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Going Advanced STF Need Help
havok69
Member Posts: 9 Arc User
So what lvl and rarity gear do I need to do advanced STF with engineer in intel cruiser. I ran adv Khitomer with very rare ap mkxiii and I could barely stop two probes. My friends are telling me to change ships but that cant be it can it. Thanks for any help.
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you can run advanced stfs with xiv weapons and everything else can be XII level. Your gear should mostly be purple quality that forms a "build" (not just random junk) that works together to make your ship perform.
assuming you meant fed (for some unholy reason both kdf and rom got a cruiser t6 as well)?
The eclipse, I am guessing?
That ship should do just fine. Surgical strikes and AP beam arrays** with critdx3 and a 20 or so crit rating right? And that isnt doing high dps? Stacked with pattern beta and power to weapons and OSS, right? Weapon power is maxed and cruiser command is weapon power, if you need it? Warp core is fleet amp or ob-AP set (with the beam!!) ? You might also throw in turbulence as well?
If you are doing that, the probes should just go poof.
** alternative, use 4 DBB front and 3 360s aft with a 4th throwaway aft weapon like tractor mines or a turret with [thrust]
Also read up on suggested strategies for running the STFs (do/don'ts).
And remember it is a 5 person event, it is a lot easier for multiple captains to take down a single opponent. If you work with them, your build may be sufficient already....
Casual players get hammered in Advanced now.
The expectation that you need to have [CrtD]x3 weapons is also false, and ridiculous. Even if you could craft them in a reasonable fashion, you're caught in the loop of trying to make them over and over. The creation part is cheap - upgrading or flat out buying them is expensive and not in the range the casual player.
First - post your build on sto academy.
Second - we can advise you on the skill set needed. An eclipse running common gear broke 20K with a great pilot at the helm - no reason why you can't do at least half that.
Three - As suggested - read up and come practise with us - learn to use your skills. DON"t PUG IT. Join the public channels, ask for help, and we'll happily teach you.
My Two Bits
Admiral Thrax
Looking at a ship build - and only the ship - does not show the whole picture (and is a little lazy imo).
What I find that usually helps folks immediately is having a good bridge officer layout, and suitable active duty space DOFFs for the bridge officer setups. That's where that STO academy skill planner stuff comes in. A few other things that greatly help are also knowing how to use what the ship can do best at, getting good at piloting and positioning, and knowing what you will end up needing to do in a STF.
Once you make it to lvl 50, you can do advanced STFs.
There is decent freely available gear you can use until you can upgrade/ craft/ obtain better gear.
Fluid dynamics in the borg episode set can give a MK XI purple antiproton beam array upon completion. It doesn't take long and can be rerun multiple times to get the beam arrays over and over.
Sphere of influence can be run to get the omni directional antiproton beam arrays and then again for the warp core.
You can get solanae deflector, engines and shield from a step between stars. It's not a quick mission, but worth it if you have limited to no resources.
If you fancy polaron weapons, you can run operation gamma in the cardassian episodes for the Jem Hadar engines and deflector. The shield and dominion polaron weapons are available by completing Boldly They Rode. It's a long mission, taking 30-45 minutes for some folks, so it's not on the top of most folks "cheap" gear suggestions for STO. If you fancy polaron weapons, it might be worth it to you, though I doubt it anyway.
My Sci Toon runs a Breen Carrier, with a Breen based build. Tetryon Weapons, and matching Consoles, Breen Shield, Deflector, Warp-cor, and Engines, with Temp Torpedo's (can't think of the actual name off the top of my head) does great. Paired with Grav-well 1 & 3 (with Aftershock DOFF) Hull & Shield Heals, teams that I get grouped with always have positive things to say.
Plus, as long as you've run a few times thru Normal, and have an understanding of what you're supposed to do, you should be fine.
If you need to, you can always find a group, let them know you're still relatively new to the Advanced, and most will be more than happy to help you out in game, and critique your build from their visual experience with you.
doff are 2 tac recharge, Law and 2 sci recharge.
Hope this helps to show were I'm at with this toon and thanks again for all the help.
And not using intel skills is pretty much a waste of the eclipse, probably because you lack the boffs for it, I guess. But intel skills like Surgical Strikes, Override Subsystem Safeties and Ionic Turbulence are on almost every ship for a reason, they're just that good.
Here is a thread of someone who knows how to make a build, so it's worth to check out and draw some inspiration.
The general thoughts these days are that torpedoes are a loss for DPS in general, so it's best to go for energy weapons. On cruisers, beam arrays are the simple setup. So get some beam arrays in place of the torpedoes if you can broadside. If broadsiding is impossible, but a point the nose of the ship at the target style of play is your thing, then dual beam banks may work better up front for you.
DOFFs make it where you can do this or that with the build. Other posters will probably have computed the optimal setup, which I don't have a clue how to know what's better without trying it, so I'll include a few ideas. Some folks have mentioned the eclipse is a tad flimsy, which I find is totally off the mark, but I will tilt toward a survival heavy setup when possible, but it's just ideas. You can try things and find what works best for you.
With the ensign universal station, you can have 4 tac abilities.
You did not mention having damage control engineers for EPTx cooldowns, which will present another hurdle.
The first one is very basic....
TT1, BFAW2, APB2
ET1, EPTS2, EPTW3
ET1, EPTS2, EPTW3, RSP3 or DEM3
HE1, ST2
BFAW1
The 2 conn officers you have that reduce tac team and I assume the 2 sci ones reduce science team as well, both will go nicely with that setup.
Run tac team, and both EPTx abilities often to get the weapon power buff and the bonus shield resistances running constantly.
If you have at least 2 purple damage control engineers, you can cut the EPTx abilities in half. 2 purples and one blue or 3 purples are best, but 2 purples work well enough for many folks that I can't not mention it.
TT1, BFAW2, APB2
ET1, A2DAMP1, EPTW3
ET1, A2DAMP1, EPTS3, RSP3 or DEM3
HE1, ST2
BFAW1
If you have an intel engineer, you can dump A2DAMP and add in OSS.....
TT1, BFAW2, APB2
ET1, ET2, EPTW3
OSS1, OSS2, EPTS3, RSP3 or DEM3
HE1, ST2
BFAW1
These are simple and easy builds that should work ok if you have the DOFFs. I hope this gives you some ideas....
Having done it, it is not out of reach. It is tedious ... 5 min per weapon (X all your crafting slots), keep critdx2 and better. Put 1 upgrade token into the best of each of those. If it gains a quality upgrade and another critd, keep. If not, vendor, repeat. Yea, I've done it. Its tedious. It takes a while. Its a goal that can be reached over time, with minimal expense in resources, but a heavy time sink (leveling crafting to the point of getting 100% purple mark 2s and able to craft the upgrade tokens and time to farm the mats for it all). With all the time since DR I still have 1 set of DBBS and 1/2 a set of arrays and 1 cannon so far. The other 2 sets are less important to me and I will get them when I do.
As you said a player can do just fine with critdx2 or even other lesser weapons, but a long term goal of even casuals should be at least one critdx3 set. Given that you get only one or two candidate weapons / day, with an 8k dil cap / day, its not out of reach at all. Its a drain on dil, of course. And upgrading from there to xiv when you finally get one is pricy for sure, but that would be true no matter what XII weapon used.
My list was just that -- a list of things to try. One of those things was the best weapons available -- even if they take a while to get. If the work to get those is too much, buy a set of failed attempts by others (critdx2) which are not all that pricy in the exchange.
I would argue that the biggest problem are the fail conditions. And in several cases the fail condition is tied directly to the dps output of the team. While XII can be done by the best players, sure, esp old high end scims etc, average players will do better with higher quality gear if they can't figure out the leetzor setup well enough to compensate for lower end gear.
For the ones that do not require top dps, just knowing and doing it right, yea that can be an issue too, but even those if the team can't take the hits and can't kill the enemy, failure or a horrible experience ensue.
Dps isnt everything, not even close. But it makes up for mistakes, and without it, even doing everything right, you may still fail. Game know-how can make up for gear, but gear can also make up for game know how. The average player needs both -- and that reaches a happy medium that does good enough performance in the stfs. I still say xiv weapons is going to help 95% of the player base. The other 5% didnt need to read this thread anyway.
Funny thing is when my friend died from the cube he spawned I was able to tank the cube and sphere and kill the sphere and damage the cube by the time he got back. So I knew I needed help to figure out what I need to try so I'll be more help then I was.
Where are you getting these random percentages? Do you know that before DR, DPS league recorded almost 2,600 accounts doing more than 10k dps and that is with Mk xii items. These are recorded which does not include accounts unrecorded accounts due to the frequency of PuGs pre DR.
So saying 95% of the players need Mk XiV is just purely imagination, increasing importance/population and bloating of the numbers of those who cannot do it with MK XII.
And currently, we're at nearly 4k accounts over 10k, just as a bump to this.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
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noroblad was correct on the CrtD weapons. I have two videos with Devs talking about DPS and how it is calculated. If you look at your Borg Universal console for example you will see CrtH x 10 = CrtD. That is the same for all damage boosting items until the fleet spire came up. The Vulnerability console x 10 doesn't equal an exploiter. 1 CrtD modifier on a weapon is stronger then an exploiter boost. vulnerability consoles are stronger then a crth modifier on a space weapon.
The above statement was made to help explain why people go with CrtD weapons and vulnerability consoles. It gives you the highest crit numbers.
seriousdave was right about the torpedoes. You aren't removing shields from NPCs fast enough for your torpedoes to be affective. You need more beams. Once your DPS is high enough you wont need as much armor and can add on damage boosting consoles.
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--- no, its more than hive. If the group's dps can't bust the transformer in ICE, and no one has enough GWS to keep the enemy off it, it will fail. There are groups that lack the dps to bust the transformer in time. Plenty of them, actually, but less than there were on week 1 lol. KHIT, there are players that can't bust the probes... less than week 1 again, but still enough times it happens, try as they might, they just can't do it. And there are teams that *can* do stfs with low dps but it takes 45 min or longer to do them due to low dps -- and when that happens, quitters quit, even if winning, happens a lot -- sometimes the remaining team can end it, sometimes not. And those are the "easy" qs... ICE should be a new player doable mission.
I agree, the game does need a way to train people how to play better. The stfs do have feedback -- you fail, and the why is bright red, and the nonstop officer blah blah blah how-tos are in place if people would just READ them, along with cutscenes for some (BD is unplayable due to the cutscenes nearly, and 3 or 4 others have a delayed start of nearly 1 min of movie time). But as you said, there is nothing on how to improve your build, no dps tips in game, tooltips and descriptions are terrible.
DPS league... is just that, players tweaking ships, its not representative of the population at all. PUG more, and you will see an awful lot of people that do very, very little damage.
You guys are not wrong. Its perfectly doable in XII. But if you can do it in XII, you know the game pretty well or have a tac captain in a gunboat (or both). Even a pretty weak player can pull a fair dps value in a scim or maha with a tac captain and whatever random gear, and the t5u tac ships with dps passives and more consoles etc had a massive effect.
I am not wrong either. Presumably you know how dps works... base damage multiplied by bonuses = big value, in an terribly simplistic summation. Upgrade the weapons, the base is significantly higher. That lets a lower multipler/bonus from a weaker player pull up the performance ... significantly. Given that when helping people most folks can't tolerate too many details all at once... you cover the basics, upgrade the weapons, and the result is adequate. If they want to thrash out details after that, ... well that is a rare individual, in my experience.
This description sounds like you're gearing up for an ELITE Queue.
Weren't advance queues supposed to be playable with MK XII weapons? I guess not.
They are. I've completed CSA in a t5 Tac ody with the white gear it came with, mkxi white consoles bought off the exchange, and 1 white DOFF that was useless slotted.
I did have 4 rep traits slotted, critD and critH, armor penetration and aux offense.
We did it, no-one topped 12K and I think I pulled 6.
No optional, but we did it.
Advanced PUG's seem to fail because people don't realise that the stuff with "Optional - " in front of it in their mission status window is optional, and stuff without "Optional - " in front of it...... isn't optional.
Actually, I guess I was thinking that. Could explain my perspective, I didnt even think it directly, but now that you said it...
http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?build=intel4highdps_0
Check Notes, Description and start playing Elite missions.
I forgot to add the Bioneural Infusion Circuits Universal Console. If you have 200 lobi get it.
If the build is not loading, I blame STOacademy. Aint making it again.
http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?build=hammer2oi_0
Still using the same doff.
With this build I was able tank just as well as I've always have which is great. I know some will not agree with this build and that's ok it works for me and that's what matters I'm sure we all can agree on that. Thanks again for all the help.
equipment IS NOT as important as skills, teamwork, and strategy in Advanced (or any) STFs.
I have a Klingon Tac flying a basic BOP. I have no points invested in any Specialization or Traits. All my equipment is common Mk XII. The only Tac skills I use are CRF I & II, TT I and TS I & II. I pug STFs for the challenge and on combat logs I'm on avg 3rd highest DPS. Why, skills, teamwork and strategy. Don't let others discourage you, Pug teams CAN complete STFs efficiently on a regular basis. To be the Pug is to know the Pug.
If you want to know how to be successful in STFs, work on skills, teamwork, and strategy first and foremost. They're much more important than any gearing you're packing.
Is it ideal? not IMO. Does it work well? Probably. Are you having fun with it? At that point, if you're not pushing for max dps, that's what matters.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!