Ground

Welcome to our ground section! A few words upfront: our ground expertise is new and incomplete. This site was principally founded to focus on space PvE and we're primarily shipbuilders, not groundpounders. Our derivations into the mechanics of ground combat are new and incomplete. That said, there is merit in having a good ground setup in STO, as many ground TFOs are very efficient in terms of investment required to do well compared to the rewards. Also, there are endeavors and fleet events and story missions to consider. 

Since we've apparently been around enough to do decently well on ground, our setups are posted here (after much asking and cajoling). Our builds are generally set up to do a few things:

• Run a variety of maps capably on Elite, including Borg TFOs, Bug Hunt, Trans-dimensional Tactics, Miner Instabilities, and Colony Defense, with minimal gear changes.

• Do so fairly cheaply (at least relative to space)

• Do at least 1.5K DPS on Bug Hunt Elite, except for support builds. 

• Do so without sacrificing space performance. This mostly goes towards doffs as specializations are easy to swap in and out of, but when in doubt we're set up for space. 

Things we can't promise our content will cover:

• If you're looking to smash the ceiling of Bug Hunt Elite's DPS records, you won't find much here. We generally make 1-size-fits-all builds good for generic Elite play rather than specialized builds. We're comfortably between top 50 - top 100 on BHE thus far but if you have higher ambitions, you'll find our content lacking.

• If you're chasing triple-digit waves on Arena of Sompek, our builds will likely not get you very far.

• The optimal choices/the ground meta. We know what works for us. Mathematical derivations of best ground choices are outside of our interest. Ground, even on Elite, requires less concessions to the meta than space does, so "thematic and fun" will often take the cake over "ruthless devotion to DPS."

Quick Build Glossary

Ground builds, as far as we can tell, don't have easy classifications like space builds do for things like CSV, Exotic, etc. While we're woefully unqualified to do so, we had to come up with some kind of classification page to name our pages so it wasn't just "Tac 1, Tac 2, Eng 1, Eng 2, Eng 3...". 

• Assault builds are focused more weapons and weapon-based effects. 

• Fabricator builds are focused around constructs and/or drones. Stereotypical "bunker builds" fall into this category for engineers.

• Mage builds are focused heavily around offensive/control-based kits

• Support builds emphasize buffing the team, debuffing enemies, or healing allies. 

• Hybrid builds are a mixture of the above

• Melee builds focused on close-range hand-to-hand combat. We do not currently have any of these.

Build Descriptions