[crizza]

I'm not that trustfull...I have a paypal account, but why does perfect world want to know my adress and phone number O.O

[Commander Zane]

When you select which account type you want to use I think it's permament.

[crizza]

Yeah, that's for sure, but paypall has all the information and I don't get it, why perfect world wants my data too.
Playong World of Tanks, they're just happy with the name of my paypall account...

[Liberator]

God only knows, but I haven't been spammed with anything irritating.  It could be for account recovery for all we know, but they probably sell it.  However as I said, I haven't seen an uptick in my spam or any unwanted phone calls.

[NGTM-1R]

There's a reason I don't trust PW.

[BloodEagle]

Just hit Commander, and I noticed a drastic increase in difficulty on generic missions.  Part of that is that I have to remember to use my abilities, of course.

[Crybertrance]

So, anyone create a fleet yet?

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Just hit Commander, and I noticed a drastic increase in difficulty on generic missions.  Part of that is that I have to remember to use my abilities, of course.

Yeah, I noticed a pretty significant jump in the difficulty of ground missions past Commander. Not sure about the space missions, they might be more difficult but I've got a beast of a ship and all kinds of fun goodies from being completely addicted to the Ker'rat war zone. I'm still amazed at how sneaky the Borg cubes are. Also, as a bonus, the war zone starts actually having some PvP at Commander...or, I should say, a couple of roaming Klinks that like to pick off lone Fed ships. It's a good thing the devs gave them stealth, because I don't think I've ever seen more than 3 or 4 in the zone, as opposed to 10-12 Feds. I don't get many kills, but I think they get bored trying to wear down my tank and eventually just give up and go away to find someone else.    Unless I'm flying my escort, in which case all bets are off. Paper thin, but I've got it outfit with all rare tetryon heavy cannons fore and turrets aft, its forward firepower is frightening. So much fun.

[NGTM-1R]

Just hit Commander, and I noticed a drastic increase in difficulty on generic missions.  Part of that is that I have to remember to use my abilities, of course.

You have to step up to the plate with new kit gear about that level, possibly new away team gear. I really ran into the wall as a Captain, though, because there's at least two tiers more guns in that rank band and the lowest-possible bog-standard ones your ship is automatically outfitted with leave you throwing spitwads.

The Rear Admiral wall isn't as bad. I had my Galaxy gear on my Sovvie until I could replace it with stuff from STFs.

[Retsof]

I've discovered the Arena PvP is rather fun.  Though I'll typically be pew-pewing someone in my science vessel, only to be blind-sided by an escort, which takes me out in about three volleys.  I definitely need to hang near a bullet-sponge in that game.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Just hit Commander, and I noticed a drastic increase in difficulty on generic missions.  Part of that is that I have to remember to use my abilities, of course.

You have to step up to the plate with new kit gear about that level, possibly new away team gear. I really ran into the wall as a Captain, though, because there's at least two tiers more guns in that rank band and the lowest-possible bog-standard ones your ship is automatically outfitted with leave you throwing spitwads.

The Rear Admiral wall isn't as bad. I had my Galaxy gear on my Sovvie until I could replace it with stuff from STFs.

Also, for space combat, I noticed it's much more important to have bridge officers with useful abilities that you can actually put to use (as in, Eject Warp Plasma is fun but you probably won't be able to use it much in a cruiser because it's harder to control the speed and turning fight), and you should use them early and often. Plus, it's not necessarily the tier of equipment but also the type. Mines suck (except for chronitron or tractor mines in area-denial situations), turrets kinda suck, non-heavy cannons are meh. Escorts should pretty much have only heavy cannons fore. Cruisers and beam arrays are a match made in heaven. Torps are only useful if you're comfortable enough with your maneuvering to know that you'll be able to bring them to bear at the right times. Also, photons only. Most of this stuff seems like pretty general consensus. I could be mistaken, though. 

[crizza]

Got my third ship and I'm still using a phaser turret as aft weapon, since this thing has a FoF of 360°.

[BloodEagle]

I find the 250 degree phaser batteries to be more effective than the 360 degree turrets, at my level.  Mainly because the former does four times the damage of the latter.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I find the 250 degree phaser batteries to be more effective than the 360 degree turrets, at my level.  Mainly because the former does four times the damage of the latter.

Yeah, the turrets just do such terrible damage. The beam arrays (240 deg.) are what you should be using if you have a cruiser - turn to broadside and fire both fore and aft beam arrays until you take down a quadrant, turn toward and fire fore torps. If you're in an escort, I suppose you could get away with turrets in your aft slots if you never really show your aft arcs to the enemy (since they're all about forward firepower). But compared to the heavy cannons, the turrets look even worse. I like chronitron mines in my heavy escort aft. Between the mines and warp plasma, it's pretty easy to trap some poor bastard in a snare and blow them away with the cannons. Having an aft torp launcher is nice for when you have to u-turn and open distance, and it's a nice little surprise for people trying to follow you. I don't hate turrets, I just think they get outclassed by the other options.

Oh, almost forgot: get rid of the phaser types as soon as you can. Disabling weapons sounds nice but it doesn't happen often enough or for long enough. If you can get 'em, tetryon weapons eat shields for breakfast.

[BloodEagle]

btw,

Bosch@jerkwadthesecond

I would have made a new Cryptic account, but I can't delete the link to my e-mail (let alone the account) from Perfect World.

[crizza]

So, I have a photon torpedo launcher, dual plasma cannon and a dual heavy phaser cannon fore...
So I should get rid of the heavy phasers?

[TwentyPercentCooler]

If you mix energy weapons types, they will drain power from each other and your damage suffers a bit (I think it's on the tooltip somewhere, although it isn't phrased very clearly as to how the reduction works). I would recommend ditching the plasma and getting another phaser cannon from the Exchange. Phaser weapons are dirt cheap, which is fortunately one of their advantages. Also, I'm not sure I'd bother with a forward torp launcher on an escort (since you're using dual heavy cannons). Another set of cannons will actually out-DPS a torp launcher with the added advantage that cannons aren't useless on shielded targets. If you love torpedoes, you could get away with having it aft, though. Anything aft on an escort is going to be fairly situational anyway.

[Liberator]

Tricobalt actually works pretty well as an aft weapon.  That said, Torpedo Spread doesn't seem to work with it about 9/10 of the time.

Also, the drain is when you fight more than any two energy beam weapons at the same time, which is why broadsiding with a cruiser is generally weaker than an escort.  Though it's not bad if you can get them to unsynchronize.

[NGTM-1R]

Oh, almost forgot: get rid of the phaser types as soon as you can. Disabling weapons sounds nice but it doesn't happen often enough or for long enough. If you can get 'em, tetryon weapons eat shields for breakfast.

Tetryon Procs do not scale with level, iirc. Phasers do. (Everything but plasma and tets does, I believe; one of the reasons plasma is cheaper than phasers at high levels.) In fact this is terrible advice since phasers have a chance to disable any subsystem (shields, weapons, engines, aux) and the hilarity of seeing somebody's shield system crash two seconds before the inbound torpedoes hit should always be experienced at least once. This matters less to escorts because they rarely fight extended battles, but it can still be quite noticeable.

Mixing weapons does not directly hurt you. The power drain is a consequence of firing any energy weapon and cannot be avoided. Rather, you get more damage out of having a standardized battery and the type-specific tac consoles to support it.

Torps on the front of an escort, I'm told, depend on having torp skills in your bridge officers. (I'm beginning to suspect the use of torps in general, once you get up to Captain and beyond, could be described that way.) If you have Spread or High Yield they're an excellent addition if managed well.

Turrets are useful mainly to escorts because they can fire frontally with the front guns and are also cannons, meaning that your bridge officer cannon skills work on them too. I don't see too many other ships mounting them.

[NGTM-1R]

Tricobalt actually works pretty well as an aft weapon.  That said, Torpedo Spread doesn't seem to work with it about 9/10 of the time.

It shouldn't work at all. You can only use high-yield with Tricobalt. (Because being able to launch spreads of 10k torps would be broken as ****. An HY-1 hit from a TCD does between 20k and 50k damage to an unprotected hull. I've seen them used to oneshot Borg Cubes outside of STFs.)