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If you try this, be prepared for a pretty long slog as the missions are random and don’t always show up. I have done this on a couple of toons and it took about a month to finally get 3 of them.
One tip that helps is that if the mission chain doesn’t show up, you can fly out of the sector, just over the border and return and the missions on the map will reset. This gives you 2-3 tries for the mission each time the overall map resets the missions.
Also, since you need to get a critical success in order to get the purple Aux2Bat doff it helps to get purple or blue doffs that have the right attributes to raise the critical chance of the mission. At best you can get it in the mid-30% chance for a critical success, so it needs at least 10+ attempts after unlocking the final mission.
Good luck!
For Energy DPS builds Intelligence/Strategist is generally considered “best”. Intel gives a pretty large damage bonus when flanking a target.
Miracle worker is great for tanking, survival or balanced builds.
Temporal is the go to for EPG/Science or Scitorp builds. It gives added EPG and grants continuity which teleports you out of danger if your health hits zero (with cool down before it can trigger a 2nd time).
Command doesn’t get much love, but has some nice team oriented abilities for support role.
Constable is an option instead of strategist for single target builds, as it gives some bonuses if you attack a single target for a longer period of time.
Keep up with admiralty and you can get them all leveled up fairly quickly.
I am not a big RPr, so for me it’s a great thing. It doesn’t bother me how others want to play in terms of keeping to canon builds or not, whatever they want to do is fine.
For me it just gives more options, more admiralty cards, and I can save money on crappy ships bundles with good traits/consoles by just buying the Romulan ships. All good things.
The reality imo is that the game is not strong enough to support much new content, so they need to focus on creating content that benefits all players.
G
Yes, R&D boxes are only available for a limited time (not sure the exact date). They are not gone forever though. Every couple of months they will have another “event”, and for at least part of the time there will be a discounted price.
Those numbers assume purchases are during sales. 1000 is the normal price for 4 boxes, but they always have at least a 20% sale, and last weekend they had a 30% off sale.
Cryptic runs a lot of sales, it pays to plan ahead and be patient.
Reviewing various posts on different sites, the chance of getting a ship from an R&D pack is about 1.1%. Getting a ship with 45 packs is pretty lucky. It would be common to open 100 packs and not get one.
The best way to guarantee a ship is to buy infinity promotion R&D packs on sale (700 for 4), put them on the exchange for $16 million until you have enough to buy the ship with EC. 75 packs sold for $16m each would buy the ship for 1.2 billion ec. That would be about 13,000 zen per ship. A little less than $100 per ship if you buy 28000 zen during a zen sale for $200. If you don’t want to spend money you would need to grind out 5 million dilithium, convert to zen, buy packs to sell and get it that way.
Infinity promotion duty officer packs give slightly more ec per zen vs R&D packs when they go on sale. Buying keys for ec is a much more expensive way to convert zen to ec, but they are always available if you are in a hurry.
RE power levels, I believe that is with both emergency power to weapons and emergency power to shields active. You wouldn’t be able to achieve that with no buffs running. Still impressive!
Congrats on the new ship! I was in a run with one and those pets look amazing. Looks like a great tank platform, and the extra DPS from the beams will help keep aggro.
I was surprised at it having two full hangar bays and a full set of 8 weapons also. It is almost identical to the Tzenkethi Tzen-tar which is only 5/2. My guess is they felt taking away the ability to use dual cannons and taking away the Lietenant Commander Command seat was enough to compensate. If they ever buff beams back to be competitive with cannons and torps, those beams would be seriously OP.
I have been saving for it but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Waiting to see what balance changes/bug fixes arrive in the next couple of weeks.
I have a theory on some of the recent updates like this, mostly moving towards making the game easier. I have a couple friends who have tried STO, and they both gave up rather quickly. I gave them some decent weapons and gear, but around L50 they said the game was becoming very hard in certain missions, and once they discovered all the clicky systems and dailies (doffing, admiralty, reputations, endeavors etc) were the primary means for gaining resources and access to the better equipment, they just lost interest.
They were used to games like SWTOR, FF XIV and WOW where the gear/equipment systems are much more easily understood and full sets of level appropriate gear are obtained naturally along the way. Everything is pretty much easy mode unless people choose to pursue the end-game content which begins to require some min-maxing to succeed. The trade-off of course is that there isn’t much variety in builds and equipment compared to STO, which is one of the things I enjoy most about it.
The scaling T6 ships are very overpowered compared to the T1-T4 ships. This makes the game much easier through the early to mid levels and getting that first L65 character leveled up. This will perhaps give people more time to become invested in the game before giving up once they hit the wall of clicky-grind.
With a T6 ship and even common MkXII gear people can get through the content pretty easily now with the recent NPC damage nerf. No need to do all the daily clickity-click if you don’t want to. This should keep more people playing longer who may eventually decide to purchase more C-Store items, which in the end is what keeps the lights on.
Hopefully this will be healthy for the game going forward and increase player retention.
I had to google Canute. I thought the reference might have something to do with Bilbo Baggins, who also felt like butter spread over too much bread, but as usual I was wrong.
I found this article about Canute:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13524677
I learned something new today. Always good thing.
@Nubia:
I think your ideas to tie the rewards into regular content are great. I wasn’t disagreeing with that at all. I apologize if it seemed that way. These grindy events that require daily logins are just not practical for many people and it would be good if they addressed that.
I was just commenting that what they are actually doing is good start in terms of getting ships to people that fit their play style. I hope they can expand on the available ways to earn “coupons”, and I hope the program is continued so that those unable to complete this over the 3 TFO events can earn a ship as well doing other content.
My first reaction was to be discouraged at yet another long grind of mindless daily tasks clicking at reputations and running time-gated auto-win TFOs where action don’t matter. Their current strategy of these back-to-back “events” is getting a bit draining and not very much fun.
After giving it some more thought this idea seems to me a move in a positive direction. Most people are already doing 14 each of these TFOs for the reward anyway, so this is just a bonus on top of what we are already getting for doing just a few more TFOs, especially with the double coupon days. Cryptic is already pretty generous with 3 annual free T6 ships during the Winter, Summer, and Anniversary events. This will give active players another free ship each year so that everyone can choose a ship that fits their preferred play style.
In terms of being just an excuse to sell tokens on the C-Store, I don’t really see that as an issue. People already can buy the ships, so being able to earn part of a ship with coupons and buy the rest is better than no option at all. I don’t expect this will be a big money maker for them, more of an incentive to keep more players active.
I think Cryptic knows exactly what they are doing. They track everything and I am sure there are some small % of players who literally spend thousands of dollars every year getting these ships on multiple characters. If they weren’t “exclusive” they would quickly lose interest and move on. $300 may seem like a lot of money, but it really isn’t that much if Dad is giving you a $20,000 monthly allowance. I have seen this and worse in my years as a CFO and estate planner, and these people aren’t as rich as you might think.
The argument that if they drastically lower the price more people will buy is true, but that is why they have the Cstore ships for that market. Making the promo ships cheaper won’t necessarily raise more money as the whales will lose interest if there is no exclusivity.
In Cryptic’s eyes, the purpose of the majority of players is to give the whales someone to play with so they keep spending money.
I personally think the prices are crazy high as well and would love to see account unlocks, but more important to me is that Cryptic gets enough funding to keep the game alive so I can continue to enjoy it. If that means I don’t fly Promo ships on all of my alts, that is ok with me.
The odds of getting these tokens is extremely low. Of course only Cryptic knows for sure, but based on forum posts and what other fleet members have reported I would estimate the odds of getting an EPIC token to be less than 1 in 1,000, and the odds of Ultra Rare something less than 1 in 300.
The good news is that they are still a good deal, even if there was no chance at all to get the ships. There are some great items in the boxes (red matter capacitor, duty officers, consoles etc), and the upgrade tokens are the most cost effective way to upgrade your gear.
The ships from the UR tokens are older T5 ships, so none of them are really that great in today’s game, but still more capable of doing just about anything with a good build and pilot. I would pick whatever you like the looks of and feel like would be fun to fly. The Jem’Hadar bug ships unlocks the pets for the Jem’Hadar Carrier, so that is a popular choice.
This round I went overboard and opened 1,000 boxes. I got 1 EPIC and 2 UR tokens, and I am very happy with that.
