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Malon battlecruiser utterly crushing me
dougarthur
Member Posts: 9 Arc User
in The Academy
Ye gods, how are the Malon (encountered during “Reunion”) the hardest enemy in the game? Had a hard enough time with its support craft, but the battlecruiser itself is laying waste to me. Spent a good 20 minutes fighting it (and the two smaller Malon craft), dying about once a minute, finally getting it down to about 40%. Then, after one respawn, the damned thing had returned to full health! 🤬 Needless to say, I’m not continuing right now. This mission may get skipped...
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Let me venture a guess: you get caught in a tractor beam and then pummeled by explosions?
The malon strategy is based on immobilizing the opponent and then pummeling them.
Without taking your build into account: stay out of the yellow cloud, stay 6km or more way from Malon to avoid tractor beam and spatial charges and remember to keep moving.
if you have to get within 5 km... have Polarize Hull on one of your BOffs so you can break free of a Tractor Beam.
1.) Stay out of it's frontal and aft arcs - it has dual cannons facing both directions that can chew you up.
2.) In general, keep your distance - preferably over 5km away so it cannot tractor you(Malon also love to vent radiation and deploy mines if you're too close).
3.) It's equipped with Spacial Charge Launchers - think of them like space mortars. You'll see little red circles appear at your location; that means an artillery charge is on its way. If you're at the location when the warhead arrives, you're going to take a lot of damage(so keep moving). The Voth, Tzenkethi, and maybe one or two other encounter groups also use this weapon.
4.) If battles are taking that long, there is probably a lot of room to improve your setup. A lot of us are more than willing to help with that.
Thanks for all the advice, folks!
Also: check to see if your ship's power preset is set to 'attack', that all of your energy weapons are of the same type (i.e. phaser), and that your tactical consoles are specific to that energy type.
If i recall correctly they're only worth about 2-3k DPS so you may need a few pointers on your build. Can you post it on https://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/
Okay, this is probably the worst build you’ve ever seen, as I have no idea what the hell I'm doing most of the time. 90% of my playtime is spent concentrating on the story. And if the game doesn’t explicitly tell me I’m able to do something (which seems to be its default), I end up not discovering it for ages, so I’m probably well behind on a lot endgame stuff.
https://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/5c2551bbee4ca75e882b0cc78c218f14
I await the cries of “how the hell did you get to level 65 with this setup?” 🙂
Toldja.
At this exact moment, I have 1,518,985 energy credits, 21038 dilithium and 225 zen.
I’m just assuming this isn’t much.
Thanks, I appreciate that. 😄
The thing about engineering heavy cruisers with limited tactical boff slots is that they often work best using an auxiliary to battery (A2B) build that requires 3 technician doffs (blue or better) in combination with 2 copies of the engineering boff ability 'auxiliary to battery' to take care of having your abilities coming off cool down as quickly as possible as well as keeping your power levels nice and high .
With this non A2B build two copies of emergency power to weapons is your staple so that it's up all of the time, as in Teacher Kirby's video. More weapons power equals more damage done. There are a couple of ensign engineer boff slots not entirely needed in this non-A2B build that could be filled with other things but really am just trying to point you in the right direction and see perhaps what others have to add - and to ensure the bad guys say ouch more often than you do.
One thing about the number of tactical boff abilities slots available on this ship and others similar to it is there's not enough of them to do everything you'd like to. In this case you only have 2 and with tactical team being a staple to distribute your shields you're left with either an attack pattern (beta), a torpedo spread, or a beam buff. In this case I used beam overload as you did so there's no torpedo in the build. You could keep the Vaadwaur cluster torp though.
https://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/d51bb315b3ff1c42d43fc1f31f5af7bd
Some notes:
If I had a ship with more tac boff slots I'd add attack pattern beta 1 and try and get my beam skill (whether BFAW or BO) to the LtC level, and finally add an ensign torpedo skill last and would probably make sure the torp is part of a set.
Tactical team cool down is via 2 active VR duty conn officers if you can find some cheap ones or in a different ship you could use 2 copies.
The type of warp core recommended might be better for BFAW, with a plasma integrated being better for BO but this isn't too important at the moment nor is both the rarity and level of the core. W-->A or W-->E are both fine.
Any Positron deflector would be a good fill in for now to firm things up. Lot's of items can be filled in cheaply from the exchange while running missions for better stuff - they don't have to be purple.
Consider trying intel as your primary spec (has both space and ground aspects) and strategist secondary for cool downs (attrition warfare) using threatening stance. The temporal primary you've listed is a good fill in and has some interesting aspects both for space and ground as well.
For the ground portion of the spec both the PSG, primary and secondary guns and armor are available via the story line. I picked a split beam primary as I happen to be fond of them. The PSG and secondary gun form a good set bonus. Some would put the skill points from endurance training and armor expert into a second point of kit cool down and armor pen for more dps and quicker kit ability cool downs.
Space spec is a league standard recommendation and works well. It includes a couple points into torpedo for the future if you intend on running one. The usual disclaimer - you are the Captain, build your ship how you want to
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Episode_replay
Thank you so much!
For this guy (x3):https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ten_of_Ten_(Technician)
3 very rare technician doffs currently cost about 48,000,000 EC (16M each) so you could save a lot by doffing for techs over time. A2B is the optimal build for the ship, compared to more basic options a player might use.
In the suggested build, there’s a bunch of Very Rare Phaser Beam Array Mk XII. I don’t see one anywhere in the listed rewards for Episode Replay. Am I stuck buying (at a million credits each in the exchange) or crafting (in which case I better learn how to properly craft) those or am I completely oblivious to where one might find them?
If you want to complete your ship build you could use Mk XI-Mk XII rare from the exchange for a little over 100K ec each or use mission replay.
As for crafting, get your beams school to level 15. Items are crafted at Mk II VR and upgraded during an upgrade weekend.
I used Mk XII VR as an example to work towards. For doing missions and normal level queues you don't need much to get off to a good start. Your spec and basic gear choices count for some. After those are taken care of it's your boff ability choices and especially piloting and practice that count for a lot more.
Check out Cold's build, I tested it in-game and it worked very well. If going A2B please don't use the temporal disentanglement suite console that I linked as it isn't A2B compatible. A2B builds don't have much in the way of auxiliary power and that console is aux dependent.
All 3 builds are viable for your ship but again could be ranked basic, better, best.