How do you survive Ground missions?

[Revanchist1ab]

So I just recently hit lvl 65 and I've arrived on New Romulus. Before lvl 50, ground missions weren't too hard, now I can barely survive a team of 3 enemies.

What am I supposed to be doing? I'm a Tac officer with a Klingon melee tac, two science officers, and an engineer.

My Skill points are in Health, Shields, and base damage, and my specializations are Command and Commando... whatever the damage one is.

Should I just straight up spec for damage and criticals? It seems those points I put in health and shields arent doing anything.

I'm also using Borg weapons since I just started doing the Omega/MACO rep.

[Agnithrax]

Tactical: Photon Grenade I, Target Optics I, Overwatch I, Motion Accelerator
Science: Medical Tricorder I, Medical Tricorder II, Vascular Regenerator II, Nanite Health Monitor
Engineer: Quick Fix I, Shield Recharge II, Equipment Diagnostics I, Reroute Power to Shields

Pollyalloy Weave Armoe
Dual Pistols to clear out trash

M.A.C.O. sets later on

[Nimbull]

On my engineer I do the following:

New Char: Phaser/Disruptor turret, Mortar launcher, shield gen, health gen, mines
Currently: Health/shield drone, explody drone, Methusla, nomad drone, mortars

Things that make em go boom on my engie works wonders. Rack up 4 engies to go planet side with a new char setup as much as possible and you can have 5 mortar launchers + lots of mines just blowing everything up. Not to mention turrets, shields, and health generators all over the place for you.

[Revanchist1ab]

what about skills? do they do anything? Is there any particular setup?

I've been using a sniper and its been pretty good.

[Jaq]

Ditch the Tac on New Romulus and take either 2 medicals or a medic + engineer, with skills focused entirely on keeping your captain alive. More or less the skill sets Agnithrax posted above (could argue about engi regenerators). Tacs aren't worth bringing unless you have a full team of 5, and even then I'm not sure. I also doubt a melee bridge officer is a good idea, but I haven't tried running one in a long time. Most of the damage in ground combat comes from your captain's gun, because the AI-controlled characters don't attack as frequently as they could. For a time I experimented with only equipping bridge officers with big single shot weapons if they were going to be reluctant to fire often anyway, but I never came to a conclusion about whether that increased their overall effectiveness. I mostly favor giving them polaron weapons with knockdowns, as this decreases incoming damage on your captain the most.

[necaradan666]

Forget shields and health on the skill tree, put points in weapon damage/crits and in kit power/recharge, killing power matters more that staying power everywhere in STO, for the most part. A slow firing sniper rifle is probably holding you back, I'd swap for an assault rifle or split/wide beam rifle.

Boffs don't really matter, I just set them up with basic white energy damping armour and shields from the ground requisition store, give them all assault rifles and do the missions on my own.

But if you really want them to be useful I guess you could find Team Space Princess' Ground Boff guide useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/wiki/tspbasicboffguide

I do have one of my teams set up this way and they become somewhat useful, for Boffs anyway. They do look slightly cooler using command and intel skills.

[VoodooMike]

If you're having a tough time with ground content make sure your away team is at least two engineers with a focus on fabrications, and one sci with two different heals and maybe some sort of aoe. When you only get two away team members, make them both engineers.

Engineer away teams members should have a loadout like Chroniton Mines, Turret, Medical or Shield Generator (and use the doff that spawns the other type sometimes), and maybe a MW specialization with the healing canister.

You yourself should crouch to fight to get the Commando specialization heal ticks, and stay inside the shield/health generators and certainly inside the minefield they spam.

I don't know how much it costs to snag the manuals on the exchange, but giving your boffs Harmonic Lure III... on more than one of them... should fill the world with hurq attendants which will happily soak bullets.

[Khelder]

Might seem a stupid thing to mention - but check that all of your gear is Mk XII, and ideally Purple (or at least Blue). If you can get Sets from missions, that'll help.

Missions "Uneasy Allies" (Romulan Imperial Navy set - no weapon, but also comes with a decent Kit Module), "Survivor" (Furtive Perserverance set - includes Cloak and bonus Crit), "The Temporal Front" (Na'kuhl Temporal Operative set - the shield alone gives you 10 seconds of invincibility with a 60 second cooldown), or the "Lost Dominion"/"2800" missions (hidden under "Available", not in the main list) are all good, and are hopefully available to you.

Also, check that you and your Bridge Officers have a decent mix of Expose/Exploit weapons between you, for the bonus damage!

[Nimbull]

I'd snag a TR-116. It has 100% shield penetration and borg don't adapt to it. It's been serving my engie well. Also if you do that quest with the Fab Ferengi you can get Lek's throwing knives which also has 100% shield pen.

[LostSoulToo]

Originally posted by Nimbull:

I'd snag a TR-116. It has 100% shield penetration and borg don't adapt to it. It's been serving my engie well. Also if you do that quest with the Fab Ferengi you can get Lek's throwing knives which also has 100% shield pen.

I've found Lek's knives' performance to be sketchy for some reason. At least as I've used it so far. I've killed enemies faster with weaker energy weapons than I do with Lek's. Not sure how to explain that. Note: I've not tested them against borg yet, so I'm not sure how that factors in.

[Revanchist1ab]

Thanks all. ^-^

Ima respec into damage like Nec said and switch to 2 Sci / 2 Eng based on JaQ's suggestion.

I haven't ever had luck with the auto rifles, but I'll give the split beams a try.

I think I'm still to low in the crafting ranks to get gear sets, but I have been keeping my eye out.

I did read about the TR-116, but its gonna take a loooooong time for me to craft them. I've only been building my cannon crafting rank (now lvl 10).

Thank you all again! If you have any thoughts on what I should throw on my BOffs, I'd love to hear it.

Also side note: The melee actually does wonders. I have the gloves you get from the prize box and they cut enemies down way more reliably in 1-on-1. My big issue is that most ranged weapons do VERY little damage, even the pistols which claim to have the highest DPS.

[Tilarta]

It depends on the mission, but some of the endgame ones are fairly punishing.
I basically treat it as a case of, obliterate as many as you can, respawn and continue the process until there's nobody left but the boss (if there is one).

Due to a certain longstanding ground gameplay bug which resets BOFF powers randomly, I don't bother with specific skill loadouts.
I just give them a Advanced Fleet weapon or some other MK12 weapon and let firepower be my solution!

Also, I make use of the focus fire command a lot, it's hotkeyed, so I pick the strongest enemy in the group and order that one to be obliterated first, they tend not to survive all my BOFFs targeting them at once.

My average team is tac, engineer, sci, sci.

And a sniper rifle helps out a lot, it's range is 35-40, putting me outside of the NPC range of 30.

I prefer melee in close quarters, it's more efficient then a shotgun, at least for close quarters combat.

I also recommend kinetic weapons, if encountering the Borg, a TR-116 for ranged/bosses.
The Zefram Cochrane Shotgun and Replica Thompson Machinegun are also alternatives.


It's not necessary to craft the TR-116 yourself, any experienced crafting player can fabricate one and pass it to you.
Keep in mind the construction process is 24hours, so you'll have to wait a day before recieving one.

I've done it myself for Fleetmates, so if anyone wants one, I don't mind giving it out, as long as they're not expecting 4xShieldPen mods or something.
I tried that once, took me like 10 iterations to get that version!

[necaradan666]

The most important part is that your crew looks badass
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1661853497
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1661847898

[cyäegha]

so long as you're crouching with commando, you're basically invincible so long as your boffs don't get stuck on some terrain and get lost or something - almost to the point shields basically don't matter

probably the only real problem you'll face are the hurq, simply because crouching gives you a sizeable melee res penalty

[Revanchist1ab]

Yeah so everything went pretty well, still setting up my engi's butt all damage with crouch/aim worked wonders... until the Tholian Captain looked at me and my team and laughed...

Said laugh sent a wave of world ending pain over my team, knocking them over in 1 shot and them me over in 4... so that was a thing. >_> All good otherwise... working on just getting better gear and improving my BOffs.

[Jaq]

The trick to the Tholian Captain is to stay at point blank range on it at all times. It won't use its huge damage long range attack at melee range.