Looks pretty good! I've already scheduled my Galaxy class to head in to drydock for a refit this Thursday.

oooo and the stats are up!

http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/9585103-star-trek-online%3A-yamato-dreadnought-cruiser

For those that don't know yet, a headsup about October 13 (next Tuesday):
Arc is going to "implement critical network improvements", which means that everything that is Arc, including all their games and probably also their website. is going offline.

Their estimation is that the downtime will be from 6AM PDT to 7PM PDT. That is 2PM to 3AM British time. Yes, that's a downtime of 13 hours.
Hopefully it means that the servers will be more stable in the future and will be more secure against hackers and DDOS-attacks.

© by @lars1091

Very nice guide Andrea:)

Thank you to the people who gave time to help out.

Very informative guide Alex

Playing with a non DPS team and actually using the old tactics is fun! :woohoo:

Quote by Ozymandias71

This looks like tremendous fun!

Like, super-amazing fun, more like! Can't wait to see you there!!

Awesome!! Terrific resources to be had! Now that most everyone has super high DPS, I've noticed that Infected runs can often turn into a 'shoot everything as quick as you can' kind of match that can lose the optional, rather than the 10% rule, which I still think is a good tactic to ensure success.

Great to remember and stick to the tactics that will guarantee an optional every time. Thanks Andrea for the guide and to everyone who helped make it happen!

This looks like tremendous fun!

Guide finished.

We´ll remember Captain Yar, who sacrificed her ship and crew to gather this important intel.

Live recording from the bridge of the R.R.W. T´asha:
"Oh crap... I´ve just realized... I can´t trigger the nanite spheres before... OH CRAP!!!" :D

And also thx to @dylgo, @alex284, @NikoLunus and @bullocaj, who jumped with me into the map, not minding an eventually possible leaver penalty.

Andrea :)


P.S.:

Please let me know if I forgot something or if you have questions. I wanted to keep it simple, so I didn´t mention things like "when should who activate which ability" or things like that.

Congrats Jacien!

Way to many lines in this topic my dirty mind chose to misread... :evil:

Congrats, Jacien.

Cai that's 2 sp00ky 5 me

*hides under covers*




I'm excited. Especially for the 20 person PvE. Big Dig on Halloween? what manner of monster will spawn?

EEEEEK

Wow, amazing detail - thanks for putting so much work into this! Will have to try to implement some of this into my builds!

This guide is AWESOME! :woohoo:

Thank you for writing it!


Andrea :)


P.S.: You might be slow... but I´m slow and lazy (geez, I´ve started a guide for ISA months ago and still have to finish it...)

The game can be very frustrating for players doing little damage, which is why I often see fleeties asking how to raise their damage output in chat. STO is a complicated game and it gives players a lot of choices, and making the wrong ones - especially wrong choices that are expensive - is not fun and can make people quit the game.

I have lots of resources that helped me get to 85K DPS and I like to share that information in chat, but doing so is cumbersome and I never know where to start. So I'm putting it here to have one place I can link.

The first part of this post is about how damage is calculated in STO. I think it's important in order to understand the tips in the second part, but you can skip it if you don't care about the game's mechanics. The second part is some basic tips to increase damage. I focused on simple things that don't take away from having a fun build. I put some links I've found useful in the third part.


How STO calculates your damage

Here's the equation:

damage = base damage * (weapons power/50) * (1+sum of category 1 bonuses) * (1+sum of category 2 bonuses) * (1+bonus from weapon upgrade) * (1+sensor analysis bonus) * (1.03)^(number of [dmg] mods on the weapon) * (1.06 if the weapon is epic quality) * (1-distance multiplier) * (1-damage resistance)

Base damage refers to the damage that a mark 0 common variant of a weapon does. Here is a chart that shows what the base damage is for each energy weapon type. I also put in info about firing cycle so that base damage per second (DPS) can be compared:

Weapon type	Base damage	Shots per cycle	Seconds per cycle	Base DPS
beam array	100	4	5	80
dual beam bank	128	4	5	102
single cannon	72	4	3	95
dual cannons	86	4	3	115
dual heavy cannons	173	2	3	115
turret	45	4	3	60

Weapons power is how much power is in your weapons subsystem at the moment a weapon fires. This is not the same out of combat and in combat, and it changes frequently in combat.

Category 1 and category 2 bonuses are two categories that bonuses (like "+30% phaser damage") get sent to. These bonuses are added together with the other bonuses in their category and then multiplied with the rest of the equation.

Category 1 is full of large bonuses, like a weapon's mark, a weapon's rarity, tactical consoles, some set bonuses, starship mastery, and skill points. Category 2 contains fewer bonuses and most of them are temporary, like emergency power to weapons (EPTW), attack patterns alpha and omega (APA and APO), some set bonuses, the Pirate trait, the Nukara reputation offense trait, and critical damage (that's right, your critical severity is a category 2 bonus that gets added only to critical shots, not an all-damage bonus). Because of how multiplication works, this means that a bonus (like "+30% phaser damage") helps more if it's category-2 instead of category-1.

A weapon upgrade is a tactical skill like Fire at Will (FAW), Beam Overload (BO), Cannon Scatter Volley (CSV), Cannon Rapid Fire (CRF), Torpedo Spread (TS), Torpedo High Yield (THY), and Surgical Strikes (SS). You can only use one of these on a weapon at a time.

Sensor Analysis (SA) is that stacking thingie that science ships get (up to 6 stacks!). You know, the blue hourglass thing.

[dmg] is the mod... and a mod is a modifier to a weapon, those little letters in brackets after the name of the weapon, like [crtd] and [acc]. Other mods will give you a 2.5% cat-1 bonus, but [dmg] gives you a 3% bonus counted in a separate category. Epic weapons all get [ac/dm] which counts as a big [dmg] mod in addition to an accuracy bonus.

The distance multiplier is how much your weapon gets weaker the farther away from the target it is. The distance that maximizes damage for all energy weapons is 1 km, and both beams and cannons decrease their damage the farther from the target they are. Cannons decrease more. Projectiles do not lose damage at greater distances.

Damage resistance is your target's resistance to the damage you're doing against it. This can be reduced with the [pen] mod, enhanced weapons penetration from the Delta Reputation, disruptors, secondary deflectors, sensor scan, attack pattern beta, and other things.

So what's not in that equation? The most counterintuitive thing that's absent is energy type. At the same mark and with the same mods, a disruptor beam array does the same damage as a phaser beam array. What's different is their procs. A proc (short for "procedure") is a random event that occurs when a weapon is fired. It's that "2.5% chance to do something" that all weapons have, except for antiproton weapons which have a 20% bonus to critical severity. A weapon's proc is much less important than its type, mark, mods, and bonuses from other gear like consoles. Don't worry about procs unless you're trying to maximize a specialized build.

A weapon's damage per second (DPS) is:

DPS = damage * (shots/cycle)/(seconds/cycle)

Beam arrays and DBBs fire 4 shots in a 5-second cycle, so their damage (from the first equation) should be multiplied by 4/5 to get their DPS. Turrets, cannons, and dual cannons fire 4 shots in 3 seconds for a multiplier of 4/3. DHCs (and the turret from the Undine reputation) fire 2 shots every 3 seconds, for a multiplier of 2/3. Torpedoes and mines all have different firing rates depending on lots of things.

10 ways to increase your damage

This is mostly about ships that use energy weapons (beams and cannons) because those are easy to work with.

1. Decide which way your ship will point

You should know which way to point your ship so that all weapons are firing on an enemy. A weapon does no damage if it's not firing. If you have to turn around to use a weapon, this means that your other weapons can't fire. Builds that require a lot of turning effectively reduce the number of weapons that you use.

The two most common ways to set up a ship are 1) for enemies that are in front of you or 2) for enemies on your side. If they're in front, then you'll use dual beam banks (DBBs), cannons and dual heavy cannons (DHCs), and torpedoes. If you want enemies on your side, then you'll use beam arrays.

2. Reduce weapon diversity

Both in terms of type (cannons vs. beams) and energy type (phaser, disruptor, etc.)

This is because bonuses stack. For weapons upgrades (like Fire At Will (FAW) or Cannon Scatter Volley (CSV)), using 2 copies of a beam upgrade and 2 copies of a cannon upgrade takes up 4 tactical boff skill slots (more on why you should use 2 copies of a weapons upgrade below), and you still need room for attack patterns and tactical teams. Even if your ship has 8 tactical boff skill slots, you're going to have to accept a lower rank of some of those skills to make room.

But if you stick to beams, then you don't need CSV because all your weapons will be modified by FAW. Or if you pick cannons, you can drop FAW because CSV will modify all your weapons.

The same principle applies to energy type. Your tactical consoles will only buff the weapons of the same energy type (or you'll have to use less effective all-energy tactical consoles). If you have 2 phaser and 2 disruptor tactical consoles because half your weapons are disruptor and half are phaser, then each weapon is receiving 2 console buffs. If you use only phaser weapons and 4 phaser consoles, then all your weapons get 4 console buffs.

3. Increase weapons power

From the equation in the first part, you can see how important weapons power is - your damage is multiplied by this number. Double your weapons power and you double your damage. (This is only for energy weapons - torpedoes don't use weapons power.)

The maximum (unless you're running Override Subsystem Safeties) is 125. You should put 100 into weapons power. For the rest, you can get bonuses from your ship, your skill points, consoles like the assimilated module, Emergency power to weapons (EPTW), plasmonic leech, Supremacy, and other sources.

Your weapons power is drained whenever you have more than one energy weapon firing. There are ways to reduce this drain (increasing your weapons power over the 125 cap, traits like Greedy Emitters, the assimilated 2-piece set bonus, Nadion Inversion, increasing EPS power flow...), but this guide is supposed to be simple and reducing weapons power drain is complicated. Just know that it's important for damage.

4. Use two copies of area-of-effect weapons upgrades

For PVE content, upgrades that attack multiple enemies do more damage than those that don't. Fire At Will (FAW) does more damage than Beam Overload (BO), Cannon Scatter Volley (CSV) does more damage than Cannon Rapid Fire (CRF), and Torpedo Spread (TS) does more damage than Torpedo High Yield (THY). Even though there might be times when one awesome shot is better than a bunch of great shots (even against a single target, FAW, CSV, and TS increase your damage), killing lots of small targets is far more common than killing one large one in STO. The damage bonuses from these skills are not added to any category, so they multiply your total damage.

Skills have several cooldowns (a period where you can't fire them and have to wait). The important ones here are the standard cooldown (the cooldown a copy of FAW starts on itself) and the group cooldown (the cooldown FAW starts on another copy of FAW). The standard cooldown can be reduced to the group cooldown but no further. If you get down to the group cooldown, you'll notice that the skill in your power tray has a horizontal line that goes down instead of the usual ray going around clockwise.

Weapons upgrades all have a 30-second standard cooldown and a 15-second group cooldown, except for FAW which has a 20-second group cooldown. The goal is to get this skill down to its group cooldown, which is most easily accomplished by carrying 2 copies of it. These skills are powerful enough that 2 slots is a small price to pay to use them as often as possible.

(Aux2Batt, Reciprocity, and All Hands on Deck builds are alternative - but more complicated and expensive - means to the same end and use only one slot for these skills.)

5. Use an attack pattern and a tactical team with every weapon upgrade

Attack patterns increase your damage and provide some defensive bonuses. Omega (APO) is better than beta (APB), which is better than delta. APO give a category-2 damage buff and bonuses to speed, turn rate, and damage resistance. APB lowers your target's damage resistance.

Tactical Team (TT) provides a small bonus to your Weapons Training skills and it rebalances your shields toward the side you're taking damage on. The damage bonus is OK, but the shield redistribution effectively gives you 4 times the shields on one facing if you're taking damage on one side.

The goal is to get these skills down to their group cooldown, just like the weapons upgrades, so that you can use all 3 skills each time the weapons upgrade is at its group cooldown. For example, FAW, APB, and TT would ideally be used every 20 seconds all together because their buffs multiply with each other (look at the equation all the way at the top to see why).

APB and TT have a standard 30-second cooldown and a group cooldown of 15 seconds; APO has a standard cooldown of 60 seconds and a group cooldown of 30 seconds. So the easiest way to get them down to a 15- or 20-second cooldown is to carry 2 copies of TT with either 2 copies of APB or 1 copy of APO and 2 copies of APB. If you have 6 or more tactical boff skill slots, this is easy to do.

If you have fewer than 6 tactical skill slots, then drop the tactical teams or the tactical teams and the attack patterns. Yes, these skills are useful, but they're not more useful than weapons upgrade and if you don't have room for them you should cut them first.

(You can also use Conn Officer doffs to reduce tactical team's cooldown, some very expensive Conn Officers to reduce attack patterns' cooldowns, or an Aux2Batt, Reciprocity, or All Hands On Deck build to reduce all tactical skill cooldowns. Again, this is more expensive and more complicated than carrying the 4 skills or dropping them.)

6. Run Emergency Power to Weapons constantly

EPTW has a 30-second uptime and a 30-second group cooldown. With 2 copies of EPTW, you can have it running all the time. (You can also use EPTW, a second "emergency power to X" skill, and Damage Control Engineer doffs to reduce that cooldown.)

It provides a nice category-2 damage bonus in addition to more weapons power.

7. Use tactical console slots for tactical consoles

These provide great bonuses. Use the consoles that are specific to the damage type that you're using. If you're running beams with a torpedo or cannons with a torpedo, then your energy weapons will use the buff more.

If you have the fleet credits, get vulnerability locators from the fleet spire. These provide the same bonus to damage type as normal tactical consoles along with a bonus to critical chance.

For most builds outside of specialized science builds, these are the best consoles you can put in your tactical console slots.

8. Get close to the enemies

Your damage drops off as you get farther from your target, and this applies to both beams and cannons.

On the other hand, if you get too close you'll increase their damage to you (NPCs use the same equation), increase your aggro since NPCs attack the player who's doing the most damage to them modified by their proximity to you (and a few other things, but damage and distance are the 2 biggest components of aggro according to one of the developers), and you risk getting caught in warp core explosions. I try to stay in the 2 to 3km range when I can.

9. Upgrade gear to mk 14, don't worry about going epic

Each mark improvement gives you a 10.2% category-1 bonus from mark 1 to mark 12, 39.6% going from mark 12 to 13, and a 70% buff going from 13 to 14. That's a total improvement of 240%, with almost half of that bonus coming in the two steps between mark 12 and 14.

In other words, you get around 110% bonus weapon strength for going from mk 12 to 14, which is the equivalent of almost 3 mk 14, epic tactical consoles. A ship with 3 tactical consoles and mk 14 weapons will have a bigger bonus than a ship with 5 tactical consoles and mk 12 weapons, all other things being equal.

(Remember, these are not final damage multipliers and they are not multiplicative with each other. Final damage will increase by less than 240% if you have other category-1 damage bonuses like skill points and starship mastery, but the difference will still be large.)

Rarity adds a mod for each rank, plus a 2.5% category-1 bonus (unless the mod is [dmg]). Going from common to epic (without [dmg] mods) gives you a 10% category-1 bonus (in addition to the 6% bonus the [ac/dm] mod, which is standard at epic, gives you).

Of course, this is up to your judgment and your financial situation in STO, but the leap from mk 12 to mk 14 is much bigger in terms of damage than the leap from very rare to epic quality, and it's cheaper.

10. Set up your keybinds for success and turn on autofire

Keybinds attach your keys to actions in the game. By default, STO gives you a set of keybinds (otherwise you'd load up the game for the first time and do nothing!). But there are better ways to set it up. Look at my guide that shows you how to cut-and-paste stuff in 3 easy steps to set up your keyboard for STO.

If you already have keybinds set up, take "distribute shields" and "fire all weapons" out of whatever key you're using for your short-cooldown buffs (e.g. the space bar). These commands mess up your weapons' firing cycles by starting 1-second cooldowns on your weapons if they're used at the wrong time.

Custom keybinds keep you from having to look at your power tray all the time and help you use boff skills as they become available.

Also, turn on autofire by going to the options menu>Controls>Auto-Attack and picking "Toggle, non-combat cancels" from the drop menu. Then right-click all your weapons so that they have a green outline; this means autofire is on. The computer can fire your weapons faster than you can and find a new target faster than you can, and you can focus on piloting and using your other skills.

Last, while we're in the options menu, go to Options>Basic>Enable Auto-Loot and turn it to "On". Now you can pick up loot by pressing "f" without having to use your mouse.

Further reading

Reddit has a section devoted to discussing ship builds, complete with a wiki that covers some more advanced topics than I did here. It also has a page with the best discussion of tanking in STO on the internet if you're interested in that role.

STO wiki has lots of information on ships and how things are calculated and is generally a great resource for all things STO.

Here is a more complete/complicated discussion of how damage is calculated in STO. I have yet to find a complete list of which buffs are category 1 and which are category 2, but this list is better than most.

What about mods? Which is the best? My opinion is pen>dmg=crtd>crth>acc>other, and that's because of the math @mastajdog did on Reddit. Check out this link and look through all the various cases he put together and calculated and see where [dmg] is better than [crtd] and vice versa, and how much of a bonus we're talking about (spoiler: all the mods on your weapons are worth less than the mark bonus or most of the other large bonuses you get from boff skills and skill points, but more than a proc is worth).

STOAcademy's site has a great tool for planning a build. Pick your ship and you'll get a page where you can pick your gear and your skills and everything else you'll eventually want so you'll remember what you're working for and so that you can show something to people who are helping you with your build. You can also search other people's builds to get ideas (warning: some people have terrible ideas).

Here is a collection of stats on mark XIV/epic gear so you know if upgrading reputation, reward, and other unique gear is worth it.

If you want to know why damage resistance debuffs (like [pen], Enhanced Armor Penetration, Attack Pattern Beta) are so awesome, there is an explanation on Reddit (scroll down to the long comments by @mastajdog). If you thought that the math behind damage was complicated in STO and that the math behind damage resistance was even more complicated, wait until you see the math behind damage resistance debuffs! It turns out that how much "-50 damage resistance" helps doesn't always depend on the target's original damage resistance.

If you want to move from "increasing damage to a reasonable level" to "mastering DPS," a good place to start is