Admiral T'pral's crew

I noticed today I’d gotten my monthly allotment of C Store points in Star Trek Online (I get some each month for being a subscriber). There wasn’t anything I particularly wanted to _buy_… I have all the ships I need. Maybe some of the uniform options.

There are _lots_. Most of the time, you’re the only one who sees your bridge officers. How they’re dressed has no effect on the game. But it’s _fun_. I broke down and bought the Bajoran militia uniforms that Odo and Major Kira wore on Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

Then I decided I really needed a changeling on my crew. I brought my Romulan bridge officer kicking and screaming to the tailor, lightened his skin, shaved off a lot of sharp edges, partially melted him, and I had me my changeling.

All the males on my crew got Odo’s uniform. All the females got Kira’s, but in Starfleet section colors. You can see all my bridge officers above. Not all of them are thrilled with their new look. I guess they liked the regulation thigh-high boots of the old uniform.

T'pral's Fleet

Not much of an admiral without a fleet; after collecting all the bridge crew together, I thought I should do the same for her ships. My science admiral has an entirely different fleet, and my Klingon yet another. This is T’pral’s. Mostly escorts. I scaled them to the relative sizes of the ships according to the Memory Alpha wiki. The Akira came out larger than I expected.

So; pictures.

Most MMOs, if they allow it at all, make changing your avatar’s appearance a time consuming and possibly expensive task. In Star Trek Online, a trip to in-game tailors on any space station allow you to change everything from your uniform, to your hairstyle, to the smallest detail of your appearance. You can store up to five appearances at once which you can swap with a keystroke at will.

No other MMO offers that.

In my Vulcan engineer’s long career in Starfleet, the years and the burdens of command have taken her from the fresh enthusiasm of a newly minted ensign to the grizzled veteran of years of campaigns against the Breen, the Borg, the Devidians, the Romulans, the Klingons and all the other myriad enemies of the Federation.

Thanks to the tailor system, not only has her appearance changed — making her more distinguished with age and authority — but all her previous appearances are saved to my local hard drive. I can load them up at any tailor.

If your characters are more than just manikins on which to drape raid gear with increasingly bizarre shoulderpads, you might like what you can do with them in Star Trek Online.

Bonus feature: You can do the same with every member of your bridge crew and away teams as well. Want to make your crew change from the young crew of the original Star Trek series to the aged geriatric crew of Star Trek V?

That can happen.

(By the way, I designed the uniforms T’pral is wearing).

Go ask Alice, when the white dragons fall

None of us was happy about the way we left Gianthold Tor; expert at getting through the dungeon and killing the Gatekeeper, unable to kill the three dragons at the end. We’d all gained a level since we left the Tor, though, and the Harbingers of Madness gear was a literal game changer for most of us.

The rewards for grinding Gianthold Tor for rare dragon scales are not that great, given the effort involved. I estimate it would take killing a dragon thirty times in order to get enough scales to make a piece of armor. We were never going to spend half a year farming this instance.

But the dragons had to die. Last night we returned to Gianthold Tor and we killed the dragons.

The Death of the Black Dragon

All the dragons have a giant protector, and both dragon and giant have to die within seconds of each other. For this, we split the group. Spode tanked the dragon, Ulan the giant, and Gleek and I would switch from one to the other to keep their health balanced as we took them down.

We’d all acquired special cold resist gear when we were here before. We suited up, potioned up and buffed up, went in, and died pretty fast. Came back, changed our positioning a little — dead dragon. Between the four of us, no dragon scales.

Next up: the blue dragon, whose power was lightning. Since this was said to be the easiest of the three dragons, we’d tried this one a few times before. The room gradually becomes more electrified as the fight drags on. If you can’t kill everything in two minutes, the room itself will kill you.

Again, first time failure. Second time we kept the clerics near to the wall, outside the worst of the electricity, and won. One blue dragon scale between the four of us.

Gleek challenged us to kill the black dragon in his room full of acid pools the first time. This trick requires keeping the clerics and everyone else on one of the islands floating in the acid pools. And we did it — first try. Two black dragon scales among the four of us.

Three dragon scales out of twelve chances = 25% chance at a scale. If I’d need 20 black dragon scales for some decent light armor, I could expect to kill the dragon 80 times (on normal mode). I’d get some scales from other people in the group in trade for the ones I wouldn’t need, of course, but that’s still going to be a significant number of kills required.

We’re happy we killed the dragons, but I don’t think any of us see any reason to go back.

Infected Space (Elite)

Infected (Space) is very simple. There’s only one thing you have to do. And that is all focus and kill the nanite spheres and probes when they pop. That’s all. Infected (Space) is a test of teamwork. If someone goes off on their own, the optional is all but lost.

There are two optional objectives. Complete the entire task force in fifteen minutes, and don’t allow any nanite sphere or nanite probe to heal one of the transformers. If any nanite probe or nanite sphere gets close enough to heal a transformer, the optional is instantly lost.

The strategy is pretty simple. If you see a nanite sphere or nanite probe, kill it. One ship can easily take the probes, but unlike Khitomer Accord, they don’t come alone. They come mixed with tougher nanite spheres and very tough sphere escorts. Additionally, random spheres come to defend the transformers.

Kill the transformers in order. Trying to kill both at once will launch an unkillable wave of spheres and probes.

Infected playbook

There’s a lot of different strategies to winning Infected, especially the elite version, where the transformer guard spheres are replaced by cubes. I’m going to write down the way it’s normally done in normal mode.

You start facing a tactical cube threatening a Federation starbase, Starbase 82. Like all tactical cubes, it has very strong shields, strong hull, strong weapons, and heavy plasma torpedoes that can take down an unprotected ship in one hit. It has two sphere guards which will try to tractor you so the cube can kill you.

It’s pretty annoying.

Once the cube and the spheres are dead, move to the transformer marked with a (2). It is healed by four generators. Kill the guardian sphere (or cube in elite), the generators and then the transformer.

While this is going on, nanite spheres, nanite probes and regular spheres will arrive through the gateway. Break off and kill them. Seriously. Continuing to damage the transformer may cause another wave of probes and spheres. If any of the nanite spheres or probes heal the transformer, it will instantly lose the optional. Additionally, since they are healing damage to the transformer, it will take longer to finish the mission which means more waves of spheres until you have half a dozen circling around.

So when you see a sphere or probe while you’re killing a transformer, take a break and help kill them. Position yourself in front of the transformer. Burn it down. When enemies come, swivel 90 degrees, kill them, turn back and continue the assault.

With that down, go to the transformer on the right side (3) and do the same thing.

The cube and gateway

With the transformers down, a tactical cube will arrive to guard the gateway. Both the cube and the gateway must die to get the optional. The cube takes longer to kill and does more damage, so I would kill the cube first, then kill the gateway. Some suggest killing the cube right at the gateway, so that the cube will damage the gateway, but that’s pretty hard to arrange, and it puts ships in range of the gate’s guns. Getting on the far side of the cube keeps everyone out of the range of the gate guns.

If everyone works together to kill the adds as they spawn, this special task force comes down to raw damage. Unlike Cure and Khitomer Accord (walkthrough still to come), nobody has to do a special job, Just kill enemies, then kill the gates, repeat until finished.