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What to do with an Caitian Atrox Carrier?
ihatepwe735
Member Posts: 337 Arc User
in The Academy
Yes, its a T5-U ship, but I've always liked the look of the ship.
As an engineer, what can I do with this thing?
Its slow to turn, so I presume beams for basic damage. My current gear consists of XII VR phasers and phaser damage tac consoles.
I don't really know what to do with boffs or eng and sci slots with this ship as its kind of different to anything i've flown before - i.e. lots of science boff skills. (My current build is more an aux2bat kind of thing (except I don't have enough doffs to pull it off)).
I'd like to actually use the flighter wings to do damage.
I have access to rep gear, and mission gear, but only have about 12mil EC to play with. What can I do without spending Zen or zillions of EC?
As an engineer, what can I do with this thing?
Its slow to turn, so I presume beams for basic damage. My current gear consists of XII VR phasers and phaser damage tac consoles.
I don't really know what to do with boffs or eng and sci slots with this ship as its kind of different to anything i've flown before - i.e. lots of science boff skills. (My current build is more an aux2bat kind of thing (except I don't have enough doffs to pull it off)).
I'd like to actually use the flighter wings to do damage.
I have access to rep gear, and mission gear, but only have about 12mil EC to play with. What can I do without spending Zen or zillions of EC?
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You will want to invest heavily into science skills.
As for gear, there are so many options I don't know where to start, beyond suggesting for pure damage from fighters, consider Elite Scorpion Fighters with they're high yield plasma torpedoes.
I can't see how gravity well is going to help this build. With beams, and fighters, and a ship with a rotten turn rate, there's no real point to bunching enemies. I mean it does its own damage too, but I'm not seeing that as being useful.
That works out better in a Vo'Quv or Jupiter, to be honest - I ran a bunch of torpedoes and B'rels on the mirror Vo'Quv a long time ago. The B'rels are more survivable and pack more of a punch than Stalkers, I think.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Gravity Well can do a lot of damage if you slot in Particle Generators in the science slots. GW allows you to do crowd control which can come in handy when used with other AoE (Area of Effect) abilities like Tyken's Rift, or better yet, Subspace Vortex (~ 3m EC on the Exchange). It also proves useful for weapons that can do AoE damage like a Tricobalt Torpedo, or the Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo which is a lot better because of the shorter cooldown (10 seconds vs 30 seconds) and the damage caused by the particle cloud ignores shields and is augmented by Particle Generators.
It's pretty apparently you have limited experience with science so that is something you should research because not building around it can severely limit the potential of the Atrox.
Get turn boost console(s), in particular a conductive RCS, at ultra rare they can come with a handy mod including turn, resall, partgen, controlx, extra subsystem power etc. Similar applies to partgen console exotic particle field exciter. Checkout those consoles and see what fits your budget and plans for galactic domination. IMO without turn rate boosts those big ships are not fun to fly.
You could also try and make what I call the Spamtrox, which uses the Romulan Hyper-Plasma combined with Tractor Repulsors, to try and keep the enemy in your forward arc, and Elite Scorpion fighters. Dang thing is a weapon of Terror seeing ALL THOSE HEAVY PLASMAS!
Anyone want to give me a Temporal Heavy Dreadnought pack? I'll be your friend
Grav well & scramble sensors are a solid combo as with a bit of timing you can persuade them to cause more warp core breaches than just you and your fighters. The time bubble rep ability also pairs fairly well with grav well for groups of enemies for similar reasons.
Gather them up and let the exploding commence.
First, sci powers which fire only in the forward arc are going to be virtually useless unless you are fighting stationary targets. You simply lack the mobility to execute a timely SNB, for example. You have to take the shots you are offered, for the most part. Omnidirectional powers like PSW would generally be more useful than forward arc targeted powers.
In the race to 100k damage output it is sometimes overlooked that a healboat can make a difference, especially in content in which the enemies actually fight back. Your Atrox build may never dish out the DPS of a battlecruiser, but by the simple act of tossing HE onto a dying teammate you could materially increase your team's damage output. (Thanks, Noldaron, that lesson has served me well for a long time now!)
Don't ignore your fighters or your ship's ability to generate damage. Do remember that you are flying one of the superior team support ships in STO, and take advantage of it.
I mean, the Pilot tree adds significant boosts to turn rate, even when it's set as a secondary tree. One of the Delta reputation abilities also adds a lot of turn rate, and doesn't it help if you boost engine power levels?
Together these things will likely still make it a relatively slow turning ship, but I think that other weapons can still become viable options then. A torpedo or, generally speaking, exotic build as @sophlogimo has suggested could work in that case.
And you can of course always adapt the way you fly it.
I don't know if it's comparable, but I used a Vonph for a while. By just holding back a bit and avoiding that your ship ends up between all enemies, keeping them in your front arc should be possible. Also, draining enemies' engines with Tyken's rift can be just as effective as Gravity well if keeping an enemy in one spot is the goal. And the Atrox definitely has room for both. So I would just use a Sci build, and maybe invest a bit in turn rate boosts.
If you want to use that style how would you suggest a setup? I never had much luck outside of a beam boat for it.
Gravity Well is kinda basic. Once you have the enemies clumped together, you can do all kinds of nasty things to them. Almost every other skill you could use to deal damage has a limited AoE, and if you don't have the enemies together in one spot, you don't deal the maximum amount of damage possible with it.
Basically, the only skill where this doesn't matter much is Beam Fire At Will and single target skills.
Torpedo Spread, Subspace Vortex, Destabilizing Resonance Beam, Eject Warp Plasma, Charged Particle Burst, Photonic Shockwave, Scramble Sensors - if you managed to get your enemies to be close together, these powers will work better.
Single Target skills tend to be less useful when fighting groups of enemies, the more common case of fighting.
It doesn't have to be used as Commander level slot, of course, but without it, pretty much anything else in the Commander slot will be less impressive.
Your alternative is basically only a Tractor Beam Repulsor turned to pull instead of push via that special Duty Officer.
Or Feedback Pulse, but that has no synergy with other science powers, and if you don't want to load up only heals, you could still benefit from reverse TBR or Gravity Well for damage and crowd control.
Khajiit has wares if you got the coin. Take a look:
I can make a follow up video on my revision of the build if you will like
And seeing the old Atrox again, makes me think the ship should be much larger; based on the number of windows on it!
Maybe some of the older ships should have their stats looked at and 're-balanced'. The Atrox was 'big' when it came out so it had horrible turning. Now much larger ships have better just due to power-creep.
Well... Beam abilities are easier to support on a ship with lower level Tac slots. So you could either do Tac Team 1 and Beam FAW, or FAW1 and Overload2 with the Atrox.
You'll also have a Lt. Cmdr Engie, so you could put an Engie Team 1, Reverse Shield Polarity, and an Aux2Structural. Or have an Emergency2Weapons or something.
For the Commander and Lt. Cmdr Sci... I honestly don't know outside of a Sci Team, Polarize Hull, and Hazard Emitters.
Just remember that the Atrox is a brick. She can't turn very well without lots of help like slotting RCS only in her engie consoles. So in general for weapons I'd say get what has the widest arc possible to counter that low turn rate. Beam Arrays in the front, Beam arrays and Omnis in the back. No Torpedoes. Although a wide angle Quantum might be nice.
With the upcoming rep track, Tetryon might actually be a good choice for Omni beams, as we got the crafted one, the mission reward Antichroniton infused, and the upcoming rep one. Antiproton is also up there with the crafted and the Ancient, and Polaron with the Chronometric Omni and crafted. The rest generally don't have mission reward omnis or they're lockbox.
The Kinetic Cutting Beam is also an option, however it does not benefit from beam abilities, and shields nerf its damage until you are hitting bare hull.
But still... Omnis should always go in the back.
As for the Spamtrox... as I've never actually used it myself... I couldn't say. I've seen it used before however.
edit: Has anyone tried a polaron or tetryon drain-boat build with this one?
Hey... if the Atrox had the Mirror Vo'Quv BOff setup, that thing would be one of the tankiest T5s in the game! Anyone who is an experienced Captain and good with builds will make it a deadly ship. And you want to know what those Caitians will say then?
Actually, when the Atrox was new we played with different builds, and it turned out to be an excellent platform for an Eng captain.It turns out to be a very tanky ship, and when healboat was still a viable build it was one of the better ships for that purpose.