This site is intended to help intermediate to advanced players learn and improve at endgame, Tier 6 PvP. This game mode takes place in the public Arena queues and in the Ker'rat warzone, and has no rules or restrictions at all.
If you are already well versed in Star Trek Online, and looking to explore new types of content or compete with your peers, hopefully this site helps provide some useful information.
However if you are still learning the basics of the game and concepts such as training your boffs, earning traits, cooldown management, don't know where to acquire gear, or are anything less than level 65 - then this is not for you right now. Participating in PvP under-leveled or unprepared will be nothing but an exercise in frustration for you, and there are many other sites that provide the fundamentals you need to know much better than I will be able to here.
Additionally, if you refuse to learn, improve, and adapt, you will never succeed in PvP. Entering a PvP match and then complaining about it in zone chat, or on the web, only serves to make you look ignorant and misinformed.
That said, don't let that deter you. PvP can be some of the most fun you can have in this game and the more people there are to participate, the more exciting it is. Every player brings new perspectives and build philosophies to the game. If the idea of refining a build concept that combines multiple concepts into one, then using that build against varied, thinking, and unpredictable opponents, then this is the game mode for you.
This site is also geared towards the PC platform, but console players may benefit from some of it too since the game mechanics and ships are identical. However due to the way abilities are activated and ships flown, there may be some differences that I cannot account for, so keep that in mind.
One of the most common issues for players newer to PvP is due to the compartmentalized nature of PvE content, which everyone participates in first. In PvE, a build focused solely on DPS is all that is necessary for Advanced content, and even for Elite difficulty, usually only one tank is necessary to draw threat, allowing everyone else to do whatever they like. Roles beyond just "DPS" and "Tank" depend on the type of run, which brings crowd control and nanny/support builds into play, but otherwise it's all "whatever you like to fly."
In PvP, we can't be quite so disorganized - EVERY build here must have its own source of healing, resistances, escapes, debuff cleanses, let alone some kind of offensive contribution too. That's also what makes this game mode so interesting and dynamic - builds, techniques, and concepts all change and finding the right balance between offensive and defensive setups is a constant but rewarding struggle.
Let me cover those concepts a little bit more, starting with Healing. I've done some extensive video guides on this topic, but it's important to understand that in PvP, every ship is a "tank" through the lens of PvE players. Even the most elusive and stealthy builds rely on a large amount of self healing from consoles like Colony Protomatters or traits like PLOT Armor. Restoring lost hull rapidly is critical to surviving in PvP because you will always take damage from enemy players, and you can't rely on a tank or teammate to absorb that threat - players will target whoever they think they will be able to eliminate. Another factor is adding in placates and stealth abilities to avoid taking fire in short bursts. Chaining these together means less overall incoming damage and is another important part of staying alive. Check out this video for more details on that.
Another concept that eludes many is damage resistance. This seems simple, but the amount of resistances required for a good PvP ship are drastically higher than PvE builds. Damage resistance caps out at 75%, although there are ways to get above this number in bursts, so our goal is to get as close to 75% as possible. On top of that, the very same negative resistance debuffs you are used to using on NPC's are now being used against you by players, so if you're used to having 30% or 40% damage resistance, that could be well into the negative values when taking damage from players using damage resistance debuffs. Because of this, the old myth of not stacking multiple sources of resistance is false - you want more resistance than you think you need to account for that. Traits like Rhythmic Rumble are common in PvP, with speeds in the hundreds that means Rhythmic combined with other resistances like Redirected Armor Plating are completely necessary. I've also done a video guide on this subject to help visualize it.
Escapes, or "oh shit! buttons" are also common practice on these builds. Sometimes even with perfect healing and high damage resistances, you might find yourself the focus of the enemy team, or stuck in a gravity well or a hold like Parasitic Ice. Singularity abilities, trajector jump warp cores, and universal consoles like Fluidic Phase Decoupler are critical in these situations for getting out of trouble. Other consoles that offer bursts of defense or damage resistance like Molecular Phase Inversion can also be classified in this category. I would recommend nearly every ship to have at least one escape for emergency situations, and I go over several of the options in this video.
The last one is debuff cleanses, and this is probably the most difficult one to understand because it does not have a quantifiable impact. Clearing debuffs from your ship however is critical - for example, if you are on the receiving end of a science captain's Subnucleonic Beam, you will be stripped of all buffs, including any healing and resistances you might've had. During this time you also deal less damage and can be killed much more easily - the faster you can remove this, the better. This is cleared by Science Team, which restores your ability cooldowns so that you can buff up again quickly and resume regular combat. Every PvP build should have both Science Team and Engineering Team to clear various debuff effects. Going without either of these is dangerous for you and detrimental to the rest of your team. Additionally, these team abilities can be cast on teammates, so very well organized pvp teams use these on each other - when I notice a teammate is Subnuked, if my science team is not on cooldown and I don't need it at the moment, I will use it on them so that they can get back in the fight quickly.
Frustratingly, there are some effects that are not cleared by any of the team abilities, and some things that logically should clear things do not. I've been compiling a list through exhaustive testing for these things, which is now a public spreadsheet viewable here.
Unlike PvE, being effective for your team in PvP isn't exclusively tied to damage output. Of course, dealing damage must still be done, as at the end of the day an enemy ship's hull must be reduced to zero somehow to win. However, this can be done in many ways - sure you can try to outright overcome their healing and resistances with pure damage output, but this is difficult unless you have a team to help focus targets. Alternatively, you can use disables, slows, and damage resistance debuffs to make them take more damage - therefore they are easily to kill with less damage.
It's difficult to define where the best balance is between these two things, but many builds combine them together in varying degrees. Some more traditional beam damage builds might focus almost entirely on damage output, but ships with Intel abilities for example might lean more towards knocking subsystems offline and trying to score a kill that way.
Ultimately, the best combinations are usually teams that employ both strategies to some degree, where one ship will focus on setting up an enemy ship to be easier to kill while a teammate in a more damage-heavy build will score the killing blows. Of course, it is also just as plausible that what may normally be considered a support ship, if able to hold down an enemy for an extended period of time, may be able to defeat them without any help if they can lock them down so long that they essentially bleed out from AoE damage, such as that from Gravity Wells.
This also means that some of the most effective PvP players might not necessarily even be that obvious in a parse or at the end of match screen. There are players that focus entirely on more support aspects of the game and their presence on a team greatly improves the chances that the team will win.
Speaking of dealing damage though, all pvp players will have Auto-Target Pets and Auto-Target Objects disabled in their options, as well as having "Attack if No Target Selected" set to On. These settings are critical for focusing your damage on actual enemy player ships instead of pets - there are some advantages to playing crowd control but that is not weighted as heavily as dealing damage to actual player targets. The only time you should be targeting pets is when eliminating the immunity-duplicates of Na'khul ships or the Sensor Interference platforms that reduce your team's damage output by 79%. More on that in an advanced guide. See this page for more details.
Once those options are set correctly, you don't have to worry about tabbing through 500 pets on screen to find enemy players. Your tab will only cycle between enemy players and even if you have no target selected, if a player ship flies within range and arc of your weapons, you will fire on them automatically. Awesome!
We talked about setting up your own build defensively, and covered how to deal damage or otherwise be effective for your team offensively. What about other ways to support your team?
This is where builds like healers, suppressors, and other debuff spreaders come into play. It may not be clearly evident on a parse, but using something like Team Synergy to clear debuffs off of your teammates or Suppression Barrage to reduce the damage output and speed of the enemy team can be a huge advantage in a match.
You never want your whole team to be exclusively support builds - *someone* has to deal damage, but it's incredible just how effective a good support ship can be at keeping everyone alive and making it very difficult and frustrating for the enemy to take you down.
This also creates a unique playstyle not really used in other content in this game - rarely if ever is there a time when a healer or debuff cleanser is used in PvE because most NPC's do not use any debuffs besides the occasional Borg boarding party. I'd encourage anyone to try out a build like this because it also makes you a better pilot in other builds, seeing the fight from a birds-eye view and helping you understand what is happening on your teammates' buff bars. Even an escort pilot can cast their Science Team or Engineering Team on a teammate when they are in trouble and need that pesky subsystem offline effect cleared, or maybe a teammate in trouble being drained needs a big power boost and engines put online again to get away and continue the fight, so use a Team Engines battery. This kind of unselfish playstyle is what separates the great pvp teams from the average ones.
I hope that basic mindset behind how these types of builds work helps you understand just how PvP is such a different game type from PvE. Builds designed for PvE content will never perform well in PvP and that's a hurdle that so many players seem to be unable or unwilling to learn.
I also hope this makes it clear why it's not as cut and dry as some will have you believe - sure a PvE team can do a million or higher DPS in a fixed TFO run, but those same ships are absolutely min-maxed for one specific performance goal, and would perform very poorly in PvP content.
Developing a build of your own that balances all of the above - offensive, defensive, and team play dynamics - is the only way to find endgame PvP enjoyable.
It's also important to address the cost of these types of builds. I have successfully created free to play builds, and many players grind Dilithium to convert into Zen, allowing them to purchase expensive gear and ships. While it is possible to excel in PvP entirely free of cost, spending money does accelerate how quickly you will be able to achieve top performance. Consider it "pay to accelerate," but not necessarily "pay to win." A free player who understands the mechanics of the game and piloting well can build a ship that will defeat a paying player every time. As with all builds in this game, there is also a constant progression - you can't expect to drop into a PvP match having rarely played it and outperform those with countless hours of arena experience. Stick with it, keep working on your builds and piloting, and either earn or purchase upgrades and you'll find it quite rewarding.
Additionally, stick to the Solo/Duo arena queues. In the Solo/Duo queue, no 5-man teams are allowed and this prevents the frustrations about encountering a much better equipped and organized team - not every match will be a good one, but at least with random teams no side has a preset advantage.
And who knows, with some more interest, maybe someday we will get a basic matchmaker to make the matches more fair - something like the never-implemented Player Potential System.
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