Tips & Tricks: Escort Class Starships

[ShadowDrakken]

First, let me say, I really enjoyed flying Closed Beta, and this information is based on my experiences therein. Hopefully this information will continue to be true as we move through Open Beta and into Release, but given the amount of problems people have been having with Escorts, chances are things will change.

Purpose of this thread:
I want to offer some play suggestions for flying Escort class ships. My experience is playing as an Engineer, so your mileage may vary. Anyone is free to comment their experiences, share what worked well for them, and what didn't work well.

Please do not be disparaging towards one another, this is intended to be a helpful thread, not a flame war or troll session.

Now, on to the show!

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As many Escort fliers know, the 8a.1 patch rebalanced Escorts pretty severely. Some may argue that they're broken, and at first I would have agreed. After changing my playstyle however, I found that they were still viable, although they were certainly suffering slightly compared to the other ships.

I am aware that they rolled back to 8a.0, however that was a temporary rollback, and 8a.x should have the 8a.1 changes.

What I did:
First thing I did, was change my energy settings. I had been flying the default Attack and Defense settings. These are basically useless with the rebalance; the attack setting leaves you unable to take a single torpedo, and the defense setting drops your damage down to nothing.

The second thing I did was change how I thought about my ship equipment.

The last thing I did, was change my attack patterns. Previously, I treated the Escort as a dog fighter. I would drop down to about half speed and just follow my target from behind (where they have the least weaponry) and blast away till they blew up. Doesn't work anymore.

The new settings I use:
90 (100) Weapons
60 (62) Shields
25 (32) Engines
25 (32) Auxiliary

The number in parenthesis is the final value I had after skills and equipment

This let me attack at nearly full damage, while giving me JUST enough extra shields to stay alive. Along with ship equipment changes, and tactics changes, this gave me decent survivability.

The new gear I used:
Ok, I admit, I'm one of those people who thinks like a tank with a railgun attached, so my first instinct was to shove the biggest shields I could on my ship, and the biggest weapons I could. The weapons were mostly fine, except that canons eat the heck out of your weapon energy until about midway through your rank, where they finally become manageable.

First, I remedied the weapon problem (and consequently improved my DPS) by using a forward canon, a forward bank, a forward torpedo, and rear arrays and torpedoes. Later, as my weapon energy related skills improved, I was able to replace the bank with a second canon. This config gives you massive forward damage, and enough rear firepower to keep their shields down while you come about. It also gives you the nice rear torps for fly away kills.

The second change I made was my engines. I stopped even looking at the impulse modifier and looked ONLY at my speed and turn radius modifiers. Turn radius is especially important for an Escort, and allowed me to sweep enemies repeatedly in the time it took them just to come about.

Because Escorts have very little Hull and very little Crew to do repairs, I found that the Engineerin Consoles for resistance and crew weren't much help at all, so I switched to Hull Repairing Engineering consoles. They helped a ton in repairing damage anytime my shields were in place.

The last gear change I made was my shields. I stopped looking at the shield output, and instead focused on the shield regen. By maxing shield regen, along with assigning Rebalance Shield to the 0 key on the shortcut tray, and my new tactics, I was now able to maintain nearly full shields through most encounters. This included 1-on-1 Battleships and Flagships, as well as 3-on-1 Escorts and Cruisers of 0 to +2 levels (depending on their specific gear). I still had trouble with soloing larger groups, but that's the pains of a "glass canon" vehicle.

The new tactics I use:
It went against my instincts, but I stopped using dog fighting tactics and switched to hit and run tactics. I flew in at top speed, sometimes even flying in at full impulse, and launched everything I had at the enemy. Along with a preemptive Tachyon Beam, this almost always broke their shields.

I immediately starting maintaining my Rebalance Shields, if it stopped, I hit my hotkey again (you MUST NOT stop Rebalancing for an Escort using these tactics). Why did this work? Because STO does not increase shield regen on damaged sides just because you have undamaged sides.The regen rate is flat, by using Rebalance, you're able to inject that spare regen directly into the weak sides and let your regen get all 4 sides at once. This is also why the high regen shields work MUCH better than the high capacity shields.

I use Rotate Shield Frequency when I was up against multiple targets or large targets, this gives a very nice resistance buff so your shields last longer. You may not have this skill depending on your preferences, but there's other alternatives out there, including just dealing more damage.

The end result of these changes left me with a very playable Escort (if a bit weak due to a few possible bugs Cryptic is looking into)

I hope this helps previous Escort fliers who felt like they were handed a useless ship, and hope it helps new players enjoy Escorts a bit more

Btw, I'm reposting this as a new thread because the original thread had a lot of complaints about NDA (that lead to me removing this information temporarilly for safety's sake) which I think will interfere with other people giving tips. If a moderator sees this, please remove the old thread rather than this one??

[markel]

IMO, this simply means we need to /bug shield regen being a component of redistributing shields. Shield regen should effect how damaged shields regenerate, not how you distribute the undamage shields you have.

[ShadowDrakken]

Originally Posted by markel

IMO, this simply means we need to /bug shield regen being a component of redistributing shields. Shield regen should effect how damaged shields regenerate, not how you distribute the undamage shields you have.

Not really, it's working as intended. Lets take the basic 103 regen shields. This is meaning each shield quadrant regens the full 103 health (for lack of a better word) per tick no matter what state your shields are in.

When you hit the Rebalance Shields ability, you're piping whatever regen rate it has from the strongest quadrants over to the most damaged quadrants, but that 103 regen is still happening to all four quadrants as well.

Also, the shields was just one of several things I had to change. By themselves, they didn't make or break me, but as part of the whole, they helped make a difference.

[StarKiller66]

Thank you for this information, very useful! What was your captain's build like?

[WarBird69]

Thanks for the tips!

Though I'm almost 100% certain I'll be using a cruiser come launch, I think I'll dip into escorts during beta...just to see how flying a glass cannon is!

[ShadowDrakken]

Originally Posted by StarKiller66

Thank you for this information, very useful! What was your captain's build like?

First, I'm not much of a ground combat person for this game, I enjoy it well enough, but space is really my thing. So, all of my points went into space combat and engineering abilities. By the time I was C1, I had all the LT skills maxed out (except the away team stuff that I don't use), Escort maxed out, Beams, Canons and Torps maxed out, Shields maxed out, and a couple other ship operation skills about halfway. (don't recall at this point exactly which ones) My ship gear was all Disruptors and Beam/Bank weapons (except my fore and aft torps, and my single Canon). That way I could put in a Tac console for Disruptors and a Tac console for Beams and get a stacked bonus. (works with any combination of damage type and weapon type)

[skullkandy]

I haven't flown an escort but I played a lot of klingon which essentially are all escorts so I believe this advice may carry over.

The biggest mistakes I've seen from escort players who complain about it being broken are:

1. They fly into close range at full impulse, drop impulse at 5k them start firing. full impulse drains all your power so when you come out of it your shields and weapons suck. Don't full impulse into the thick of battle.

2. don't use the default attack setting for everything. change it so that you have 35 power in aux instead of 25. The biggest difference in play style you will have to get used to is that you can't just circle each other because your weapons are most likely not optimal at broadside. If you drop all power out of aux you will have trouble turning your nose towards the enemy because aux effects your turn radius which is one of your biggest advantages.

[Strill]

Agreed. That's a terrible system. Rebalancing shields should be inefficient, and shield regen should be a flat amount that's split between all damaged shields, not something that's specific for each part of your shields.

With this system there's no reason to ever not spam your rebalance shields button. There's also no reason to ever move your ship to protect your weak sides. That's just flat-out idiotic. They should make it so that turning your ship is more effective than rebalancing.

[ShadowDrakken]

Strill: I found that on Cruisers and Science, the shield rebalancing wasn't as effective, because those ships have a much higher regen to begin with. This rebalance spam is just for the Escorts who can't normally regen shields effectively (in part due to having 1/8 of the crew of the other two).

The system makes sense though. Each quadrant is a different shield generator. Imagine if they were light bulbs, If one of them gets dimmer, pumping "leftover" power to it isn't an option, there is no "leftover" power.

[WarBird69]

Thanks for the tips!

Though I'm almost 100% certain I'll be using a cruiser come launch, I think I'll dip into escorts during beta...just to see how flying a glass cannon is!