Defiant Help?

[Zhian'tara]

I recently got promoted to captain and chose the Defiant class escort. I equipped all of the cannons I had been saving up and went to start a mission. The problem is that the ship lasted about 10 seconds in the fight before being destroyed. I am now saving up the 80,000 dilithium necessary to purchace a Galaxy class cruiser by replaying only missions with my Ambassador support cruiser I earned as a commander. I am wondering, is there a better alternative to this long and tedious method. I would like to be able to start playing missions for my level again.

Thank you,
Picard

[Ceejay]

If you only lasted 10 seconds I would look more at how you are outfitting the ship to be honest. Plenty of people including myself have used them for all the missions fine. I have played through with 2 characters 1 went assault 1 went cruiser, to be honest I found it easyier with the assault ships far more dps.

Have you bought all the latest equipment for it and are you making sure you keep moving. I really had no issues with my defiant.

[Zhian'tara]

I had all rare and very rare cannons that did over 200 DPS each. I also had Ablative armor Mark 4 and many other hull boosting consoles. My sheils have a capacity of 5200.

[Gabrial]

Escorts are the easier ship to play in sto. Not sure where to point you as never really considered where to go for leveling guides in sto as most of my alts end up leveling off doff daily quests.

You should choose your boffs carefully for a mix of sheild heals, hull heals and cannon/torp damage buffs. Its tough to min max while leveling but hopefully you can find a happy balance. Good luck and sorry i couldn't be more help.

[Zhian'tara]

You were a lot of help. Thank you very much.

[Clarimonde]

Don't forget to rebalance your shields every so often while in combat also. Running with two copies of tactical team 1 can help in that regard. If you have your ship in constant motion you also gain a bit of a defense bonus where it's harder to hit you, even if that is just moving forwards and reverse in the general area :D

[Iye]

I got to agree... Tactical Escorts have some sort of outlast problem.
I switched form the HEC (VA ship) to the Tactical Escort Retrofit (the defiant for VA) and was quite shocked how fast it gets killed. But i got used to it. (and i got some more decent gear obviously)

For the shield balance i would recommend this

/bind Space "+Power_Exec Distribute_Shields$$FirePhasers$$+Power_Exec Distribute_Shields"

Type it into chat ingame WHILE IN SPACE (because its pretty useless as a ground bind)
The bind will automatically rebalance your shields everytime you press Space (Fire Energy Weapons) Just press it once every 3-4 sec (since a attack is 4 sec long and the balance takes about the same time) and you are fine.

Next thing is that you should only use ONE type of energy weapons and the tactical consoles that fit your energy type. (dont use cannon dmg consoles)

I did a QUICK example here:
http://skillplanner.stoacademy.com/?build=ideaofanescort_4466
this is NOT an ultimate go for. neither its really thought through. just a small hint.

Hope you get to love your Tactical Escort :)

[Szeron]

In a nutshell: two alternating Tactical Team 1's and Emergency Power to Shields should be all you need to keep yourself alive for most of the encounters in leveling missions. Hazard Emitters(Sci), Transfer Shield Strength(Sci), and Reverse Shield Polarity(Eng) are also solid abilities that are relatively easy to fit and go a long way towards keeping you(r teammates) alive.

Personally, I set 'rebalance shields' to my fourth mouse button (keybind macros are too cheaty for my personal tastes). Constantly rebalancing your shields goes a long way in preventing shield breaches(because you're pulling from all facings). Tactical Team does this reactively(don't expect to 'fix' your shields inbetween encounters/hits) and redirects them a LOT faster than you're allowed to. Manually rebalancing your shields also works very well for Reverse Shield Polarity to fully restore all your shield facings instead of just the one being hammered.

[Ceejay]

What I am trying to get at is, if you only last 10 seconds in an escort, the extra shield/hull offered by a cruiser is not going to compensate for whatever reason is causing you to not last very long in an escort.

You should try and get the feel of the escort and work out what you are doing wrong, even if you switch to cruisers later it is all experiance and it will also help you when fighting pvp etc about what the enemies in escort class ships will do to attack you etc.

It is good to try a range of ships and work out all their strengths and weaknesses.

[Zhian'tara]

Thank you Iye and Szeron for the rebalancing tip. I am going to give my escort a second chance.

[Lana Del Rey]

Hello Picard,
Sorry to hear about your problems with the defiant. It sounds to me like you still need to learn the game a bit.

First off all, please do NOT bust your butt to save up 80k dilithium.... you are only captains rank so far and you are still learning the game. 80k even at max rank is a huge number to hit, and I'm pretty sure you can't even do dilithium mining yet so it's gonna take you MONTHS to get that amount. The only time you should be saving/spending that amount of dilithium is when you are vice admiral level 50. At max level, you want to save all your resources towards the best ships (they don't give you one at level 50 so you have to grind for it). Vice admiral ships cost either tons of zen or fleet credit/earnings. I recommend you join a good fleet and slowly contribute so you when you hit max rank you can buy fleet ship.

Now for you ship, I've played nothing but escort since I got the game. Take a look are you skills/spec tree.There are abilities in the science/engineering that you WANT. Some provide power to all your ships systems. Others give a flat bonus to power/weapons and the works. If you are only going for JUST damage, well, that's not good yet! I do recommend you put points into your shields and other defenses so you don't get killed so easily. I had to at captain, face it, you're not max level, you don't have the best ship, and if you haven't put anything into defenses you're gonna get killed easy.

[the2pages]

if thats the case switch to cruisers they are far easier to manage