We tackle some common respec questions, get the latest STO news in your face, and much more, grab the latest STOked here: http://bit.ly/stoked043



Enjoy!
-Chris

Great show, as always fellas.

Chris, as Jeremy was helping you with your respec, did the two of you have specific goals in mind?
I ask because Jeremy mentioned toward the end that you were shaping toward a tank build.

EB

Not really.. I knew my priority was space combat, and I figured with that in mind I should build for my cruiser, figuring if I switch from that I'll just respec at that point. I think once we locked into that, spec'ing so that it complemented the cruiser the best lead us to more of a tank build.
-Chris

Jeremy was wrong about the power difference between a new RA vs old RA if you could get all your skills to 9. There are two reasons for this.

1) You don't use most of your skills in any build that you setup. Look at all the skills you are not even using during your own respec in the show. Also my build is very good and there is very little I could do to improve it. With the cap raise on tribble I got the last could skills I needed by about RA 8. After that I threw my extra skill points to max out of lower tier ships for their 25% of effect carry up just to see what kind of hull improvement I got. Let's just say it's a huge waste of points.

2) Diminishing Returns that you mention during respec come into play. Someone with 7 in all the appropriate skills for their build is not really going to be 11% lower (1% from Tier 1, 2% from Tier 2, and 8% from Tier 3-5). A lot of that power gap is covered after a few levels and is about what you'd get with someone who is just starting out at Grade 1 in a rank vs someone who is Grade 10 in PvP.

Even the argument on balancing for PvE doesn't hold true for the same two reasons. But also most of the power increase comes from the higher tier ships, the new MK equipment, Boff/Captain powers, and stat increase in the case of ground combat.

Skills are very important to have for the equipment you use to reach its max potential but beyond that there is nothing more you can get from them. For example if you go Phaser or Disruptor then odds are at some point during Commander Rank you'll max out weapons and can't make the skills any better. So your weapons will already be doing their max potential before you even reach Captain, let alone Rear Admiral. The other types are more of style choice and you can save them for respec if the balance thing is an issue and even then higher skill cap wouldn't effect that.

What the cap really hurts is the ability to swap out equipment and boffs. So like now say you wanna try plasma instead of phasers well unless you wasted skill points and had both trained then you gotta go waste a respec. For weapons this might not be as big of an issue but for Boffs it's huge cause often times you wanna try new stuff out and a lot of Boff powers are kinda weak unless you properly skill them up and get right equipment.

Right now there are about 234,900 skill points worth of skills in the game. The cap only being 60,700 and it's going to be raised to 72K something soon with VA1. It's easy to break down the math and show the difference between someone with 60,700 and 234,900 skills points is actually very small. The real difference is in how people are speced and what equipment they have. Right now at RA5 there is huge gaps in power because people don't spend their points properly.

Honestly for all the MMORPG Casual friendly stuff STO was suppose to be pushing I don't know why the bothered with this Skill system. The spend your points to design your character's skills as you level up is something a lot of RPG games that aim to target more casual gamers have tried to move away from. Or at least design it where you can't totally screw over your character. This was one of the major stumbling blocks of a lot of RPG as casual gamers didn't understand all the mathematics and thus ended up with really terrible chars at high levels. The same thing is happening in STO as people can completely screw over their characters and so a RA 5 could do worse then a Captain 1 or lower depending on how bad their spec is. The main thing raising, or better yet removing, the cap would do is reduce the number of bad builds as people could slowly work to correct their mistakes rather then needing to plan out their build strategy and respec.

Hopefully one day we can see a complete rework of the skill system at some point. Though I doubt it will be in season 3 or 4 if it ever came.

one thing to consider about respecing...... you probably should have waited if you could till after season 2 goes live and you can trade bo's between characters.

So I am a bit behind on my STOKED lol but...

I just wanted to say that I was watching it and there was a part that Chris and Jeremy were talking about efficency skills. I just wanted to say that the bonuses that you can get are pretty massive. With my set up at 35 on any given power setting (other than weapons) I get over 20 points of power .

So not totally weak sauce and my aux is almost 35 or 40 points actually.