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Feeling overwhelmed!
redmordock
Member Posts: 45 Arc User
in The Academy
I just unlocked the Duty Officer system and after reading and reading and reading about it, I am still finding that I am unable to make heads or tails of it. I tried one assignment, assigned one of two doffs shown as recommended for and it failed. I just can't seem to understand how to tell whether a doff is or isn't suitable.
I have been looking at the requirements of some of the assignments and comparing that to the traits of the Doffs I have available. I have noticed that some traits are shown in green and other traits shown in white. Now I am only guessing here, but it feels like traits shown in green match the ones required for the assignment I am currently looking at. However of the assignments I have looked at, not a single one has had Doffs listed with all traits shown in green.
I thought that maybe I could sell off some of the doffs I started with, but when I spoke to LT Ferra I found that none of the doffs listed could be bought. They all had some sort of message about not enough tier available or something like that. Worse, the sell tab is greyed out and not accessible. It feels like I have been shackled with a bunch of useless crew members that I can't use.
It feels like this game is becoming more and more complex with every additional mission completed. I am starting to worry that I am going to just walk away from this game.
I have been looking at the requirements of some of the assignments and comparing that to the traits of the Doffs I have available. I have noticed that some traits are shown in green and other traits shown in white. Now I am only guessing here, but it feels like traits shown in green match the ones required for the assignment I am currently looking at. However of the assignments I have looked at, not a single one has had Doffs listed with all traits shown in green.
I thought that maybe I could sell off some of the doffs I started with, but when I spoke to LT Ferra I found that none of the doffs listed could be bought. They all had some sort of message about not enough tier available or something like that. Worse, the sell tab is greyed out and not accessible. It feels like I have been shackled with a bunch of useless crew members that I can't use.
It feels like this game is becoming more and more complex with every additional mission completed. I am starting to worry that I am going to just walk away from this game.
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With the exception of the few assignments that literally can not fail, failures can and will happen no matter what you do, just blow it off and move on, not a big deal. I will mention that I have personally noticed that the random number gen seems to be a bit flaky. I have had days where 75% of the assignments that could fail, did, on all 21 toons. And it didn't matter if it was an assignment that had a 2% chance to fail or a 50% chance. It doesn't happen often enough to make me upset, and since I don't always play every day and I'm too lazy to chart when I do play, I can't say if it's certain days, certain times of the day, or whether it's when I start the assignment or when I turn it in. All I know is that when it happens, it's every toon and almost every assignment that can fail, does. No big deal, I start a fresh set of assignments and move on. Good XP for nothing more than a few seconds of mouse clicking.
Recommended doffs are just that, the system picking doffs that match the needed criteria for the assignment. Unless I want keep a certain doff available for R&D, I usually just go with what the system picks. I rarely find any combination of doffs that have a better chance to crit on the assignment, and it's really not worth the time it takes to even try (to me). No matter how much you search through your doffs, I doubt that you will ever find one that shows all green on everything, not saying it can't or won't happen, but the assignment requirements are not built based on the exact mix of traits a doff might have. Doffs, just like boffs, have a random set of traits. You just find the best match you can, avoid assigning Doffs with red and run with it.
DOffs can be sold on the exchange, although, unless it's a particularly rare one that you don't plan on using yourself, it's not worth the trouble, especially with the better uses you have for them. White doffs (and some greens), can be used to fill Fleet assignments, so that "useless" doff nets you some fleet creds and helps build the fleet. The personnel officer (right there by Lt Ferra) will let you trade five doffs of any given quality for a single doff of the next higher quality. You can also get rid of a green, blue, or purple doff and get some (I think it's three) of the next lower quality doffs in exchange. You can also just dismiss a doff and get a small amount of dilithium and recruitment xp for it.
Lt Ferra will "give" you free doffs as you increase your level in each category. One free one of each level in each category. I read quite some time back when I first started playing that buying DOffs from him for dilithium wasn't a paying proposition as you have much better uses for dilithium and you get much better doffs elsewhere anyway. As such, I myself have never bought a doff from him, all of my higher level toons are full with greens or better, and with the exception of a few extremely rare R&D doffs, I have every doff I need for anything I care to do.
All that being said, I'll now be quite blunt, if doffing, which is an extremely minor side line to this game, is enough to make you want to walk away, this game might not be for you. R&D, Admiralty and the reputation system is still to come, and unlike the others, the reputation system is almost a must if you want to get the really good stuff at end game, and unlike doffing, which can be totally populated in an extremely short time with some mouse clicks by just going with the doffs the system picks for you, the others actually require you to take some time making various selections. Then again, they also have much better rewards in exchange. While I am not space rich at all, I make as much EC as I care to spend just from R&D.
I completely agree with your summation of the DOFF system and given your fine assessment of that would appreciate hearing you expound more upon the reputation system with tips to make that stuff make better sense to me. I've been using it, but thus far haven't advanced terribly far.
The doff system was took a bit for me to get used to. I just started playing in October, but I think I have a handle on things so I'll try to answer your questions.
1) LT Ferra - You gain experience points in certain areas of expertise as you complete doff missions. For example, completing the EVA Suit training assignment will reward 426 Engineering XP. If you click on the Overview tab, it will show you how much XP you have earned in each area. Once you fill a bar, you'll be messaged by LT Ferra that you've gained a tier. At that point you can purchase a doff from him for that area of expertise and in that tier level. The doff system maxes out at tier 4.
2) The green and red traits in doff assignments determine your chance of success. Again lets look at EVA Suit training. Logical / Resolve are in green, and Emotional / Telepathic are in red. You can certainly use duty officers that are emotional and/or telepathic, but they will bring down your chance of success.
Your going to fail a lot of doff assignments when starting out. Keep doing them. Let the system choose your doffs for you in the beginning.
Suggestions
1) Expand your duty officers past 100. It cost a little zen, but it's totally worth it to have a bigger doff pool. Doff expansions go on sale regularly.
2) Do the missions that give you doffs at the academy. There are Vulcan, Tellerite, and Andorian NPC's that will give you doffs. Also the personnel officer next to LT Ferra has assignments that give doff. Get your list maxed out, and then start worrying about replacing the Common (white) doffs with green, blues, and purples.
Refining your doff takes time. I'm been at it for 5 months and I am nowhere close to being finished.
Also as you rank up you will be awarded more doff slots until you get 100, you can by more at the zen store if you want, but personally I'd wait till after level 60 to buy more unless your very active and have a high turn over rate.
You can sell doffs on the exchange, you can trade them in at a starbase(sometimes for dil)for better doffs, you can mail doffs (unless they have a lock symbol) and you can get rid of white doffs by donating them to fleet projects. You use to be able to dismiss doffs but it's been so long I can't remember if that's still an option.
Doffing is like a lot of things in life the more you do it the easier it becomes.
Expect a lot of failures on missions until you build up your crew and it could take time to build one up. Even then, after you have a fully decked out roster of very rares there are just some missions out there that you'll still never guarantee a successful outcome 100% of the time.
The recommended picks are pretty good at maximizing success rates, but with just the starting allocation of crew you shouldn't be expecting too much. Personally I only tweak the picks when a DOff I'd like to save for another assignment is recommended or increasing the critical chance for good assignments when there's no chance of failure (recommendations will prioritize a regular success over a critical one).
There's no vendor that will buy back DOffs. The best you can do is put unbound ones on the exchange, dismiss them (small amount of dilithium and recruitment CXP), or burn 'em in missions that will kill them off. Lt Ferra's store requires some unlocking by gaining levels in the commendations.
There's really not much to Doffing other than investing time in gaining a crew (or Zen/EC if you just want to buy one). It's pretty much something to do at end game after all the missions have been played (and replayed again and again) to build up extra rewards: dilithium, expertise, ... Similar to the admiralty system you'll eventually get to, although there are distinct differences.
Doff traits can either improve your chances for both success and critical (green traits), increase the chance of failure and disaster (red traits), or have no affect on the outcome (white traits). There are no such thing as a "bad trait" because while some traits may increase the failure rate in certain missions, they can increase the success in other missions. Take for example the Unruly trait. It is bad for the "Assist with Demolitions for Dilithium Mining" mission since it can increase the chance of failure and disaster. But Unruly is a good trait to have for the "Drinks On the Town!" mission since it can increase the chances for a success and critical success. Therefore, it is generally good to have Doffs with different traits.
The Doffs sold by Lt. Ferra are "reward Doffs" you can acquire based on your various commendation categories and their tiers. All Doff missions falls into one of several commendations; see link below for all of them. As you complete Doff missions you earn commendation XP to advances through the commendation tiers. As you rank up your commendation tiers you are allowed to purchase Doffs from Lt. Ferra.
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Commendation
You can get Andorian, Tellarite, and Vulcan Doffs for free. All you have to do is speak to those representatives at the Academy; they are all female and are standing outdoors. The Andorian and Tellarite are both talking to each other on the left side of the circular building where you do the daily Path to 2409 mid term mission to earn 480 Dil and some XP. The Vulcan representative is located in the south part of the Academy map standing alone. They are pretty easy to find since the map is not large. You basically acquire a Doff mission from each of them none of which requires a Doff in order to start the mission. These missions take 20 hours to complete and you have a 91% of success and 9% of critical success. A critical success can result in several white Doffs, a single blue Doff or a single purple Doff. There is a 72 hour cool down.
You can also buy them from the Exchange. There are general categories for the Doffs which are further broken down into specializations. The categories include Tactical, Security, Engineering, Operations, Science, Medical and Civilian. Price vary by specialization and by quality.
You can also find various different recruitment missions to get Doffs. Just explore the sectors to find them, but be aware you need to refugee (civilian) to do the mission which appear from time to time. These are under Development. On Earth Space Dock you can recruit a Human Doff. In the orbit of Vulcan you can recruit a Vulcan Doff. On the surface of Andoria you can recruit an Adorian Doff. These are the easy ones to find.
The quality of the Doff can improve the chances of success and critical success. Naturally purple Doffs are the best, but they are expensive if you want to buy them from the Exchange or they are very hard to get as mission rewards. I rarely purchase any Doffs from the Exchange beyond some green Doffs just to get myself started. All the blue and purple Doffs I have acquired are Doff mission rewards and it takes a very long time to accumulate them... especially since I have 10 characters on my primary STO account that I actively play and 3 characters on a secondary STO account that is strictly free to play (no real money spent). Be patient and spend little to no EC on the Exchange to buy Doffs, or be impatient and spend a lot of EC on the Exchange to acquire as many blue and purple Doffs as you can.
All my characters on my primary account has either 300 or 400 Doff slots. All my characters on my secondary account currently has 200 Doff slots, but I probably increase it to 300 later this year. At a minimum I recommend you have at least 200 Doff slots. You start off with 100 slot. 100 Doff slots costs 750 Zen from the C-Store when not on sale. With 200 Doffs you can have a decent number of Doffs in each specialization with various traits. That should also allow you to run 20 Doff missions at once assuming you have enough Doffs with the specialization required by the missions.
The best advice I can give is to just take it slow as I stated above. Do the mission that you can do, and slowly acquire more Doffs as you play the game. There are many other ways to get Doffs, for now that would be information overload.
If you do buy any doffs from the exchange, consider buying green or better. You can also sell your own spare white-quality doffs for some credits, except any bound ones.
Don't buy doffs for dil from Mr. Kitty, the prices are bad compared to the exchange.
All I can really say about the rep system is that it exists, and it has some really good rewards in exchange for the "grinding".
But seriously....well, I was serious.... I've been playing since just before DR and out of 21 toons I have exactly one that has finished every rep, and that's not counting the new Lukari rep. That one was an AoY toon and I ground out the reps just for the MK XIII upgrade on rep gear. Each tier of each rep gets you access to more passive space/ground traits and tier five gets you access to a new active space or ground rep. None of them are absolutely necessary for game play, but they are wonderful enhancements. Each rep has it's own set of unique "rewards" in the form of gear (and some Boffs in the Omega repI believe) that become available for purchase that can not be gotten in any other way. Some of it is meh, some of it is really really great.
Again, none of it is a requirement for game play, but it is a great enhancement, and between the various reps, has enough different bonuses to greatly enhance just about anyone's play style/preference. The only drawback in my opinion is that getting through the rep system is a true grind fest. There are ways around the grind to make it not quite as grindy. You can join the CCA que every 20 minutes, selecting a different rep mark reward (with bonus) each time and get enough marks in each rep to last you a few days until you get them to tier 5. Then you can keep doing that after tier 5 to get the marks to convert to the "special" marks some of the reps need to buy the really good stuff.
There are other, more exciting and most importantly, fun, ways to get the special marks needed such as the battlezones, but with how fast CCA goes nowadays it is the least "grindy" option available.
Again, that's all just my opinion.
Me? I have to say, I am playing STO since 2011 now, so I'm pretty much knwoing my way around - and to this day I don't even pay attention to which DOFFs I send on missions, I simply click on an assignment and click "start" with the default suggested DOFFs as quickly as possible. I do follow a strategy which assignments I do, but I don't do anything at all to influence the chance of success because if it fails nothing is lost, it doesn't mean anything. And when you play for a while you will have so many rare, very rare and epic doffs accumulated that the failure rate will be much, much lower later on.
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I am going to put this game on hiatus for now. I'll come back later and see how things go.
Play the game however you want to play it. If that means of ignoring doffing then so be it. It's something I personally only do when I remember it exists.
Anyway, if doffing upsets you then you'll really not like Admiralty. AKA Ship Doffing. The computer doesn't recommend like doffing does, so it takes a bit more time to fill a queue. And since the only way to get more Ship doffs is to buy ships, expanding that roster can be hard to do unless you got lots of Zen or EC!
I hope to look into it in more detail and try to get some better doffs but atm i think i just have commons and 1 pink one, i havent even started looking into the R&D stuff yet ... there is just soooo much stuff to look at and understand its insane haha but i love it
* It doesn't really matter if white DOFFs die. You want to replace them with green or better anyway.
* Don't bother to manually select DOFFs, and don't sweat the failure rate.
* The goal is quantity of quests, not quality: as you keep cycling through assignments your success rate will improve as you earn higher quality DOFFs
* Do your factions quests to get more DOFFs as often as is reasonable.
* Once you are close to the DOFF limit that you are willing to spend zen up to - those same NPCs that give you quests to get packs of white DOFFS ALSO give quests to trade 5 DOFFs of a quality level in, for a DOFF of a greater quality level. Do this.
Why are you doing this?
Ultimately you are going to be getting purple quality DOFFs. And a careful read of the DOFF card shows that most DOFFs have a ground or space ability.
Sure, the reputation and crafting implications are interesting, but what you are really trying to do with the DOFF system is get 10 purple quality DOFFs that have ground or space abilities that complement your play in some way.
I do not understand a word of that.
Don't worry, that person is a little elitist in his ramblings. Suggesting only to Doff with purple quality Doffs or not at all is not very helpful. Yes, your rewards may be greater, but something always beats nothing.
This here is the way to go. There not nearly enough to get out of doffing to really put thought into it, ultimately you get good doffs for the few very special projects that are worth doing.
The only thing you might want to pay a bit attention to is doff chains, for example the colonization chains in the star clusters. Those are assignments with a number indicating the length of the chain (i.e. 1/7, 1/4) and int he end you get a blue doff and another mission with the chance to get a purple one you can repeat indefinitely. But the default missions are usually not worth doing in the first place.
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Basically:
1) Take all those common duty officers you have, and sell them on the Exchange. (This might take a moment)
2) Use those funds to buy green or blue duty officers from the Exchange.
3) There is a DOFF Assignment at the Academy where you turn a higher quality DOFF into a low number of lower quality DOFFs. Turn the green and blues into white ones again. (A DOFF grinder assignment, basically)
4) Repeat Steps 1-3 until you have the funds to buy purple DOFFs from the Exchange.
Additional Path:
Take Common DOFFs and use them in the Fleet Holding projects. This earns you Fleet Credits. And you can also use those Fleet Credits to buy new DOFFs. But you gets less FC out of this then you pay from this, so this is only an option if you have additional sources of Fleet Credits.
But remember that the poster that gave the advice is calling himself ruinthefun. He's all about optimizing how you get rewards, not about having fun in the process. Fun is a filthy parasite is what he says, I believe. So take it with a grain of salt. But if you really, absolutely positively need to find the fastest and most efficient way to success, listen.
My usual "strategy" has always been mostly doing Recruitment assignments and grinding upwards, not downwards (there are also assignments that allow you to turn a few lower quality DOFF into a single higher quality DOFF). But I never tried to actually optimize it and don't use the Exchange all that much. That's also why I am not a space billionaire.
white frame/tag are the starter doffs, they are expendables. as other said, they can die from failed tasks.
just watch green as positive (good traits) and red as negative (bad traits), they are made for specific tasks, some bad traits are helpful in specific reasons but most not.
you have to avoid which can make lot of fails.
if you get extra same types of officers, make sure to check ground/space skill.
use fleet to throw unwanted to get rep credits.
green frame/tag are first upgrade officers, they go to sickbay and out of service for 2-3 days or depends on time frame. they yield better chances on success but not as good. some specific green officers are often hard to find, sometime they are expensive in exchange, when you get extras, you can sell or use to trade for expendiable white tag officers for more fleet credits.
blue frame/tag are scaled up version, same as green when they go to sickbay, much better success rate than greens, same process as green once you have extras.
purple frame/tag are the ones you wanted to keep until you get duplicated copies, sell the copies or give to your other alts. they success rate are higher almost as 90%, they rarely failed.
if you get hybrid teal-purple frame, some are quest reward, and known as "Elite", or unique.
i hope this help. if i am wrong, let me know so we can fix it, i could use some help.
i get from officer packs often, usually from lockboxes, and they are also available in zen market if you need officer packs.
some players has some perks as lifetime to get free 500 zen a month, they only cost about 300 zen. dont spend right away, just wait for discount events for lower prices.