The New Player and the New Account: The Three-Week Roundup

Hello, Joe and STOers! After indicating an intent to run a 3rd account for the F2P experience, giving a first update in the form of a playthrough of the opening mission, and doing a Universal Endeavor walkthrough for the Nimbus Dance Competition, I wanted to give a proper update at around the 3-week mark of this new account.

I currently have 3 characters on this account:

• Remara’Etan is my primary character. Right now, he’s got a number of Tier 5 ships from the Exchange and Tier 6 Admiralty-specific ships from the Phoenix Prize Pack to do Admiralty missions fairly reliably, he’s got rough ship builds to do all the “Deal [type] Damage (Space)” Endeavors and I believe enough Ground weapons for most, if not all, Ground-based Endeavors, and the only one with a “proper” working ship setup (as you’ll see below).
• Grav’ty was made when I realized we were going into the extra Dilithium days of the No-Win Scenario Event. To get Dilithium refined as quickly as possible, you want 2-3 characters rotating through those extra days (I did the math on a Twitter….*ahem* X post a week or so ago).
• Korol is a temporary Klingon character. He won’t do much except get to Level 65, perhaps do some Admiralty and Reputations to get some Dilithium before he’s eventually replaced by a Klingon Recruit.
  • You get 10 character slots, but you’ll need 6 of them to get all the Recruit-based account-wide rewards:
    • 1 for Temporal (Starfleet, TOS-era character)
      • 1 for Klingon (any Klingon Defense Force character creation type, but not allied so can’t use Romulans or Jem’Hadar for this)
        • 1 for Gamma (should be the next Recruit type in line as of the time of this writing)
        • 3 for Delta: 1 Starfleet 2409-era; 1 Klingon; 1 Romulan (either Federation- or Klingon-aligned).
        • While you could erase those characters after their work is done to free up character space…you’ll likely find you put a lot of work and resources into them. Why rebuild from scratch? This is why they want you to buy Character Slots. However, if you’re already divorced enough from them that deletion isn’t a bad thing, then yes, just make sure you have them for their Recruit rewards, claim them all, then dump them for a character(s) you would like.

That’s definitely a lot fewer than I’m used to, but real-life time has slipped from me (along with making content that’s hopefully relevant for a number of you) so this update isn’t as chock full of improvements like AllThingsTrek47’s was.

“HOW’S THE VIEW FROM DOWN THERE?”

Oh, ha ha ha. Yeah, I know, me and all my 13-year buildup of fancy ships and gear, and here I am with a T5-U Jem’Hadar Escort, barely a fleet of ships that can provide a variety of play experience, and nowhere near all the Reputations and Specializations at full strength.

But honestly, it’s not been that bad.

Sure, I’ve had to be a bit more methodical about ship acquisitions, Admiralty mission fills, what I do to get Reputation Marks and how many I need, but performance-wise, I don’t feel I’m missing out on as much as I thought I would.

“…Really?”

Well, I mean, I miss not having stuff like Dynamic Power Redistributor Module (mostly on Klingons as they were relatively cheap Choice Packs for just the Console at the time), Miracle Worker-spec’d T6 ships for Tour the Galaxy, and a boatload of ships for the Admiralty system, but I’ve managed to scrape by on my damage output (parse from an Infected: the Conduit [Space] public queue on Normal difficulty).

“HOW!?”

I’ll get to that later. Right now, I kind of want to do an economical update to show earnings compared to targets.

Back to the Reason for This: Affording What You Want at F2P Levels

The whole point of doing this series is to get to enough Zen to grab a 10th Anniversary Legendary Bundle…not quickly, but to get it done. But that means we have to invest into characters to get them into shape to get the Bundle.

Currency Levels

So far, my reserves look like this across all 3 characters:

This totals up to:

• 3,558,624 EC
• 185,690 Refined Dilithium (average: 8,440 Dilithium per Day over 22 days)
• 38,810 Unrefined Dilithium
• COMBINED DILITHIUM: 224,500 (averaging ~10,204 Dilithium per Day)
• COMBINED ZEN EQUIVALENT: 449 Zen (224,500 Dilithium / 500 Dilithium per 1 desired Zen)

While I could have done better (more queues/patrols/battlezones, more missions run, more Admiralty rotations and Admiralty focus on Grav’ty), I don’t feel this is too bad considering my time constraints.

If I really wanted to push, I’d try to get ~51 Zen more in Dilithium (25,500 Dilithium, to be exact) to get the EC Cap increased…but I don’t think I’ll do that.

I’m 1/4 of the way to getting a Starter Pack (usually ~2,000 Zen when not on sale), and while I was originally going for the Temporal Agent Starter Pack (2 ships [although one’s a Tier 1 Constitution], 1 BOFF, 1 uniform), I just can’t get my mind off the Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack like I did the last time I tried this. I’ll try to set aside an article to explain why in another post. But either way, I feel going for a Starter Pack of some kind will be more beneficial for new character creation down the line than the EC Cap increase would be right now.

Having said that, though, if, once I get back to putting a real strong focus on this account, I start noticing I’m regularly up against the EC cap on at least one character (free accounts can hold 15 million EC per character outside the Account Bank), I’ll likely grab that cap removal service (and especially if a good Services sale hits).

How have I achieved this so far?

EC

This one is Tour the Galaxy. Over a 15-minute span, and with my equipment right now, I can get a solid 6 digits worth of EC per Tour run. Combined with selling undesirable loot and Reputation daily project equipment drops, I’d say you could turn nearly 1 million EC per day on a character.

Events

I got nearly the full amount of extra Dilithium I could have from doing the No-Win Scenario event every day, so 8,000 initial extra, increasing by 1,000 Dilithium per day, combined with the 25,000 Dilithium initial payout, that’s ~117,000 Dilithium, equivalent to ~234 Zen (very roughly half my current total).

Plus, I’ll do the extra days of the current Galactic Red Alert, so that’ll be another 63,000 Dilithium if all my timing works out (8,000 on a 2nd run the day I get the main prize + 9,000 the next + 10,000 + 11,000 + 12,000 + 13,000).

Reputations

This is only for Remara’Etan, but you can see I have quite a few Reputations at Tier 3. Daily Reputation projects give 340 Dilithium, so if you could get 10 of those among the 13 (?) Reputations fired off each day, that could be 3,400 Dilithium per day. That’t not likely to happen early on without Recruit account-wide unlocks, but if you put enough time in (especially right now with a Galactic Red Alert mixed with a Bonus Marks Event to go with it), it’s doable.

Part of doing Reputations is doing Patrols and TFOs. Depending on the Patrol, you could get a minimum 1 day of 1 Reputation per Patrol (with a few in the Azure Sector region and acros sthe Delta Quadrant awarding a tad more). With TFOs, you tend to get a lot of Marks along with about 420 Dilithium per run.

Galactic Red Alert right now is nice: 420 Dilithium per run, ~50 Marks per run (due to a Bonus Marks Event), and they’re instantly repeatable. Now until ~September 12th or 13th would be a great time to focus on Red Alerts for a high rate of return on both Marks and Dilithium.

Admiralty

Again, this is for Remara’Etan. I’m surprised it’s only taken ~3 weeks to hit Level 7 in each Reputation (roughly evenly spaced out). Level 1 gave 1,000 Dilithium per Admiralty track, while Level 5 gave 5,000 each. Once these hit Level 10, they’ll award 25,000 Dilithium each, but I’m going to take my time on those (more details closer to that happening). Let’s just say I’m focusing the Ferengi “Tour of Duty” completions more than the other Campaigns’ “Tour of Duty” lines for some extra Dilithium.

As for the ships, that 33 count includes 10 ships that are one-time use. Still, 20-something permanent ships from only 2 to start is not bad! My other Jem’Hadar character will work on getting a more robust roster, as well. 20-something ships still isn’t enough to be very confident in getting a lot of Admiralty missions going successfully, but so far I’ve only had to pass up a few due to requirements being too high.

LET THAT BE IT…FOR NOW.

I wanted to get an update up before the weekend gets away from me.

I’ll come back next week with the build I’m currently using for my Jem’Hadar Escort (including Perk Point spending from Endeavors), how I’m managing the “Deal [type] Damage” dailies, and what I’ve gotten from the Phoenix Prize Pack.

For now, that 22.5k parse of Infected: The Conduit on Normal will have to tide you over.

Until next time, continue enjoying Star Trek Online!