Hello, Joe and STOers! I know it’s been a long while for posts on here. Real life is the priority as always, but if you’ve been on my Twitter feed you’ll know I’ve been keeping up with stuff pertaining to Star Trek Online. I haven’t been radio silent, I’ve just been more about posting quick thoughts and re-posting relevant STO news than being able to test builds or write thought-out blogs. My apologies for the communications break, but I’m looking to be back at it with this review, then within the next month both the Terran Styx and Mirror Crossfield reviews. Then, perhaps there’s a revisited series I’ll do once Gamma Recruit drops (hoping that’s in another couple months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s right after the Summer Event).
“Previously, on Joe and STO…”
For those just joining, I’d crowdfunded the funds for the 13th Anniversary Terran Bundle. The trade-off was that I’d do a review series of all the new ships of that Bundle, then I’d extend that to include the Styx and Mirror Crossfield if I got fully funded.
In Part 1, I was told to cover the Terran Eagle Pilot Raider (thanks again, Ri’Shad!)
In Part 2, I covered the Terran Monitor Miracle Worker Carrier (thanks to you, KWolves!)
Part 3 was the Terran Hydra Intel Destroyer (thanks to Gina G!)
This review is Part 4, and it’s brought to you by Spencer, AKA “CasualSAB.”
“And Now, the Continuation…”
The General Build Guidelines
Spencer gave me the challenge I’d hope no one would give.
He wanted this to be a Tank.
But…not just any Tank.
A budget Tank!
Oh, boy…I’d hoped I’d never have to take that role. Having played World of Warcraft for a while now, I know how successful or disastrous a run can be based on how good or bad the Tank is.
But he didn’t leave me hanging. He supplied me with some guides.
- STOBetter has some build articles, including this one I used as a primary suggestion for what an Odyssey Tank would look like (the Sirius has similar seating and console layout).
- This budget Tank build from Reddit user DilaZirK, using mostly F2P-acquirable items except for 1 Lock Box-acquirable Personal Space Trait and 1 Z-Store ship for its Starship Trait.
In addition, both Spencer and EndeavourGameOn provided helpful build and keybind suggestions independent of those guides, making this process ultimately very simple.
Now, the next hardest point was to figure out what “budget” meant.
To be honest, I didn’t know where to go with this. Considering that even the Reddit guide had to use a Z-Store ship and a Lock Box trait, I figured some amount of money would need to go in. But how much would be too much?
I decided to build what I felt was budget, then see what the cash price would be if you spent real money to get Zen to either get Master Keys (since they’re always available; Promo Boxes are better, but their sales are relatively few and far between) to sell for the needed EC or to buy any ships from which you’d need traits or other gear.
In the end, I feel I stumbled on a $50-$120 range, with $60 depending on if you use an Event Campaign on 2 T6 ships from the Z-Store and another nearly $20 on the Ba’ul Omni. I’ll break that down better in a separate section later. Some items will feel expensive in terms of EC, but in terms of Keys needed, most aren’t too bad.
The Build: Ba’ul Antiproton with Isomagnetic Power Distribution Modules
Star Trek Online Terran Sirius Command Dreadnought Cruiser ISE Tank Build Visual Form
I knew from both past tanking advice and some of Stu1701’s “Lazy Boat” guides that if I wanted to get enemies’ attention, I’d want to go with Ba’ul Antiproton Beam Arrays and its Omni-Directional Beam Arrays. These weapons are nice on the eyes as they create single red lines to both the main target and nearby enemies (extrapolated from how Ba’ul ships connect to each other from Discovery Season 2’s “The Sound of Thunder”). Since it gets other enemy ships’ attention, they’ll draw their Threat perception toward you (and give them a bit of damage at the same time). With the beams firing fast enough and long enough, you constantly chain into enemy NPCs you either wouldn’t have hit due to distance or would have only hit once or twice under Beams: Fire at Will.
This ship had planned to use Vulnerability Locators, but for how long this took me, I got to look at a relatively new kid on the block recently: Isomagnetic Plasma Distribution Manifolds.
These consoles boost your weapon power.
*crickets*
Doesn’t seem like much? Okay.
They also boost your maximum Weapon Power.
*heads start turning*
Did I mention they’re Re-Engineerable?
*heads tilt*
And you can get Damage-boosting modifiers on them?
*audience swoons*
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
In testing, it seems that any ship that can use 5-7 Engineering Consoles will beat out Vulnerability Exploiters and/or Vulnerability Locators on damage potential (I assume this is at Mk XV Very Rare or Ultra Rare at minimum).
Why? For one, you still have the damage modifier the Exploiters/Loactors gave you, so you’re not losing a base damage modifier. Secondly, you’re holding more Weapon Power, meaning your shots get to deal more damage than before, meaning your raw damage hits will be higher, meaning any Critical Hits you land will hit even harder.
Combined with the Colony’s Tactical-based Energetic Protomatter Matrix Infusers, you essentially get a ton of extra damage (Cat1, meaning it adds to the base damage) and get to splash a little extra Torpedo damage on top.
Anyway, how this helps this Tank build is that the combat becomes almost fully passive as far as console activations are concerned. For me, aside from an, “I’ma gonna die!,” button on Hull Image Refractors, you have zero Console activatable abilities to worry about. It’s all passive damage boosts and passive healing. Sure, you’ll still need to have your Captain and Reputation abilities at the ready, but this is up to 7 fewer consoles to have to worry about compared to only using Vulnerability Locators/Exploiters as our primary damage-boosting consoles. (Besides, because the Energetic Protomatter consoles heal me [yes, it’s a proc, but you’re shooting a ton], I’d rather have had those anyway).
The rest of the build is in the YouTube video.
A few notes:
* I went with an all-Watcher Bridge Officer setup as they’re essentially a budget and non-Fleet solution to Superior Romulan Operatives and Jem’Hadar Vanguards. Remember, this isn’t Free to Play, it’s more, “not spending so much money on one build.” Plus, according to Spencer, an all-Watcher crew will at least eke out a performance advantage compared to other options.
* I started off using 2 Personal Space Traits that were fairly expensive, but I reduced it down to one: A Good Day to Die. Sorry, this is a Tactical-career staple Personal Space Trait. It’s worth the 500 Zen to get rid of the EC cap so you can grind out the EC for that trait. It removes Go Down Fighting’s “50% or less hull” activation requirement. With Last Ditch Effort slotted (another Tactical trait, but it’s a free option), you get a little Damage Resistance Rating to boot. At 15 seconds of usefulness on activation and a 45-second cooldown, that makes Go Down Fighting into more of a Bridge Officer ability you’ll want to activate at all available times.
* This is not meant to be a meta Tank build. It’s more a “starter Tank” build. Some items and traits will change to do a better job at getting & holding Threat, increasing damage potential, and healing.
* I’m also not a master pilot. You’ll probably watch the videos below and wonder what in the world is going on. Well…so do I, at times. Ha ha! But it’s serviceable even if not optimal, so I’ll work with that for these purposes.
The Build-up and Learning: Running Infected: The Conduits on Advanced (“ISA”) in Pick-Up Groups (“PUGs”)
When I try to learn something, I need to learn it on lower difficulties (in no-stress situations) so I can at least get a feel of the flow of the queue and what things I need to be using and when…and even note what I’m forgetting to use. I can then look at the parse and see what I may be lacking (too low a Heal per Second may mean I need more heals; Attacks In below 50% means I need more Threat; etc.).
This run is a near-final test before attempting Infected: the Conduit on Elite (“ISE”). The build above is the majority of what’s on this video’s build, give or take a couple traits and BOFF abilities.
Star Trek Online, Terran Sirius Command Dreadnought Cruiser, ISA, Tank, run July 9th
Here’s the parse on its own, including the personal details on Heals per Second both damage and healing sources.
On a Tank build, you’re looking for a few things in the parse stats:
- Decent DPS. I believe Spencer had suggested that 120k+ DPS would be the low end of acceptable for in Advanced to look at…well, advancing to Elite. (See what I did there? Huh? Huh? … Fine! I’ll continue.)
- High “% Attacks In” and “% Damage In”. Those are, essentially, how much of the attacks came in at you (as a percent of all attacks) and what percent of damage you took (out of all damage dealt to your team). I believe I’d once read or heard you want those numbers not much lower than 60% each.
- Heals per Second (“HPS”). While I’ve never seen a target number for this, for some reason 3,000 HPS rings in my head as the target. Perhaps that’s just my low range that either Spencer or Endeavour has said seems fine, so I set that as the low end of the bar to clear? Who knows.
So, judging by those numbers, this recorded ISA was a success. 124k DPS, 75.19% of attacks in with 83.66% of the damage coming at me, and an HPS of over 7,000! I don’t know if those are even halfway decent numbers for a Tank, but I’ve personally never seen numbers like that for Tanking that I’ve intentionally tried to do, so I’ll call that a success!
So with Advanced testing (and comfort time-wasting) winding down, I turned my attention to Elite.
The Real Test: ISE in a Pre-Made Group
For Elites, I knew PUG’ing was likely to end in disaster (no specified roles, perhaps have 2-3 Tanks or all EPG, no Support, etc.). So I needed a group of people either I knew or that someone I knew could get together and would do fine even if I stumbled.
I relied on EndeavourGameOn for this part. I know Spencer’s had a lot on his plate, so I didn’t want to bother him.
I ended up doing two ISEs for this. The first one will be made public, so if you want to go to my YouTube page and look for it, it should be among the most recent videos I’ve uploaded.
The test and parse I’m showing off, though, is likely among my better runs overall, I feel, considering it was among the very few Elite runs I’ve done, if I’d done any before (it’s been 11 years for me, so if I did an Elite further back than a few years ago, it’s gone from my mind. Lol!).
Star Trek Online, Terran Sirius Command Dreadnought Cruiser, Tank, Infected: the Conduit Elite (ISE)
The details of this run’s parse are below:
Of note, this was as much a testing run for the other players involved. We weren’t going for record-breaking DPS; for them, it was more checking older builds or newer ships’ general performance.
I honestly feel that, for a “budget” build, this isn’t too bad, from what limited knowledge I have of Tanking stats.
- 126k DPS (likely low, but again, “budget” build. Full-on meta, that’s likely a good bit higher.)
- 79.70% of all Attacks in to the team, with 71.64% of all Damage in to the team.
- 5,648 HPS.
“What’s Up with this ‘Budget’ We Keep Reading About?”
Sorry for the hold-up! I was just so excited that I think I got Tanking down that I wanted to get the meat of the point of the review out of the way (which, if anyone missed the overall point, I’ll cover in the overall rundown below).
As I said, there was no real set amount of Dilithium, Energy Credits, or Z-Store purchases on this build, just that it had to be a budget build. Well, “budget” is open to a lot of interpretations. Here’s mine:
Budget (noun) – To set a specific limit on spending, usually involving a currency that’s limited in availability, and to fit within one’s means of living.
…yeah, so not exactly a definitive definition. So let’s consider that this is a game (or hobby if you treat ship combat builds kind of like building models), which means you have a fixed amount of disposable income. You don’t want to spend all your disposable income on STO unless it’s your only game where you can spend money constantly to help your overall performance (yeah, I know, spending $100 won’t get you better stats, but spending that $100 in the right ways will get you a general performance boost).
So I’ll assume that $100 USD is a bit high for a one-off build.
I couldn’t quite get there, but the impact could be a lot less depending on how you treat Event Campaigns, which let you pick (among other prizes) 2x T6 Z-Store coupons completely free (assuming you do no Buyouts or spend no cash on those Buyouts).
Here’s a list of all the gear, Re-engineering, and Upgrades I could keep track of, including equivalent Zen pricing.
EC-purchased Items/Gear/Traits
Ship Costs (for their Starship Trait)
NOTE 1: The Narendra has a Legendary version in the 11th Anniversary Bundle. If you have that Bundle, you don’t need the Narendra/Vor’ral.
NOTE 2: The Endeavour’s trait, Super Charged Weapons, comes on all 3 “Tactical” variants of the Tier 6 Flagships along with the Legendary Verity (10th Anniversary Legendary Starship Bundle) and the Legendary Scimitar (Legendary Romulan Warbird Bundle). If you have either of those Bundles, you have access to Super Charged Weapons and don’t need the Endeavour and its Faction equivalents.
Isomagnetic Plasma Distribution Manifolds
NOTE 1: Since I did Re-Engineering on these, Cryptic added more modifiers to the Re-Engineering re-rolls. It’ll likely take more Salvage and Dilithium than what it took me before that change.
NOTE 2: All “Isomags” started at Mk II before upgrading.
GRAND TOTALS IN ZEN:
As you can see, the Ships constitute nearly three-quarters of the entire build. If I had this to do over again, though, I’d likely ditch Super Charged Weapons (I don’t recall firing the torpedo too often, so it likely didn’t matter). Entwined Tactical Matrices is too important to keeping Beams: Fire at Will up nearly/at 100% uptime (“uptime” — How often it’s active as a percent of its cooldown timer until it could be activated again), and History Will Remember is too valuable for damage reduction.
So if we cut out the ships completely (no need for the Endeavour/variants and use your Event Campaign on 2x T6 Z-Store coupons), this build clocks in at 2,170 Zen at the lowest end. Even if we add back the Ba’ul Omni, that’s ~3,920, so under $40 USD. I don’t know about you, but the equivalent of a ship + $10 to do Elite-level Tanking isn’t bad, in my book.
But again, keep in mind that Re-Engineering is luck-based performance enhancement, and the pool of possible mods grew recently, so you’ll spend more Dilithium to get the same result. Even with my luck, though, before they added those extra mods, I only spent a cash equivalent of $2. You may spend $5, $10, or under $1 depending on your luck. Just keep track of that spending. If you’re on a tight budget, you may want to consider just buying the Isomags you specifically want from the Exchange, instead.
Impressions: Is This a Sirius Tank?
Considering I’ve never seriously tried Tanking before (I’d tried a solo Tank-style build, but never an Elite-capable Tank), I was quite impressed with the Sirius’ ability to take hits and keep on going. Plus, if I, the “professional noob,” can Tank in this, you can, too, and it’s just a matter of researching builds and gathering the proper gear, DOFFs, and traits.
Is it the best Tank platform? Likely not. I believe that honor falls to the Terran Styx Dreadnought Cruiser, but someone may want to update me on that. If you bought the 13th Anniversary Terran Bundle, though, you have this along with the Sirius, so there’s no risk to taking this setup and modifying it for the Styx (since you’re not out an additional $80-$100 cash equivalent to pick up one Styx for one character. 😉 ).
But if you only bought 1 ship from the Z-Store for both Tanking and general damage output, I’d say the Sirius is right up there for viable Tank platforms.
Final Rating
For the previous 3 ships, I gave an overall rating based on my experience.
It’s a “Galaxy-X” variant, meaning you can make it look like the “All Good Things…” Enterprise-D refit with the 3rd nacelle and the Phaser lance. I just chose not to use that because I feel it’s important to use the skin of the new ship so there’s no confusion which version of the ship I’m using: the current new one.
It doesn’t feel too sluggish, but some of that could be my Endeavor system Perk Points helping the turn rate. I don’t believe I had any turn rate-boosting passives in the equipment slots, and for all “gotta move quick” needs, there’s Evassive Maneuvers by default, you can get and make Deuterium Surplus, and you can slot Emergency Power to Engines for a 3rd boost. Plus, if you’re using the Competitive Impulse Engines (?), activating any firing mode will get you zipping around quite well.
I showed ~126k DPS on a Tank build. I have no doubt if you focused more on damage output than tanking, you’d get that number much higher. The Sirius isn’t the overall DPS monster of the meta (though I’m unsure what is, but I believe 5/3 ships are best for Energy Weapons while this is a 4/4), but if you’re not a DPS chaser, getting started into torpedo builds [this is a Command ship, after all. 😉 ), or you just like a Galaxy Class-style look, this’ll fit your needs quite nicely.
I’d give this ship an 8/10.
The Thanks for the Tank (and the other ships)
As I’ve been accustomed to doing for this series, here are the folks who made this Review Series possible. I apologize for the speed at which I’ve done this series, but I appreciate the faith they all had (have?) in me to see this through to completion. Four ships down, two to go!
* Spencer/CasualSAB
* Stephen
* EndeavourGameOn
* Gina G
* Ri’Shad Shadowstar
* KWolves21
* Pattee
The Next Test: Way Out in the Styx
Speaking of the Styx, that’s my next review: the Terran Styx Dreadnought Cruiser! We’re done with the new-to-the-Bundle ships and onto the Lock Box and Promo Ship offering for buying the Bundle (as opposed to picking up one of the new ships from their individual listing in the Z-Store). That’ll have a different twist on a previous build in the series, so stay tuned for a comparison of the two. Then it’ll be the final ship, the Mirror Crossfield Science Destroyer.
Until then, which I’m hoping to do within the next couple of weeks, take care and enjoy STO!
Joe and STO 