Level 50 was for a very very long time the maximum level. That means players set there forever and got the best gear possible and had a lot of experience, knew every trick. And with those players in mind the new missions of the iconian war were written.
That is a problem for a new player. Don't feel bad about it.
I would recommend the following things :
- Don't upgrade your weapons. Outside of maybe some elite team missions lv 12 gear works fine. I have like a dozen characters and most have not a single peace beyond lv 12 and i can do the whole game with every single one of them i have played enough to have reputation gear. Upgrading cost a lot of dilitium and rare ingredients. You only want to do that if you have your "final" ship and gear layout. It's usually better to convert the dill to zen and buy a ship. Or use it for fleet/reputation gear. Only upgrade stuff if you really know you wan't to keep it.
- Try to get an event ship. There is always a summer and a winter event where you can get a free best level ship unlocked account wide. Even if you don't like it, it gets you a T6 ship ability and a lot of practice. Sometimes there are also giveways of Zen-ships that don't sell too well. That has included T5 science ships in the past.
- Do some reputation progression before you move on story wise. The reputation ear is better than all drops and only some fleet gear is (arguably) better. Reputation stuff is endgame gear. Which reputation is most useful for you depends on your build, but you can combine sets of diferent reputations.
- Science builds can be done to do a lot of damage with science abilities like gravity well or the ability where you reflect damage. But for that you really need to build for. Have e.g. science consoles that boost exotic particle damage and traits that do and duty officers that do and deflectors that do and skills that do, boff skills doing this kind of damage ... you get the idea. But that is not the only viable science build. There is also the option of a drain build that is similarly specialized or a carrier build (which was slightly nerfed unfortunately and costs Zen anyway if you don't go Klingon)
- or you could build a normal allrounder that fights with weapons, can do everything a little but will never be a particularly powerful build. Yes, that is still viable. Subpar, but viable. you still need reputation gear to have fun.
- Borg red alerts should be (comparably) easy. Those are geared to level 45-50, so they are nice practice before you do iconian war stuff. You can test strategies and builds there and get marks for reputation as reward.
Your Ship :
- It is not recommended to use more than one torpedo outside of special builds.
- It is (outside of very complicated builds) not recommended to combine beams with cannons/turrets. That is mainly because boff abilities buff either beams or cannons/turrets and you don't have that many tactical boffs
- It is recommended to stick to one kind of energy weapons : all phaser, all plasma, all disruptor... That is becaus the energy specific tactical consoles give the biggest boost and when you have 5 Phasers and 3 consoles that boost all phaser damage, you will be better than with 3 phasers, a disruptor and an antiproton weapon and 3 concoles that boost all beam damage. That is more important for tac ships but i would not negrect it
- pay attention to fire arcs. In general, people combine either cannons (shooting in front arc only) with turrets in the back, use dual beams (shooting in the front) with omnidicetional beams in the back (those are kind of hard to get) or use normal bhaser banks front and back and fire broadsides with overlapping fire arcs. Again, there are some exceptions but that is the general idea.
you can have more than one of the same type of console? I thought they all had to be different!! (grumbles)
A few cnsoles are unique. That is usually in the text. Most aren't. And yes, most players use more consoles of the same kind. Most popular with tactical consoles for that stackind + damage to a certain weapon time and with the engeneering resistance consoles. There are some players who have 3 or 4 lv 12 neutronium consoles. But there are diminishing returns on those.
If you want to go the extra mile for specific hard missions, you could look, what kind of weapon your enemy has and slot damage resistance consoles against this particular damage tipe for the mission. You should not really need to do so, but it is a cheap trick if you still struggle a bit.
thanks for that info, I'll try that. I'm doing the Taskforce delta? The Antiborg ones? I kinda want their stuff.
The different reputations are supposedly similarly powerful concerning the unlocked gear options. They are meant as alternatives but some mixing and matching is common. There are always some advantages and disadvantages though.
But yes. Farming reputations is what you are supposed to do at your level. With most reputations that does involve team based combat missions to do in any reasonable time. The big exception is the romulan reputation which is most easily done via Eppoh-tagging.
I have noticed recently that, with Iconian war missions, the friendly ships they pop you with also get "damaged to zero hull" super fast... but don't die like myself. I presume that "maybe" enemy damage is how they made the missions artificially hard?
That is a thing they started iirc with legacy of Romulus but did more often later on. The idea is to set some "friendly" ships into the mission that can never be fully destroyed and always come back after a repair break. Those will eventually "win" most of those missions on their own, so that a new player like you doesn't get stuck as easily. But it will take hours and is not the way it is meant to be played. It is just a crutch to compensate the gap between 4-year-veterans in the best ships that can do advanced STFs solo and new players like yourself. Those allies are not very useful to the really good players but a big help for the new and undergeared players.
