The Hilbert Blog

Eng/Cruiser as main healer

The cruiser in the guide is a multi-purpose build that can do everything. Hence it is not really optimised for any particular task. This makes it a good generic template for beginners, but if one wants a more specialised cruiser, a different build can be useful.

The following build should be used by an engineer who is the main healer of a team. This means that this cruiser will rely on help from the team to get ST for clearing SS/SNB.

Fore Weapons
Deflector
Impulse
Shields
Aft Weapons
Engineering Consoles
Science Consoles
Tactical Consoles

Ship

• Ship type: Assault Cruiser (or Tactical Odyssey)
• Front weapons: 4 Beam Arrays
• Aft weapons: 4 Beam Arrays
• Engineering consoles: 3 Neutronium Alloy Mk XI / Borg Console
• Science consoles: 2 Field Generator Mk XI
• Tactical consoles: 3 consoles for your energy type
• Doffs: Shield Distribution Officers and Maintenance Engineers
• Power levels: 100 / 25 / 25 / 50

Depending on the rarity of the maintenance engineers you have available you can use three blues or two purples. The goal is to reduce ET3 to its global cooldown of 15s.

Bridge Officers

• Tactical Lt: FAW1 / FAW2
• Tactical Ens: TT1
• Engineering Cmdr: EPtW1 / RSP1 / ET3 / AtSIF3
• Engineering LtC: EPtS1 / EPtS2 / ES2
• Science Lt: HE1 / TSS2

Skill EPtW1 only to level 6 (60s cooldown). Put EPtS1, EPtS2, FAW1 and FAW2 on autofire (tray 7). Use TT only if it is really necessary. Usually your team should provide the TT. Your job is to distribute as many heals as possible, therefore your ET has priority over TT.

Make sure that you have set the option Auto attack (in Options -> Controls) to "Toggle, non-combat cancels", so that your your weapons keep firing even when you are switching between allies to heal them.

A word about accuracy

Not every shot you fire in STO hits its target. How many shots miss is determined by a formula that takes the bonus accuracy (Acc) of the attacker and the bonus defense (Def) of the attacked player into account.

Bonus accuracy can be obtained by speccing into Starship Targeting Systems  and by using weapons with [Acc] modifiers. The [Acc] modifiers only apply to the individual weapons and thus do not show up in the character's info tab.

Bonus defense can be obtained by speccing into Starship Maneuvers, by increasing the ship's speed and from some abilities like APO and Evasive.

To determine the hitrate of a weapon the difference (Diff = Acc - Def) between bonus accuracy and bonus defense is used. This means that same values in Acc and Def cancel each other out. When Diff is 0, then the hitrate is 100%. If Diff > 0, then the hitrate remain at 100% and supposedly there is some overflow into CritD and CritH. Against moving targets Diff will be negative most of the time though. When Diff < 0, the chance to hit is determined by formulas that differ between beam and cannon weapons. Make sure you use decimal representations of the percentages when you use these formulas, i.e. 12,3% = 0,123.

For cannons, the chance to hit is

Hit = 1 / (1 - Diff)

For beams, the chance to hit is

Hit = 1 / (1 - Diff) * 0,75 + 0,25

To illustrate the difference, the following graph shows the theoretical hit rates for beams and turrets (which are cannon weapons) and real world data points that were gathered in a controlled 1v1 environment.

According to a STOked episode where CaptainGeko gave an incomplete description of the accuracy mechanics (only for cannons, he did not touch the beam accuracy issue and the STOked guys did not ask him), there is a minimum hit chance of 25% that is independent of the Diff value. Since 25% hitrate is only attained at Diff = -300% for turrets, there is no way to test whether this is actually true, since one cannot get a defense rating that is high enough to produce such a Diff.

This 25% minimum chance explains why the beam curve looks the way it does. The hitrate formula for cannons gives values that asymptotically approach 0 when Diff goes to negative infinity which means that it is necessary to implement a hard cut-off to get the 25% minimum chance. The formula for beams on the other hand goes asymptotically to 25% and thus does not require a special cut-off. In a way the beam formula is the smarter way to implement the 25% minimum chance, but obviously the curve declines more slowly and thus for identical Diff values, beams will hit more reliably than cannons.

Special cases are FAW and CSV. FAW used to have a 100% hitrate and after a "fix" it now takes a player's innate accuracy rating into account, but ignores the weapons' [Acc] modifiers. And despite being a beam ability, it uses the cannon formula. This means that currently FAW has the same hitrate as a turret without any [Acc] modifiers.

CSV has a higher hitrate than regular cannon fire (but not 100% like FAW used to have). As far as I know, the reason for this is not known with certainty. I suspect that it has to do with how CSV's multi-target damage is calculated since it appears that against a single target CSV behaves as expected from cannons. One would need to conduct tests in a controlled environment with multiple ships of known defense rating as targets to gather data to formulate a theory.

Building a Sci/Sci

Giving advice regarding science ships is difficult. In contrast to escorts and cruisers there is no default layout for science ships that you can find (with minor modifications) on almost every ship. Another difference to cruisers and escorts is the fact that there are practically no non-science captains flying science ships in a premade setting.

Fore Weapons
Deflector
Impulse
Shields
Aft Weapons
Engineering Consoles
Science Consoles
Tactical Consoles

Since this is just the informal blog, the following proposal for a science ship is less detailed than the builds in the guide and aimed at more advanced players. This means that instead of "easy" abilities like RSP or AtSIF, you will see an Extend 1.

Ship

• Ship type: DSSV
• Front weapons: 3 Beam Arrays
• Aft weapons: 3 Beam Arrays
• Engineering consoles: 2 Neutronium Alloy Mk XI / Borg Console
• Science consoles: 3 consoles of your choice / Field Generator Mk XI
• Tactical consoles: 2 consoles for your energy type
• Doffs: 2 Shockwave / 1 Tractor Beam / 2 Shields
• Power levels: 100 / 25 / 25 / 50

Bridge Officers

• Tactical Lt: TT1 / APB1
• Engineering Lt: EPtS1 / ES1
• Engineering Ens: EPtS1
• Science Cmdr: TB1 / TSS2 / ST3 / PSW3
• Science LtC: TB1 / HE2 / ST3

Here is an idea for a spec: > Spec at STO Academy <