Editorials

We’re adding this section to help explain our stances and decisions as needed. 

October 2024

ISE/HSE meta versus general play

Our builds trend towards effectiveness across a variety of general Elite TFOs rather than specializing on pushing the highest possible numbers on ISE or HSE. We do use organized runs and team compositions on the benchmark maps for the bulk of our build evaluation, but we are not tailoring to those specific TFOs. We take a build concept and/or a ship and push it as hard as we can with our team compositions, build knowledge, and piloting skill. Most of our builds do well on the benchmark maps, but are also suited for general Elite-difficulty play without modification. Statistical analysis of uploaded parses suggests that 15% or less of players who've ever touched the TFO system and had a parse uploaded are above 300K and a scant few hundred are above 1M DPS. To get into the specialized, optimized DPS-chasing build territory, you're probably talking above 1.5M DPS, as our setups aren't that specialized and we're getting up there, and that's fewer than 100 unique handles. Most STO players aren't just chasing DPS by building solely for ISE/HSE and we're not either. Many techniques or build strategies that can work in those isolated scenarios, like outsourcing all survivability or even cooldown reduction, don't work on other maps so we actually find some "peak meta" strategies counter-productive to general Elite play. This is also why we don't adjust loadouts in the briefing phase to stack buffs from consoles or traits and then unslotting them prior to entering combat. 

This is why Tilor and Eph289 are now testing their (non-support) builds on ISE, HSE, and solo, deathless ISA. Starter-tier builds are being tested in conjunction with a support tank on ISA, as it's not realistic for a solo, deathless ISA from a starter tier build. This last test removes all volatility associated with teamplay and forces them to account for survivability, cooldowns, and debuffs to better support and validate a build’s usefulness for general Elite play rather than just teamplay on ISE/HSE. We've said this before, but organized ISE/HSE only is not our focus. 

Our Reddit Footprint

In 2024, Tilor’s reddit account was hacked and banned. Reddit was thoroughly unwilling to help, so everything previously submitted by him is gone, and so we have transferred all of his content to our site. In the future, we’re considering copying all of our content that is only on reddit onto stobetter to avoid this inconvenience going forward. This also means Tilor no longer has a reddit presence. Please reach out to Eph289 (/u/Eph289) or Jay (/u/Jayiie) in the future.

Fleet Power Network Array

This is the console from the Ahwahnee and it’s extremely good, providing up to 125% haste (and you can stack it on a single player) just by having aux power. Combined with the Subspace Fracture Tunneling field console lowering cooldown on universal consoles, this console’s current behavior is incredibly meta-warping for energy builds. It also has some weird / potentially unintended interactions, such as applying its haste to the Kinetic Cutting Beam, which otherwise does not benefit from haste. 

You won’t see this console on our site. We’re taking the stance that it’s broken. We haven’t heard one way or another from Cryptic that it’s working as intended. (though if you have, we’d revise our stance). First, the bugs. While it’s possible to avoid them, it is bugged. Second, we don’t believe that recommending something that is broken (to the point where all other sources of haste become superfluous) is good/healthy for the playerbase if/when it gets nerfed. Now, we’re in uncharted waters with Cryptic/DECA and we don’t know what/if any changes they’re going to make to it. It’s possible they won’t. We’ve seen builds jump 500K from having a single player with FPNA in the TFO and that just seems too much. Back when Agony Redistributor was similarly stupid OP shortly after release, we didn’t use that either, until after a few rounds of changes had settled on it, because it didn’t feel right to go post a bunch of builds with something potentially broken. 

We understand a substantial number of other creators and high-end players are using this, and we respect their positions and decision to use this console. However, we’re making the decision that we won’t recommend it or use it at this time.

Site Criticism

We welcome suggestions and constructive criticism of our site. For example, Cell1pad suggested some specific tips to improve our Gateway to Gre’thor vods. We pulled the 3 we had finished from our queue, added some VO to them, and updated them. Westmetals suggested a Carrier Traits Tier list and we added that in 2024 after beefing up our own carrier knowledge. Sometimes, we’ll decline to accept a suggestion. For example, DivisionMuEpsilon asked if we were interested in deriving the full damage equation with its radial falloff for Technical Overload, which has some PvP implications and we declined. 

That said, when providing feedback, it’s important to remember to “speak the truth in love.” The tone and truthfulness of the conversation matters. We’re volunteers and all of the testing and write ups we do are a passion project, not a second job. There’s an awful lot of meanness and rudeness on the internet, so if you’re providing feedback or asking a content creator (not just us, anyone) to do something for you, please ask kindly and speak truthfully in your criticism. We get if we’re not your thing, but at least . . . be honest.