield
'Past Imperfect' (which is right about where you are) - blue quality Plasma-Disruptor Hybrid ship weapons (choice of beam or DHC)
There's a lot of others but those are a couple of low-level highlights.
Replay old episodes is fine but a kind soul might make you some purple & blue crafted low tier weapons or a console, maybe a fleetmate can craft you something good --- tier 2-8 stuff is "effectively cost free" to an established player. Above that start to eat into rare crafting mats at an alarming rate. And crafted allows you to use types you can't get anywhere else ... AP is only from crafting until rather high level. Ask before you need them, so you have time to find someone willing AND to sit out the delay; some items take close to an hour to cook (and longer still as you get to the endgame levels).
Replay old episodes is fine but a kind soul might make you some purple & blue crafted low tier weapons or a console, maybe a fleetmate can craft you something good --- tier 2-8 stuff is "effectively cost free" to an established player. Above that start to eat into rare crafting mats at an alarming rate. And crafted allows you to use types you can't get anywhere else ... AP is only from crafting until rather high level. Ask before you need them, so you have time to find someone willing AND to sit out the delay; some items take close to an hour to cook (and longer still as you get to the endgame levels).
As stated in my Signature, I'm currently in the hunt for a Fleet. I left the one i was in because nobody is ever on anymore; but once i can get into one .. maybe!
To Westmetals: Oh I am deffinitely going with the Escort no worries!
Comments
Not a bad idea except that I'm "Free To Play" not a Subscriber so I can't access the Foundry:(
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
ooops Sorry about that
Ok I'll post this info as soon as the servers come back up after Maintenance.
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
tac consoles -- pure damage X3, X4, or X5 depending on how many slots you have.
engineering -- fleet turn/armor X 2 or X3 depending on the ship
and 3 or 4 universal rep consoles. By this point you are nearly full and might have room for one toy console or flavor console to support your build. The "spare" console could be the shield capacity one, but usually you can find something better.
Ok I'm not sure this is exactly what you were looking for but .....
Lieutenant:
Attack Patterns =Max//Weapons Training=Max//Drive Coil=7//Batteries=4//Hull Repair=Max
Shield Emitters=Max
Liuetenant Commander:
Energy Weapons=3//Projectile Weapons=5//Everything else=0
And for the sake of accuracy I'm currently lvl 18 1/2 lol
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
???
Foundry Missions should be accessible to all players. I am F2P and I do a Spotlight Foundry Missions (generally rewards 1.4k to about 4k dilithium depending on length; 20 hour cool down) along with the Investigate Officer Reports (960 dilithium; 30 minute cool down) every day I play STO for all my toons. However, there is a level requirement before you can access them so you just need to level up more before Foundry Missions becomes available to you.
The Foundry Mission that was mentioned, "Sword of the Kuvah Magh" is a pretty good mission with a mix of space and ground combat. The mission is pretty easy and does not take very long to complete; usually 15 minutes. The mission gives you 1,440 dil when completed tack on the Investigate Officer Reports mission (for doing Foundry missions) will give you another 960 dil for a total of 2,400 dil. Not bad for around 15 minutes of play.
However, I found that if I complete the mission in 25+ minutes the reward increases to 2,639 dil for completing the Foundry mission. Tack on the 960 dil for the Investigate Officer Reports mission and you get a total of 3,599 dil. I tend to kill time by doing things like washing the dishes or whatever so that when I finally complete the mission over 25 minutes have past. Note that if you stay away too long then you are labeled "AFK" (away from keyboard) which can, but not always reset the clock on how long you have been playing the mission. Generally at the 5 minute mark I go back to my PC to do something like press "I" to open up my inventory, then I go back washing dishes or whatever else I am to kill time.
This basically means you are killing 10 minutes to get an extra 1,199 dilithium which works out to receiving 120 dilithium per minute. You will not get more than that though. Out of curiosity I allowed the mission to continue to run for a full hour before finally completing the mission. The dil reward remained the same.
There is Foundry mission that rewards up to approximately 4k dilithium when it is complete in 25+ minutes. The mission is called something like "Purity part 1: Of Thought" which involves a bit of space combat, but it is mostly ground combat. The mission generally takes 15 minutes to complete for the 1,440 dil reward so "killing time" is necessary to max out the dil reward. The dil reward seems to decrease over time with this mission. Initially this Spotlight Foundry mission rewarded a max of 4,040 dilithium but with continuous replay of this mission the reward has decreased a little bit down to around 3,980 and has stabilized there.
The combination of "Purity part 1" and "Investigate Officer Reports" will give you about 5k dilithium in total. Not bad for 25+ minutes even though you need to kill some time.
That is still pretty salvagable so no need to delete the character. In your first post you mentioned that you are a Tac captain. I'm assuming you will want to go with a vanilla build like an escort or cruiser and not some oddball science skill heavy tac captain build. You should still go into that skillpoint calculator and mess around a bit. If not to share with us at least so you can plan out your future build without having to worry about any accidents which will end up costing respec tokens/zen.
http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?build=stonewbhelp_0
Here is a build that i put together that you can use as a guide. When you first click on the link it will be blank. Underneath the Faction-Career-Rank buttons you will want to click on the Skills button to look at the info i filled out. Now I took the info that you provided and filled those in and then i filled the rest of it in. NOTE - i filled in the 66000 ground skill points needed but i only filled in 290000 of your space skill points. You have 10000 points that you can spend wherever you want. If you ever decide you want to get a plasmonic leech you can put points into Flow Capacitors in tier 1 which makes Plasmonic Leech more effective. Plasmonic Leech is a console you can find on the exchange and it drains enemy power and gives you power to all subsystems. The amount of power drained depends on your Flow Cap skills. But right now the PL console is going for i think 30million energy credits. Even if you dont plan on getting it right now just save 9000 points and set them aside so that when you do get the PL console then you can max out your Flow Capacitor skills.
Ok good i was hoping i didnt have to start over! And, dont know how I missed it but my Flow Capacitors is Maxed ...Thanks for all the help I will work towards this build.
So now all i need to do is to go back & retrain my Bridge Officers according to the aforementioned ......
If you are dying at lower levels it usually means you have not yet figured out the power of defensive officer skills. This may require going back to base to retrain your officers, which costs a tiny bit of EC (a couple thousand IIRC, might be just a few hundred, cant recall).
The staples for defense...
- tactical officer tactical team: this moves your shields instantly from the sides where you are not being shot to the sides that you are being shot on. If you can arrange to have most of the hits coming from one direction, the effectively gives you 4x shield capacity on that one facing.
- power to shields and science team. These heal your shields. One or the other, or both, whatever your ship can seat as lowbie ships are very limited. Engineering power to shields allows science seat for...
- hazard emitters! This clears off nasty hull burning plasma from evil romulans or borg, and it also heals your hull. It also clears off shield drain attacks.
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
Also, speaking of some skills you can AVOID in the tree --- you can avoid the skills that add power to systems WHEN THE SYSTEM IS LOW. Eventually, many days and levels from now, you will have gear and stuff that will ensure you never have ANY system with low power. The big bonus you get at 25 power setting today in whatever system may not reach zero but it will approach it over time and someday you will only be getting a few points (5-7 or so) of power in a system, or even 0 in a system, which makes those points in those skills entirely WASTED. Just skip them. Higher ranks there are skills that add power to systems and THOSE are necessary to take --- read the text of the skills and see which ones are which --- its there if you read it close you can tell them apart.
That it misleading and actual impact varies from skill to skill. For example on many beam boats the final three points of flow caps will increase your damage more than all nine points of weapon specialization combined. Flow caps increases how fast your power recovers from each volley weapon specialization just gives a small bonus chance to crit. There are many other examples too.
The hard part is figuring out which skills are good for what build. For example, even a small boost to crit will be worth it if you're using antiproton's or have lots of crit damage boosts. And the boost to power recovery means more to a ship with eight beam arrays than to one with some torpedoes and the experimental romulan beam (no energy drain).
Here's a link with some more specific examples and a link to a tool for helping decide when to pay for rank 9:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=20328691&postcount=79
Good point!
Joined January 2009
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
It is not misleading, you are getting into specialty builds and I specifically said the 6 in many skills build is generic. Everything you say is correct and that link is awesome, but he may not yet know what type of ship he wants to fly at max level. The generic build will do well enough in PVE in any ship available, and is more than fine for new players to use until they have sampled a variety of ships and know endgame details well enough to make a specialty build.
Replay old episodes is fine but a kind soul might make you some purple & blue crafted low tier weapons or a console, maybe a fleetmate can craft you something good --- tier 2-8 stuff is "effectively cost free" to an established player. Above that start to eat into rare crafting mats at an alarming rate. And crafted allows you to use types you can't get anywhere else ... AP is only from crafting until rather high level. Ask before you need them, so you have time to find someone willing AND to sit out the delay; some items take close to an hour to cook (and longer still as you get to the endgame levels).
As stated in my Signature, I'm currently in the hunt for a Fleet. I left the one i was in because nobody is ever on anymore; but once i can get into one .. maybe!
To Westmetals: Oh I am deffinitely going with the Escort no worries!
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan
sweet thanks a bunch. gotta work a 12 hr shift tonight but next time im in game i will definitely hit you up:D
Krayat(Klingon Alien, Tactical) -- I.K.S. Sa'Tan