[kyafelour]

Hello experts,


since I more or less messed up my first and main char, when I started with STO, I am thinking of respec its skills now.

When I started this toon, I maxed out almost every skill I thought to be usefull. Which left me with a few skills on maximum and a lot of skills with 0 points. When reading http://sto.perfectworld.com/news/?p=861531 I began to rethink my balancing and limit the point-spending to a max of 6.

Generally speaking you’ll want to put a maximum of 6 points (also called levels) unless you absolutely need to put more. The reason is due to something called “diminishing returns.” This means that the more points you put in, the less of a bonus each point is worth. The first 3 points of a skill will give you a +18 bonus for a total of 54. The next 3 points give a +10 bonus for a total of 30. The final 3 points give a +5 bonus for a total of 15. As you can see, the bonus drops every 3 points. The last 3 points give a very small bonus (+15) which won’t make a huge difference. By saving those 3 points, you can put them someplace else that would be more helpful to you.

So here is my new approach (I only maxed Space Weapon Spec and Driver Coils.):
http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?buil...en140927_0 -- switch to skills tab please.

What are your experiences in this matter. Love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers
Lareen

[Signusalpha.enjin]

In my case i maxed most my sci skills didnt get anything for eng skills and my ground are so so full till prob logictics and only weapon proficency and ps generator, for the eng skills i dont have i use some consoles and borock or something like that for increasing my energy levels a lot

[kyafelour]

Thanx Signus,

have you or anybody else ever experienced if maxing out a skill really pays off. According to the post mentioned above you should stick with 6 of 9 levels. Which gets the most of the available (mathematically obvious). Has anybody discovered a skill, which is a "must have all of the 9 levels"?

Thanx
Lareen

[Sinlock.enjin]

I'm not sure why you have put 9 points in Driver Coil. I't has become a somewhat useless skill after they introduced Warp Cores. Before warp cores, the warp coil skill was what influenced your warp speed in sector space. Now it just adds a minor boost to Full Impulse and it Turn rate.

[kyafelour]

I read somewhere that this would be nice for "Tour of the universe" - is that deprecated information?

Thanx
Lareen

[kyafelour]

Hi,

I did a little digging in http://sto.gamepedia.com/Skills and did some tweaking on the previous build. What do you think?

http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?buil...en141108_0 ( switch to Skills please).

Any thoughts are welcome.

Thank you in advance.

[noybman]

The link to your build is not working for me... I'd be interested in seeing more peoples skill loadouts.

I wish they let us respec for free. Its very hard to know a skill effect without trying it, tasting it.

I will have to post my build.

[kyafelour]

Thanx for having a look, or try to.
Weird. I just tried the link, works fine for me - except, that you must manually click on >Skills<. I have no space or ground build set.

Could someone else double-check please, if more people have problems opening it. Thank you in advance.

Just for safety here a re-save: http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?buil...en141122_0

[Funks.enjin]

link works fine, but I'm no skills expert

[noybman]

Ok, so the link does work, I just failed to read the skills only part. (oops, my bad)
Q: What char is this for and what play style are you going with? Without populating your ship, ships equipment and other trait info in there, its quite hard to debate suggesting using 6 vs. 9 skills.

I guess the simple answer is, If you have 2, and then 2 more, and add 1 to it, is 5 better than 4? You bet it is!
Now, if you have 20, and then 20 more, and add 1 to it, is 41 better than 40? Well... of course the answer IS YES! (If someone thinks not... well....)

anyways - What I'm getting at, is along the lines of the 2000xp you spend on something else (levels 1-6), why? If you are flying a risian corvette, something tells me you DO NOT NEED to put 6 points into the turn rate skill. However, if you are flying a talshiar ship like I am, well... you might need more than 6 to have a reasonable enough turn rate to work with your build/playstyle.and make it usable. With that said, why dump 2000xp into a skill or performance trait you almost NEVER use, or the combined traits of your BOFFs, DOFFs, consoles, ship, and playstyle deem it unnecessary?

With that said, I would ABSOLUTELY put 9 points into Energy weapon skills no matter what captain I am, (or kinetic if I was a kinetic player). Why? Because even 2-8dps more per weapon is 2-8 more dps per weapon. If Im firing8 weapons on avg, thats easily 16-64dps at least - and with a crit hit, that can be 600dps more. Oh, speaking of crit, 1% vs 3%, adds up fast. So at the very least, since we all must kill enemies, we all should have skills spent well enough to support as much damage as we can afford to deal out.

The next biggies are exotics, hull heals, energy/battery amount, shield, turn rates, etc. (speaking to space only). Whatever is the most important skill you need to boost your ship ability to a level you are satisified, you use. If that means you need 9 skill points and 2 turn rate consoles to be satisfied with your movement, so be it. If it means sacraficing something else more important to you, then you probably want a different ship.

thats my in depth opinion but I really think this is the underlying FUN of STO, figuring it out so we can maximize our performance!

[kyafelour]

First of all thanks for your post. You make a lot of good points here.

Currently I use a Breen Raider T5U.
Loadout is as follows: http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?buil...n1411293_0

My skills are currently totally unbalanced, since I maxed out the lower ones when beginning with STO, without knowledge how limited the available points are.

What I search is a skill setting which is more balanced but NOT totally dedicated to ONE ship. I find respec quite expensive and don't want to change my skills everytime I change my ship. So I absolutely agree with your arguments and it would be big fun to test different settings. But this comes to expensive.

I agree to your point maxing out damage, so I maxed both Starship Weapon Skills and dropped some points from Auxilary Performance. Couldn't really make a decision, I fire torps as often as possible, though I don't use "Torpedo Boat"-builds.

On my "shopping list" are
- the Enhanced Bio-Molecular Photon from Counter-Command Rep.
- another Ultra-Rare Eng-Console from Dilimine (perhaps the RCS console, though the raider doen't really lack turn rate)
- and the Delta-Alliance Space set (Shields, Eng, Warp, Def)

[noybman]

Thanks for updating that info. It does make it easier to think about and talk to.

So, if you have a goal of being able to mix and match ships-playstyles-gear-and skills, then you are right to stay with 6 points per useful skill. Will you be doing any focus on ground? I ask because I found it absolutely impossible to pick a solid set of space skills covering my "ideal design" with only 300k points to work with. With this said, I'm presumably certain that you will be dissapointed trying to cover the things you REALLY want. A big benefit is that the 1-6 skill prices ultimately are cheaper than maxing them out at the earlier levels.

Anyways...
I would still strongly recommend you max out energy damages. Everyone needs it. Since you wont be building torp boats, maybe shy away from doing +6 on the torp skills.

Also, since you are talking about mix/matvh builds, take a good long look at hull heals vs. shield heals., you would normally want to max these too because (again) everyone needs as much hull as they can have, and shields help keep hull around longer. Either way, you will mosy likely have a hard time maxing them both out (but you probably should).

Maneuverability is a must for all ships, but if you are willing to accept making these +6, you can use the points you save for some exotics. Battery powers and exotics wont both be maxxed out, but you can "balance them" accordingly to what you expect to use. If you are willing to use batteries you can go lower on power boots/xfers.

At the end of the day, you are right- it is IMPOSSIBLE to get the best build of skills you want without sacrificing something. Perhaps take a look at what consoles/DOFFs you expect to be using on each build (commonly), and let that skill get a little less boost in favor of something else you really want to put it in.

I would probably recommend fleet tactical consoles on everything (of the same damage type per ship) no matter what the build, and put universals in the eng/sci locations.You will at least dish out the most dps you can considering the design you are going with. It is expensive to respec, and STO clearly did this intentionally. They would prefer you make a different character for each type you are interested in playing as instead of making it sensible to use only 1 char. At the end of the day, your dps, or your power, or your survivability is going to suffer but it will give you the chance to really feel things out and decide your end game design. THEN you can respec again and love it when you do.

[kyafelour]

Well, I do ground now and then, but I do like space more. And your right: There is no room for a space- AND ground-related setting in the same toon. You only got skill-points to do one of them. So I will only spend as much ground points as I have to.

You are right in matters of damage types. In my current setting they were maxed out from my very beginning, so I would be very disappointed with any loss there. At least energy damage should stay on max.

I will take a closer look on heals again. Maneuverabilty is a point too, but I think i will stay away from cruiser type ships with this toon, so this doesn't have to be main focus, with the RCS console up my sleeve.

Something always has to be sacrificied, that's the game - and as life goes, too.

Dropping that SCI-consoles for universals and getting some room in the TACs is a great idea. Those are only found ones from rep-system. The fleet TAC-consoles are great. Should add upgrading them to my shopping list, too.

Thank you. Will update this thread with a modified skill set in some days.