Hey there,
so I already play one MMO that I love and with whose monetization model I really agree (FFXIV). I am not really in the market for splitting my attention between two time-intensive MMOs, so I do not want to play STO as an MMO.
Given that most (cool) ships seem to be behind a paywall or a 100+ days grindwall with the dilithium-to-zen pipeline, and that so much of the endgame is just centered around grinding and meta-gaming the best-in-slot choices for a starship loadout, I don’t really care about getting too much into STO for gameplay reasons.
However, I am an absolute slut for expanded universe canon content and I have heard that the STO story ties up so many loose ends from the canon series and even some novels, and in general seems to be really good, up to the writing of golden era Trek. Is it possible to just play through the good story parts of each faction and then leaving the game, or are some story sections gated behind huge grind-walls, metagaming the best builds or a paywall?
Thank you! :)
Absolutely. For the most part, the game is quite easy, as long as you pay a bit of attention to your stats and adjust your strategies to suit the opponents you’re facing at any given point in the storyline. There are a few points where the difficulty suddenly increases, but it’s nothing you need to spend actual money on.
I’ve practically played it as a single-player game since launch, it’s more than possible to just sit back and enjoy the story.
A good ship does not make a good captain. A good captain makes a good ship. Some of the best stuff you can get is from the crafting system. And that can be done without spending a single cent on the game. Combine crafted stuff with special mission rewards and Star Trek Online is a very enjoyable game.
And you don’t need a top of the range build to run the story quests. You only need that for elite runs or specialized PvP. The story is very enjoyable in any ship at all. Have fun in your rust bucket. ;)
When the game was first released, the level cap was 50 and the maximum gear level was Mk 10 (I think), whereas now it goes up to level 65 and MK 15. Despite that, quite a lot of the story content was designed for either the original power level or one of the interim bumps, so it’s laughably easy by modern standards. Value Subtracted is correct that there’s a significant sudden bump in difficulty when you get to some Voyager-related content, but it’s more in terms of needing to start to understand how to build a ship properly, not so much in having fancy/expensive gear.
And that’s the real bottom line: if you know what you’re doing, you can complete endgame content literally in a shuttlecraft. The DPS disparity between somebody who understands how the components of a build work together and how to fly their ship properly (from reading the wiki, DPS league build guides, r/stobuilds [unfortunately], etc.) and somebody who doesn’t can be literally an order of magnitude or more, even with both using only “free” mission-reward gear and the same tier ship. I’m talking about 10,000 DPS for a typical random player vs. 100,000 DPS for a reasonably-competent one, and that’s not even including the top-tier builds with expensive gear, which are pushing more like 250-500K.
If you want to easily complete story content without all that learning, the TL;DR is to get a cruiser, fill it with beam arrays of one energy type, fill your console slots with consoles that do +DMG for that energy type, and spam the Beam: Fire At Will ability as often as you can. (Even for a “simple” beam build like that, there’s a lot more complexity in terms of skill tree, duty officers, traits, cooldown strategy, etc. that you could get into before even considering gear.)
