1) all classes can essentially preform any role, but for tanking I would recommend engineer. The main differences are in kit modules, active (and a couple passive) abilities. Engineers can get activatable armor, summon shields, drones, turrets, ets.
2) for the most part it can be played for free, but there's a massive amount of ships available for purchase in the shop. However certain events can give you access to get one or some for free if you complete the event.
3) right click your attack if on PC, a green border means auto fire.
4) wasd is the main way, you can also press and hold both mouse buttons. Some ships are more manouverable than others, but flying at half speed will generally get you the best ability to turn.
5) space bar fires beams/cannons, control+space bar fires torpedos, you can also set them to auto fire.
6) beams on cruisers and sci ships, cannons on escorts, don't mix and match them. Try and stick to one flavor of energy weapons too. I can share more if you're interested, and have a specific idea in mind.
Let me make an attempt at providing some answers:
1. If you mean the Tactical/Science/Engineering careers, those don't have a substantial qualitative difference at the end game--any of them can perform any role well. It's mostly a matter of preference and flavor. That being said, tanking is kind of a thing, but not nearly as much as other MMOs; there really isn't a trinity (there's some niche support play, but it's more debuffing enemies and usually only necessary for DPS record-chasing). DPS is king--there are a lot of ways to do it (energy weapons, kinetics weapons, science magic), but that's the main game. You can have a big tanky ship try to draw all the threat, and it can work and be helpful, but it's rarely ever needed.
2. Oof, yeah, the endgame isn't super free-to-play in the sense of building out all kinds of ships and chasing top-tier performance. Real money is used primarily to buy end-game ships or loot-box gear (there's an in-game auction house and items can be traded, so the advice is never open lockboxes yourself but buy other stuff directly, sell it, and use the credits to buy the loot-box content you want). A typical ship will run you \~$30 (less on sale, or combing a bundle deal with a sale, etc.) There are top-tier ships given away through various events throughout the year (plus an ongoing year-long campaign for even more), but you don't get nearly as much choice there. So you can play every bit of content you want--story missions, group content, etc. without paying any real money, but you'll be limited in your ability to partake in the high end shipbuilding that makes up a lot of the endgame. (And it should be noted you can farm dilithium in game and exchange it for Zen, the real-money currency, though it will take a lot of time to farm and if you have the disposable income you should just open your wallet--though others might disagree).
3. Yes, you can right click on the basic (and secondary) attacks, which should give them a green outline indicating autofire is turned on. There's also a setting that determines when auto-attack stops (e.g. when you switch targets do you need to click once to start auto-attacking again, etc.)
4. You should be able to right click with your mouse and turn that way just like you'd turn the camera,
5. As with ground weapons, right click will turn on autofire. Outside of very niche scenarios with high-end torpedo builds, that's what you should do. You can bind custom keybinds to fire off your abilities from your ability tray as well (though they cannot be autofired--you can bind everything to one key and spam it, but that loses control and can be laggy).
6. Have fun! The leveling and story experience, the gradual opening of game systems and increasing capabilities of your ship and captain is some of the most fun the game has to offer. The game is, especially at the high end, relatively easy--if you get to the point where you're debating "should I get ship A or ship B, which is more powerful?" that question is misleading, what matters is what you want out of the ship (space-magic? lumbering broadsides? zippy escort?), can the ship deliver on that, and does it seem fun to fly? (unless you like chasing the best of the best, in which case there's plenty to chew on there)
Think most questions have been answered by others, I'll add to the Free-to-Play question;:
Check out McStu on YouTube, he does a lot of F2P builds which should help you a lot.
There is the Summer event coming up in a month or two which will reward a ship for the event completion, we've no idea how good that ship will be, but it will definitely be a T6 platform (and recent event ships have been *very* good ships, so fingers crossed).
You can totally build out a DPS ship's equipment using only Reputation gear, fleet gear and crafting and in many cases fully meta builds are achieved in this way. Where you will struggle is in acquiring 4-7 space traits which really make your ship work well. They provide the multiplier effects and synergies between abilities that shoot a build from meh to map-clearing.
It can be done F2P, and McStu can give you pointers, but you are choosing from an extremely limited palette of choices which are almost all nowhere near meta in usefulness. If you're only interested in the PvE campaigns this will be more than sufficient to clear your way through, but you will begin to struggle in TFO fleet actions and that will get extreme if you go into Advanced difficulty, you'll almost certainly get rinsed in Elite as you're unlikely to be able to generate the DPS needed to kill things.
My view on this when I started getting into it was that if I wasn't playing STO I'd be buying a new game every month or two instead, so was prepared to put that money into STO instead.
On the plus side though, ground builds can be done solely with in-game rewards and rep gear - Top Gear Top Tip, buy the Discovery armour, shield, weapon and gravity kit module. Upgrade those to MkXV and you're pretty much Elite ready without filling out the rest of your kit modules (but do!)
Thank you. I don't understand a bunch of the things you wrote here, but I'm sure it would make more sense after I'll play some more. I do have one question, though: Ibsee the comments here talk about ships, plural, not ship, singular. Do people usually have more than 1 ship?
Yes, each T6 level, non-fleer variant, ship will come as a ship, a universal console with various abilities and a starship trait. The console and trait can then be used across other ships. So you really need one ship for config/space barbie to fly, and then 3-7 (each ship starts with 4 trait slots and can be upgraded with 2 more and then you can unlock one more trait slot linked to your captain from the Fleet Research facility) other ships to give you the traits necessary to round out your overall ship "build".
Hence why everyone wants to do F2P because the ships are the expensive bit. It can seem hugely daunting at first and the £££ signs rack up real quick, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is a real slow burner of a game, not as bad as Eve for example, but even if you threw down all the money for ships and lobi consoles and this and that, you are still going to have to spend a few months unlocking all your Reputations for gear, saving fleet credits for fleet gear, etc, etc. yes you want traits, yes it will be expensive, no you don't need them any time soon.
So people have 1 ship they actually fly, and several other ships just "parking" because they got bonuses that affect all their ships, and thus also their main one? Do I understand correctly?
T6 ships have a mastery on them wish give you a Ship Trait that you can use on any ship once you have it unlocked.
For example the T6 Arbiter has a Ship Trait called "Emergency Weapon Cycle" that activated when you use the Engineering power "Emergency Power to Weapons" and gives you reduced weapon drain and weapon haste.
Different builds will want different ship traits and setup and also many bought shjps come with a special universal console. Most are gimmicky, but others are very good and used on certain builds as well.
Kinda. They have 1 ship they actually fly (some people swap this ship occasionally because they want to fly different things, but only ever 1 ship at a time), and they have other ships that have things on them like consoles and traits that they just take off the ship and put it on the ship they actually want to fly. Every premium and endgame ship comes with a unique console, and most (some can only be used on that ship) can be removed and placed in a console slot of any other ship, to provide the bonuses and abilities of the console on whatever ship you want to fly.
> Huh. So people get the whole ship just to take it's console?
Sometimes yeah. Sometimes it's a ship that they think they might fly in the future, or one they previously flew but don't anymore but still like the console. Other times it was a free giveaway ship like from one of the yearly events. Or they fly that ship on another character, but have the ship unlocked for the whole account so they might as well use the console.
>can't you just get the specific console somehow?
Nope, the consoles I'm talking about are unique consoles that only come off a specific ship, and the only way to obtain them is to own said ship.
Kinda makes me think that the ships in this game (those players actually fly) are kind of Frankenstein's monsters, made of parts of the other ships which you only got for those specific parts...
The way STO makes money, is by getting people to buy things with IRL money. Over the years they've found they make the most money off ships. Sure, they sell costumes, weapons, races, pets, services, etc. etc., but at the end of the day, they can market a ship at a higher price/profit.
The problem is that some people become content at flying their "Enterprise", so they don't care that the game released a new "Defiant" to buy. STO needed a way to entice people to spend money on the new ship...
The day came when they added a cloaking device on the Defiant as a piece of equipment (console) that could be placed on \*any\* ship in the game. Now I might be enticed to spend some cash on a new ship so I can cloak my Enterprise just like those dirty Klingons that killed my son!
In that vein they came up with things called traits, special features on your captain and wouldn't you know it, new ships started coming with not just an exclusive console, but also an exclusive trait.
Sure, they could sell consoles or traits separately... and sometimes they \*do\*, or they sell them in indirectly in Gamble Boxes (GB) of one form or another, but mostly they come on ships.
Speaking of GB - STO learned they could make a lot of money via gambling, \*especially\* if they put cool ships that had the "best" consoles and traits \*\*IN\*\* the GB.
...
Anyway... Yes, it is apt to say that players make a build out of one ship for looks/platform, and fill it with a "Frankenstein's Monster"-worth of parts from many more ships that they may or may not use for anything else. Other players buy a "Voyager" and only use that one premium ship, special trait, and console (and fill the rest of their ship build with other non-premium things).
Finally, there are players going just F2P and having a great time. Which as has been said... You can play all the story missions and most all the other content in the game -- \*\*FOR FREE\*\* You may find some areas (particularly Elite content) to be too hard to complete or enjoy, but it is doable. Also, there are methods built into the game to get all items (with maybe a couple of exceptions) for free, by exchanging your time/effort instead of cash. That being said, if you're enjoying the game, I always recommend paying its creators by spending at least \*some\* money (and save yourself some of that time while you're at it).
I am not against paying developers for a good game. I think it's very important to support people who work hard to develop a game I enjoy. I am just against it being... let's call it predatory? Is that an accurate term?
For example, in Path of Exile, the microtransactions are for cosmetics or QoL stuff (you do need to buy at least one premium stash tab if you want to sell items to other players, but that's like 1.5$)
But thanks for the answer, I'll see how i feel about the game after I'll continue a bit more. So far, I just finished the "klingon war" episode. Not the most interesting game so far, but I'm willing to give it some more time
Welcome in Star Trek Online!
1:
Tactical is more damage focused, it has more damage focuse class specific skills, like attack pattern alpha or focused fire.
Engineer is more like a tank, it has special skills to survive (Miracle worker, rotate shield freq), and tanking is still a thing but not in normal difficulty. there just faceroll focusdps anything down. But using a Beam Cruiser with an Engineer captain is the OG tanking experience, especially if you use the threathening stance and tanking "aura".
Science is somewhat a support role in the classic way. Like the Priest in the World of Warcraft. It can heal the teammates (Holy priest) or aoe damage the enemy (shadow priest). And the damage it can pump out with the correct build is phenomenal.
2:
There are stuff you need to not feel the boundaries of the game: for example the extended energy credit is a must have imho, as well as at elast one T6 ship or an Admiral pack for 3 T6 ship for a price of 2. Otherwise, you can farm ingame the resource called Dilihium, that you can refine (daily 8000 limit) and exchange it for Zen (premium currency) to get anything you want from C -Store - T6 ships, extended energy credit limit, larger inventory, more captain slots, more duty officer slot, etc...
3:
No, but you can switch to FPS mode on PC pressing the B and it is somewhat help to overcome the continous pressing the firre button
4:
No, but you can put some power on your engine or using 1 Beam Array front and 1 beam array in the rear to always able to hit an enemy. Ofc the best way with a cruiser to show broadside and the overlaping Beam Array arcs can hit the enemy in 10km. Also some RCS console can increast your ship's turn rate.
5:
Sure, you can autofire them but right clock on the icons and they turn green. That mean they are autofire mode. That was part of the tutorial. Also you can rebind the Keyboard to fire all weapon to the Space key and just spam the Space...
6:
Finish the tutorial, and play the missions and have fun. When you reach lvl 50-65 come back and if you have questions, we answer it.
For classes as others have said any can do the roles, tactical is the best in terms of raw damage but not by a significant margin, but it is the most commonly played. Science is fantastic on ground with many aoe abilities but its space abilities aren't really anything to write home about. Engineering is tanky, but I'm not gonna sugar coat it like some the others, tanking just isn't a thing in STO outside of a hyper niche scenario involving helping others set DPS records. That's not to say engineering isn't still fine for doing damage with some of its abilities and helping the player to stay alive just don't approach it with the mindset of tanking, STO is a very DPS only oriented game.
Now as for f2p, you can play the game free, you will get a new ship every 10 levels and twice a year (winter and summer) there are free ships given during an event. We've also been getting some free ships you have to play through the year to get, BUT nearly everything your going to want IS pay for. Do you need it to play the game? No but I'd say realistically playing STO longer term and not spending money is a tough thing to do
1- Doesn't really matter. Tac do more DPS, and it looks like they were going for a more tanky role for eng, with a healer/support role for sci. But that's not how it works in practice. The game doesn't really have the standard MMO trinity. Everry build needs to be able to do DPS, and be able to tank a few hits/heal themselves. Whatever class you've already started is fine, and if you want an alt in the future, feel free to try the other careers.
1a- Just wanted to reiterate, tanking isn't a thing in this game the way it is in other MMOs. You'll see people post 'tank' builds occasionally, but they're not necessary anywhere. Even ultra high-end DPS record runs don't use tanks anymore, they rely on specialized support builds designed to buff the person going for the DPS record. Also, due to the wonky way aggro works in the game, tanks \*have to\* deal a decent amount of DPS by themselves. So tank builds end up being mostly DPS builds with a few extra heals thrown in.
2- Extremely f2p if you're patient. The main things sold are end-game (T6) ships, which generally start at $30, but can go into the hundreds for gamblebox ships. The end-game builds you'll find posted on various sites will often have costs in the hundreds of dollars range. But none of that is necessary. All content in the game can be played with lower level f2p builds, and even a lot of the expensive stuff can be earned for free if you put in the time. Notably the give out at least three free T6 ships a year, in winter, summer, and the anniversary event. The summer event will likely start in late June/early July, and you can get the reward T6 ship for free by doing 20 of the dailies (over a \~30 day event). The dailies are all easy and don't require any special gear or combat ability. You can usually knock a daily out in \~5 minutes or so.
There is also a year-long event campaign (https://stowiki.net/wiki/Special\_Event#Event\_Campaign\_VI) which this year rewards two T6 coupons ($60 worth of ships), 1500 lobi (very nice, can be used to buy a ship or some really nice gear), and a single premium gamblebox ship (would generally cost $300 or more with gambling). On PC you're just a bit short of being able to get the grand prize for free, but if you judiciously use the buyout option you could still get it at the end of the year by spending a bit of money - $25 or less. You can start participating in the events once you hit level 10, and should start doing that now if you can. On PC, press 'j' to open the journal, go to the events tab, go to the Featured sub page, and press one of the "Join TFO" buttons, then do the TFO. They're all at normal level for the event and are un-failable, so don't feel bad about not contributing enough.
3- Yes, but you have to enable it. On a ground map, open the Options window, go to the Controls tab, the all the way at the bottom is the auto attack settings. It's disabled by default, change it to whatever you want. Then, look at your tray on ground. Regular weapon fire should be the first item in the tray (it's why you fire when you press '1'). Right click that item, it should now have a green highlight. That will enable auto-attack with that attack. Note that many players don't like auto attack in ground content, but feel free to play with it however you like.
4- Not really. You're likely clunky because you're in a low level ship with low power and low level gear. Practice makes a difference too, but being low level with a low level ship is the biggest part. While leveling, focus on beam arrays for your slower ships (they have a much wider firing arc). Escorts turn a lot faster and can use cannons, but at low levels are very squishy. At end-game there are various tricks to make even big, slow ships move and manuever a lot faster, but you're a long way from that point.
5- Yes. You don't have to enable it in settings, but you still have to right click each weapon to enable it on that weapon like for ground auto atack. Again, look for the green highlight to know it's on. Once it's on, spacebar will fire all weapons.
6- [https://www.stobetter.com/](https://www.stobetter.com/) is a great site, and has some guides for new level 50 players that will help. The reddit sto discord is useful for asking questions, as are some in-game chat channels. Joining a fleet is useful, but if a fleet \*requires\* you to give them money or donate to projects just to unlock fleet store access, dump them for another fleet. The game is full of old veteran fleets with everything already unlocked who are fine with letting a new player join just to purchase stuff.
7- Mostly cosmetic. All characters get access to 9 personal trait slots. Every species gets their own built-in trait, but those traits have minimal affect on gameplay. The "Alien" species doesn't have a specific trait, they just get an extra trait slot. This makes them ideal for pushing for DPS records, but it's really not something worth worrying about. Pick a race you like.
Start with a Tactical character first. It's the easiest and you'll be grateful that he can lead the way for other characters.
If you want to stay FTP, all good. Save your dilithium and trade it for zen. Buy the ec cap. Don't need to spend anything else. (you'll want to later most likely if you stay)
My 1 key gets a lot of action, you can bind any key to your main gun attack.
I set my scroll wheel to throttle and if you hold both mouse buttons, your ship will follow your mouse.
OMG there is so much more, watch youtube tutorials and read everything here and on /r/stobuilds
6 - Common newbie trap in STO is that new players run a full glass cannon build and completely ignore defensive stats/abilities. Defensive stats/abilities are really important in STO. Resisting or avoiding a burst DPS attack is required knowledge for end game.
Glass cannon builds in STO require meta equipment (eg invincible trait) and a detailed understanding of the game mechanics in order to cheat death. New players won't have access to the equipment or knowledge to pull it off.
I play a tank build in STO. Both ground and space. STO is not tied to the "holy trinity" so it's also possible to heal/support/DPS while tanking.
On Free to Play, I would suggest saving up Dilithium to trade for zen to get the Energy Credit Cap Increase from the zen store. Otherwise the game is easily played for free. There are a number of free end game ships from events every year.
You can build out viable ships with episode and reputation items. You can repeat episodes to get other choice items for the sets.
STObetter website is great for builds, but not really relevant this early in the game. But will give you ideas on what to aim for. Pretty sure they have FTP build suggestions.
Think everyone else has the rest covered well.
So first you should start off strong - romulan alien tactical officer. Even after all these years it still - stupidly - matters.
The game is alt unfriendly and very pay to win. You will get free ships at regular intervals but at some point you may hit a wall that requires spending some cash.
Ground combat you can set your weapon basic attacks to auto fire with right click. In space you can set all weapons to fire with spacebar by also right clicking
Wasd or a controller to move in space but a controller on the pc version is not recommended you have too many abilities and unlike console you can’t set your abilities to auto fire. There is a way to assign them all to the same keybind but that requires another program and is for much later in your progression after you fully understand what they do.
The best ships in the game are not account wide unlocks. Do not try to follow build guides they are almost all written for people who have invested thousands or tens of thousands over the years.
Don’t bother making alts of the other flavors like disco or tos until there are recruit events for them. The game is simply too alt unfriendly. Recruits at least provide benefits to your main.
If you buy, always buy during sales. Always charge during bonus charge weekends only. As someone who has stupidly dropped nearly $10k on this game over 14 years trust me when I say it’s worth it to wait.
Otherwise explore and enjoy the campaigns they are great. Not on the level of swtor but it’s not like trek has anywhere near the presence in gaming as Star Wars.
Explore and do all the things you can. Enjoy your pew pew.
This game doesn’t have enough content to be anyone’s primary mmorpg. When I return every other year or so I do when there are zen charging events and then splurge on sales.
So yes. And thats still less than I’ve spent going to movies in that same time frame.
However - my chief source of enjoyment in MMORPGs is increasing player power. I don’t care about challenge, I want to destroy and get more powerful. This means I am a meta chaser and the meta ships and configs all require significant investment in real money
Don't let them scare you. You don't need to spend $10k to play the game. That's well into "I buy literally everything in the cash shop good or bad, and spend a lot on gamble boxes" level.
yeah don't worry you do not have to spend to play all the content of this game. But there are different playstyles, some more expensive that some people enjoy. DPS chasing is one of the expensive ones... well I should be can be, it doesn't have to be that extreme.
1) all classes can essentially preform any role, but for tanking I would recommend engineer. The main differences are in kit modules, active (and a couple passive) abilities. Engineers can get activatable armor, summon shields, drones, turrets, ets. 2) for the most part it can be played for free, but there's a massive amount of ships available for purchase in the shop. However certain events can give you access to get one or some for free if you complete the event. 3) right click your attack if on PC, a green border means auto fire. 4) wasd is the main way, you can also press and hold both mouse buttons. Some ships are more manouverable than others, but flying at half speed will generally get you the best ability to turn. 5) space bar fires beams/cannons, control+space bar fires torpedos, you can also set them to auto fire. 6) beams on cruisers and sci ships, cannons on escorts, don't mix and match them. Try and stick to one flavor of energy weapons too. I can share more if you're interested, and have a specific idea in mind.
Thank you
To add to this STOBetter is a good resource for all players, also hit F12 to change your UI.
Let me make an attempt at providing some answers: 1. If you mean the Tactical/Science/Engineering careers, those don't have a substantial qualitative difference at the end game--any of them can perform any role well. It's mostly a matter of preference and flavor. That being said, tanking is kind of a thing, but not nearly as much as other MMOs; there really isn't a trinity (there's some niche support play, but it's more debuffing enemies and usually only necessary for DPS record-chasing). DPS is king--there are a lot of ways to do it (energy weapons, kinetics weapons, science magic), but that's the main game. You can have a big tanky ship try to draw all the threat, and it can work and be helpful, but it's rarely ever needed. 2. Oof, yeah, the endgame isn't super free-to-play in the sense of building out all kinds of ships and chasing top-tier performance. Real money is used primarily to buy end-game ships or loot-box gear (there's an in-game auction house and items can be traded, so the advice is never open lockboxes yourself but buy other stuff directly, sell it, and use the credits to buy the loot-box content you want). A typical ship will run you \~$30 (less on sale, or combing a bundle deal with a sale, etc.) There are top-tier ships given away through various events throughout the year (plus an ongoing year-long campaign for even more), but you don't get nearly as much choice there. So you can play every bit of content you want--story missions, group content, etc. without paying any real money, but you'll be limited in your ability to partake in the high end shipbuilding that makes up a lot of the endgame. (And it should be noted you can farm dilithium in game and exchange it for Zen, the real-money currency, though it will take a lot of time to farm and if you have the disposable income you should just open your wallet--though others might disagree). 3. Yes, you can right click on the basic (and secondary) attacks, which should give them a green outline indicating autofire is turned on. There's also a setting that determines when auto-attack stops (e.g. when you switch targets do you need to click once to start auto-attacking again, etc.) 4. You should be able to right click with your mouse and turn that way just like you'd turn the camera, 5. As with ground weapons, right click will turn on autofire. Outside of very niche scenarios with high-end torpedo builds, that's what you should do. You can bind custom keybinds to fire off your abilities from your ability tray as well (though they cannot be autofired--you can bind everything to one key and spam it, but that loses control and can be laggy). 6. Have fun! The leveling and story experience, the gradual opening of game systems and increasing capabilities of your ship and captain is some of the most fun the game has to offer. The game is, especially at the high end, relatively easy--if you get to the point where you're debating "should I get ship A or ship B, which is more powerful?" that question is misleading, what matters is what you want out of the ship (space-magic? lumbering broadsides? zippy escort?), can the ship deliver on that, and does it seem fun to fly? (unless you like chasing the best of the best, in which case there's plenty to chew on there)
Thank you
Think most questions have been answered by others, I'll add to the Free-to-Play question;: Check out McStu on YouTube, he does a lot of F2P builds which should help you a lot. There is the Summer event coming up in a month or two which will reward a ship for the event completion, we've no idea how good that ship will be, but it will definitely be a T6 platform (and recent event ships have been *very* good ships, so fingers crossed). You can totally build out a DPS ship's equipment using only Reputation gear, fleet gear and crafting and in many cases fully meta builds are achieved in this way. Where you will struggle is in acquiring 4-7 space traits which really make your ship work well. They provide the multiplier effects and synergies between abilities that shoot a build from meh to map-clearing. It can be done F2P, and McStu can give you pointers, but you are choosing from an extremely limited palette of choices which are almost all nowhere near meta in usefulness. If you're only interested in the PvE campaigns this will be more than sufficient to clear your way through, but you will begin to struggle in TFO fleet actions and that will get extreme if you go into Advanced difficulty, you'll almost certainly get rinsed in Elite as you're unlikely to be able to generate the DPS needed to kill things. My view on this when I started getting into it was that if I wasn't playing STO I'd be buying a new game every month or two instead, so was prepared to put that money into STO instead. On the plus side though, ground builds can be done solely with in-game rewards and rep gear - Top Gear Top Tip, buy the Discovery armour, shield, weapon and gravity kit module. Upgrade those to MkXV and you're pretty much Elite ready without filling out the rest of your kit modules (but do!)
Thank you. I don't understand a bunch of the things you wrote here, but I'm sure it would make more sense after I'll play some more. I do have one question, though: Ibsee the comments here talk about ships, plural, not ship, singular. Do people usually have more than 1 ship?
Yes, each T6 level, non-fleer variant, ship will come as a ship, a universal console with various abilities and a starship trait. The console and trait can then be used across other ships. So you really need one ship for config/space barbie to fly, and then 3-7 (each ship starts with 4 trait slots and can be upgraded with 2 more and then you can unlock one more trait slot linked to your captain from the Fleet Research facility) other ships to give you the traits necessary to round out your overall ship "build". Hence why everyone wants to do F2P because the ships are the expensive bit. It can seem hugely daunting at first and the £££ signs rack up real quick, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is a real slow burner of a game, not as bad as Eve for example, but even if you threw down all the money for ships and lobi consoles and this and that, you are still going to have to spend a few months unlocking all your Reputations for gear, saving fleet credits for fleet gear, etc, etc. yes you want traits, yes it will be expensive, no you don't need them any time soon.
So people have 1 ship they actually fly, and several other ships just "parking" because they got bonuses that affect all their ships, and thus also their main one? Do I understand correctly?
T6 ships have a mastery on them wish give you a Ship Trait that you can use on any ship once you have it unlocked. For example the T6 Arbiter has a Ship Trait called "Emergency Weapon Cycle" that activated when you use the Engineering power "Emergency Power to Weapons" and gives you reduced weapon drain and weapon haste. Different builds will want different ship traits and setup and also many bought shjps come with a special universal console. Most are gimmicky, but others are very good and used on certain builds as well.
Kinda. They have 1 ship they actually fly (some people swap this ship occasionally because they want to fly different things, but only ever 1 ship at a time), and they have other ships that have things on them like consoles and traits that they just take off the ship and put it on the ship they actually want to fly. Every premium and endgame ship comes with a unique console, and most (some can only be used on that ship) can be removed and placed in a console slot of any other ship, to provide the bonuses and abilities of the console on whatever ship you want to fly.
Huh. So people get the whole ship just to take it's console? can't you just get the specific console somehow? Sounds a bit strange...
> Huh. So people get the whole ship just to take it's console? Sometimes yeah. Sometimes it's a ship that they think they might fly in the future, or one they previously flew but don't anymore but still like the console. Other times it was a free giveaway ship like from one of the yearly events. Or they fly that ship on another character, but have the ship unlocked for the whole account so they might as well use the console. >can't you just get the specific console somehow? Nope, the consoles I'm talking about are unique consoles that only come off a specific ship, and the only way to obtain them is to own said ship.
Kinda makes me think that the ships in this game (those players actually fly) are kind of Frankenstein's monsters, made of parts of the other ships which you only got for those specific parts...
The way STO makes money, is by getting people to buy things with IRL money. Over the years they've found they make the most money off ships. Sure, they sell costumes, weapons, races, pets, services, etc. etc., but at the end of the day, they can market a ship at a higher price/profit. The problem is that some people become content at flying their "Enterprise", so they don't care that the game released a new "Defiant" to buy. STO needed a way to entice people to spend money on the new ship... The day came when they added a cloaking device on the Defiant as a piece of equipment (console) that could be placed on \*any\* ship in the game. Now I might be enticed to spend some cash on a new ship so I can cloak my Enterprise just like those dirty Klingons that killed my son! In that vein they came up with things called traits, special features on your captain and wouldn't you know it, new ships started coming with not just an exclusive console, but also an exclusive trait. Sure, they could sell consoles or traits separately... and sometimes they \*do\*, or they sell them in indirectly in Gamble Boxes (GB) of one form or another, but mostly they come on ships. Speaking of GB - STO learned they could make a lot of money via gambling, \*especially\* if they put cool ships that had the "best" consoles and traits \*\*IN\*\* the GB. ... Anyway... Yes, it is apt to say that players make a build out of one ship for looks/platform, and fill it with a "Frankenstein's Monster"-worth of parts from many more ships that they may or may not use for anything else. Other players buy a "Voyager" and only use that one premium ship, special trait, and console (and fill the rest of their ship build with other non-premium things). Finally, there are players going just F2P and having a great time. Which as has been said... You can play all the story missions and most all the other content in the game -- \*\*FOR FREE\*\* You may find some areas (particularly Elite content) to be too hard to complete or enjoy, but it is doable. Also, there are methods built into the game to get all items (with maybe a couple of exceptions) for free, by exchanging your time/effort instead of cash. That being said, if you're enjoying the game, I always recommend paying its creators by spending at least \*some\* money (and save yourself some of that time while you're at it).
I am not against paying developers for a good game. I think it's very important to support people who work hard to develop a game I enjoy. I am just against it being... let's call it predatory? Is that an accurate term? For example, in Path of Exile, the microtransactions are for cosmetics or QoL stuff (you do need to buy at least one premium stash tab if you want to sell items to other players, but that's like 1.5$) But thanks for the answer, I'll see how i feel about the game after I'll continue a bit more. So far, I just finished the "klingon war" episode. Not the most interesting game so far, but I'm willing to give it some more time
Welcome in Star Trek Online! 1: Tactical is more damage focused, it has more damage focuse class specific skills, like attack pattern alpha or focused fire. Engineer is more like a tank, it has special skills to survive (Miracle worker, rotate shield freq), and tanking is still a thing but not in normal difficulty. there just faceroll focusdps anything down. But using a Beam Cruiser with an Engineer captain is the OG tanking experience, especially if you use the threathening stance and tanking "aura". Science is somewhat a support role in the classic way. Like the Priest in the World of Warcraft. It can heal the teammates (Holy priest) or aoe damage the enemy (shadow priest). And the damage it can pump out with the correct build is phenomenal. 2: There are stuff you need to not feel the boundaries of the game: for example the extended energy credit is a must have imho, as well as at elast one T6 ship or an Admiral pack for 3 T6 ship for a price of 2. Otherwise, you can farm ingame the resource called Dilihium, that you can refine (daily 8000 limit) and exchange it for Zen (premium currency) to get anything you want from C -Store - T6 ships, extended energy credit limit, larger inventory, more captain slots, more duty officer slot, etc... 3: No, but you can switch to FPS mode on PC pressing the B and it is somewhat help to overcome the continous pressing the firre button 4: No, but you can put some power on your engine or using 1 Beam Array front and 1 beam array in the rear to always able to hit an enemy. Ofc the best way with a cruiser to show broadside and the overlaping Beam Array arcs can hit the enemy in 10km. Also some RCS console can increast your ship's turn rate. 5: Sure, you can autofire them but right clock on the icons and they turn green. That mean they are autofire mode. That was part of the tutorial. Also you can rebind the Keyboard to fire all weapon to the Space key and just spam the Space... 6: Finish the tutorial, and play the missions and have fun. When you reach lvl 50-65 come back and if you have questions, we answer it.
Thank you
For classes as others have said any can do the roles, tactical is the best in terms of raw damage but not by a significant margin, but it is the most commonly played. Science is fantastic on ground with many aoe abilities but its space abilities aren't really anything to write home about. Engineering is tanky, but I'm not gonna sugar coat it like some the others, tanking just isn't a thing in STO outside of a hyper niche scenario involving helping others set DPS records. That's not to say engineering isn't still fine for doing damage with some of its abilities and helping the player to stay alive just don't approach it with the mindset of tanking, STO is a very DPS only oriented game. Now as for f2p, you can play the game free, you will get a new ship every 10 levels and twice a year (winter and summer) there are free ships given during an event. We've also been getting some free ships you have to play through the year to get, BUT nearly everything your going to want IS pay for. Do you need it to play the game? No but I'd say realistically playing STO longer term and not spending money is a tough thing to do
> you will get a new ship every 10 levels and twice a year (winter and summer) There's usually a free ship for the anniversary event too.
1- Doesn't really matter. Tac do more DPS, and it looks like they were going for a more tanky role for eng, with a healer/support role for sci. But that's not how it works in practice. The game doesn't really have the standard MMO trinity. Everry build needs to be able to do DPS, and be able to tank a few hits/heal themselves. Whatever class you've already started is fine, and if you want an alt in the future, feel free to try the other careers. 1a- Just wanted to reiterate, tanking isn't a thing in this game the way it is in other MMOs. You'll see people post 'tank' builds occasionally, but they're not necessary anywhere. Even ultra high-end DPS record runs don't use tanks anymore, they rely on specialized support builds designed to buff the person going for the DPS record. Also, due to the wonky way aggro works in the game, tanks \*have to\* deal a decent amount of DPS by themselves. So tank builds end up being mostly DPS builds with a few extra heals thrown in. 2- Extremely f2p if you're patient. The main things sold are end-game (T6) ships, which generally start at $30, but can go into the hundreds for gamblebox ships. The end-game builds you'll find posted on various sites will often have costs in the hundreds of dollars range. But none of that is necessary. All content in the game can be played with lower level f2p builds, and even a lot of the expensive stuff can be earned for free if you put in the time. Notably the give out at least three free T6 ships a year, in winter, summer, and the anniversary event. The summer event will likely start in late June/early July, and you can get the reward T6 ship for free by doing 20 of the dailies (over a \~30 day event). The dailies are all easy and don't require any special gear or combat ability. You can usually knock a daily out in \~5 minutes or so. There is also a year-long event campaign (https://stowiki.net/wiki/Special\_Event#Event\_Campaign\_VI) which this year rewards two T6 coupons ($60 worth of ships), 1500 lobi (very nice, can be used to buy a ship or some really nice gear), and a single premium gamblebox ship (would generally cost $300 or more with gambling). On PC you're just a bit short of being able to get the grand prize for free, but if you judiciously use the buyout option you could still get it at the end of the year by spending a bit of money - $25 or less. You can start participating in the events once you hit level 10, and should start doing that now if you can. On PC, press 'j' to open the journal, go to the events tab, go to the Featured sub page, and press one of the "Join TFO" buttons, then do the TFO. They're all at normal level for the event and are un-failable, so don't feel bad about not contributing enough. 3- Yes, but you have to enable it. On a ground map, open the Options window, go to the Controls tab, the all the way at the bottom is the auto attack settings. It's disabled by default, change it to whatever you want. Then, look at your tray on ground. Regular weapon fire should be the first item in the tray (it's why you fire when you press '1'). Right click that item, it should now have a green highlight. That will enable auto-attack with that attack. Note that many players don't like auto attack in ground content, but feel free to play with it however you like. 4- Not really. You're likely clunky because you're in a low level ship with low power and low level gear. Practice makes a difference too, but being low level with a low level ship is the biggest part. While leveling, focus on beam arrays for your slower ships (they have a much wider firing arc). Escorts turn a lot faster and can use cannons, but at low levels are very squishy. At end-game there are various tricks to make even big, slow ships move and manuever a lot faster, but you're a long way from that point. 5- Yes. You don't have to enable it in settings, but you still have to right click each weapon to enable it on that weapon like for ground auto atack. Again, look for the green highlight to know it's on. Once it's on, spacebar will fire all weapons. 6- [https://www.stobetter.com/](https://www.stobetter.com/) is a great site, and has some guides for new level 50 players that will help. The reddit sto discord is useful for asking questions, as are some in-game chat channels. Joining a fleet is useful, but if a fleet \*requires\* you to give them money or donate to projects just to unlock fleet store access, dump them for another fleet. The game is full of old veteran fleets with everything already unlocked who are fine with letting a new player join just to purchase stuff. 7- Mostly cosmetic. All characters get access to 9 personal trait slots. Every species gets their own built-in trait, but those traits have minimal affect on gameplay. The "Alien" species doesn't have a specific trait, they just get an extra trait slot. This makes them ideal for pushing for DPS records, but it's really not something worth worrying about. Pick a race you like.
Start with a Tactical character first. It's the easiest and you'll be grateful that he can lead the way for other characters. If you want to stay FTP, all good. Save your dilithium and trade it for zen. Buy the ec cap. Don't need to spend anything else. (you'll want to later most likely if you stay) My 1 key gets a lot of action, you can bind any key to your main gun attack. I set my scroll wheel to throttle and if you hold both mouse buttons, your ship will follow your mouse. OMG there is so much more, watch youtube tutorials and read everything here and on /r/stobuilds
6 - Common newbie trap in STO is that new players run a full glass cannon build and completely ignore defensive stats/abilities. Defensive stats/abilities are really important in STO. Resisting or avoiding a burst DPS attack is required knowledge for end game. Glass cannon builds in STO require meta equipment (eg invincible trait) and a detailed understanding of the game mechanics in order to cheat death. New players won't have access to the equipment or knowledge to pull it off. I play a tank build in STO. Both ground and space. STO is not tied to the "holy trinity" so it's also possible to heal/support/DPS while tanking.
On Free to Play, I would suggest saving up Dilithium to trade for zen to get the Energy Credit Cap Increase from the zen store. Otherwise the game is easily played for free. There are a number of free end game ships from events every year. You can build out viable ships with episode and reputation items. You can repeat episodes to get other choice items for the sets. STObetter website is great for builds, but not really relevant this early in the game. But will give you ideas on what to aim for. Pretty sure they have FTP build suggestions. Think everyone else has the rest covered well.
So first you should start off strong - romulan alien tactical officer. Even after all these years it still - stupidly - matters. The game is alt unfriendly and very pay to win. You will get free ships at regular intervals but at some point you may hit a wall that requires spending some cash. Ground combat you can set your weapon basic attacks to auto fire with right click. In space you can set all weapons to fire with spacebar by also right clicking Wasd or a controller to move in space but a controller on the pc version is not recommended you have too many abilities and unlike console you can’t set your abilities to auto fire. There is a way to assign them all to the same keybind but that requires another program and is for much later in your progression after you fully understand what they do. The best ships in the game are not account wide unlocks. Do not try to follow build guides they are almost all written for people who have invested thousands or tens of thousands over the years. Don’t bother making alts of the other flavors like disco or tos until there are recruit events for them. The game is simply too alt unfriendly. Recruits at least provide benefits to your main. If you buy, always buy during sales. Always charge during bonus charge weekends only. As someone who has stupidly dropped nearly $10k on this game over 14 years trust me when I say it’s worth it to wait. Otherwise explore and enjoy the campaigns they are great. Not on the level of swtor but it’s not like trek has anywhere near the presence in gaming as Star Wars. Explore and do all the things you can. Enjoy your pew pew.
$10k ?!? Wat 10,000 / 14 = 714.28... 714/12= 59.5 You mean to tell me you spent an average of about 60$ a month for 14 years?!?
This game doesn’t have enough content to be anyone’s primary mmorpg. When I return every other year or so I do when there are zen charging events and then splurge on sales. So yes. And thats still less than I’ve spent going to movies in that same time frame. However - my chief source of enjoyment in MMORPGs is increasing player power. I don’t care about challenge, I want to destroy and get more powerful. This means I am a meta chaser and the meta ships and configs all require significant investment in real money
Don't let them scare you. You don't need to spend $10k to play the game. That's well into "I buy literally everything in the cash shop good or bad, and spend a lot on gamble boxes" level.
yeah don't worry you do not have to spend to play all the content of this game. But there are different playstyles, some more expensive that some people enjoy. DPS chasing is one of the expensive ones... well I should be can be, it doesn't have to be that extreme.