I.S.S. Phlegethon

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Keybinds 

With as many abilities and synergizing concepts as this ship employs, an efficient control scheme is essential. There are many ways to set up such a ship, so I don't pretend to assume that my way is superior. It works for me, especially with my background in RTS and MOBA games, where pushing many different keys quickly is essential:

• Spambar: (Spacebar) Suppression Barrage, Kemocite, Energy Amplifiers, Fire at Will, Kobayashi Maru, Auxiliary to Battery, Emergency Power to Engines, Attack Pattern Beta, Emergency Power to Weapons, Intrusive Energy Redirection, Against All Odds, Launch Type 7 Shuttles, and Nadion Inversion.

• Torpedo combo: (1 key) Torpedo Spread I; Fire Torpedo. Manual keybind to activate torpedoes. I generally leave the torpedo auto-firing, but sometimes STO is slow to fire the torpedo even when it's off cooldown and the spread is armed. I fire this every 10 seconds after FAW  is triggered to get my FAW from Entwined Tactical Matrices.

• Subspace Fracture Tunneling Field (4 key) This console needs its own keybind, because by default, it teleports you 5 km in front of your selected target. That could be desirable...or not. If I want to use the teleport, I activate it manually. Otherwise, I use a special keybind with just this console and the phrase "target_clear" in the keybind to clear the target. This allows me to avoid triggering the teleport. The full keybind is thus: 4 "+TrayExecByTray 4 1 $$ target_clear" 

Videos

This first one is actually this specific ship and covers general piloting tips for this build type on ISE

Other videos featuring this ship:

Piloting

Tanking is generally a selfless job unless you really glory in seeing how much damage you can absorb. Your job as a tank is to 1) pull threat and 2) survive. If you can also debuff enemies and amplify your team's damage, that's nice to have. In order to do #1, you need to do three things:

• You must deal at least 1/3rd of the highest DPS player's DPS. This a general guideline, not a rule, and is much-lessened if using History Will Remember and Ba'ul beams. All the +threat items in the game don't matter if you don't maintain sufficient damage to hold aggro. I've personally started to see breakdowns for 500K players where they start taking some aggro when I'm around 150K so that's my rule of thumb.

• You must deal that damage in an AOE all the time. Simply put, Beam Overload or other single-target abilities are not going to cut it. You need to damage as many enemies as possible at once. AOE attacks like Fire at Will, Torpedo Spread, and various AOE boff powers are your friend and you need to have them up a lot. Personally, I think Entwined Tactical Matrices is a far superior method of extending Fire at Will than Redirecting Arrays.

• You must have at least some method of +Threat on your ship. The Attract Fire cruiser command is nice to have if for no other reason than for resists. Much more important is using Threatening Stance and the Threat Control skill unlock. You don't need +Threat doffs, and you don't need the Threat-Enhancing Plasma consoles from the Embassy. Just Threatening Stance and Threat Control is enough.

• You must be close to your enemies. Hug the biggest, baddest guy and try not to completely eat his warp core breach--you might need your heals for other damage. Threat tends to be pulled to the closest target so be prepared to scrape paint.

In order to do #2 (survive), you need the following:

• Continuous heals for sustained damage. These could be any number of things: colony tactical consoles, common boff abilities (Hazard Emitters, Brace for Impact), or traits (Energy Refrequencer). I use boff abilities, colony tacs console, and some personal traits along with the Stamets-Tilly 3-piece. Suppression Barrage falls in this category as well as a continuous debuff.

• Burst heals to handle times when there's lots of incoming fire. This includes long-cooldown effects like Reiterative Structural Capacitor, as well as the Bio-Molecular Shield Generator. Other tools that I use include the Protomatter Field Projector, but Engineering Captains can also use Miraculous Repairs. You'll know when to use these--it'll be when the incoming fire starts to overwhelm you. On ISE, that's typically when you're fighting Tactical Cubes, Gateways, and/or 5+ spheres.

You're aiming to pull 75-90% of the incoming attacks for the entire team, so be prepared. On a fast ISE run, that could mean less than 3 million damage absorbed. On a slower run, you're looking at closer to 7-8M. This is by no means the most optimized tank build in the game, but it certainly does the job for DPS channel or fleet runs, especially in ISE. I’m very well pleased with this build and feel it fits nicely in the build space of premium supportive tank that splits well between damage, survivability, and supportive effects. I've used it to tank while boosting several other players to new records thanks to Inspiration abilities and extra debuffs. 

ISE Piloting Tips

Before the map starts, I will launch shuttles, set Threatening Stance, and set the Attract Fire cruiser command. Use Full Impulse when the map starts to hug the center cube. I prebuff Emergency Power to Weapons at 20 seconds prior to countdown and Engines at 5 to avoid misfires with resetting Evasive Maneuvers. 

I start with flying very close to the first 3 cubes. I will use all of my longer cooldown buffs in the first fight as well as the Styx console and Tachyon Net Drones. Trigger Evasive Maneuvers to fly over to the left transformer and fire off all major abilities while at 1/4 impulse or stopped within 2 km of the transformer. FAW should take care of most targets. Use the Subspace Fracture Tunneling Field whenever available, using the keybind to avoid the teleport. I use the High Energy Communication Network here. Once 2-3 of the generators are down, target the transformer with Focused Frenzy and Fire On My Mark. I rotate to face inward toward the gate. When the transformer is low health, fly towards the ball of spheres and give them a torpedo spread and cycle or two of firing. Once they start thinning out, Evasive Maneuvers again (reset due to Emergency Power to Engines) along with Deuterium and head to the right side. Rinse and repeat, then Evasive Maneuvers to fly between the Tactical Cube and Gateway. This is also the single hardest part to stay alive at, so save big heals like Reiterative Structural Capacitor or the Bio-Molecular Shield Generator for here. Try to avoid using big heals at the right transformer if at all possible. Seriously, this part can be rough depending on how fast your team wipes the Nanite Spheres. Focused Frenzy and Fire On My Mark should be available here again. Lastly, don't forget to summon your Delta Alliance Beacon/Nimbus Pirates, etc. unless you're supporting a very high DPS team/player (750+ K, in which case leave the DPS on the table for them). In a more average ISE run, I can get two off: one at left transformer and one at the end.

HSE (Hive Space Elite)

I’ve successfully flown HSE on this build without dying and while you can't always save your teammates dying from Warp Core Breaches or Feedback Pulse, it's hard to knock this build for it. I'm not the best HSE pilot but the build is fine. The hardest part is the first fight. I stagger my big heals in 15-20 second intervals to give the team time to clean up. I use Brace for Impact, Reiterative Structural Capacitor, Give Her All She’s Got, and Subspace Field Modulator. As those are winding down, use the Bio-Molecular Shield Generator. If the health bar is still going down after that, that's what Miraculous Repairs is for. Use the Sensor Interference Platform as a last resort. Hopefully by that point, the spheres and first few cubes are cleared out after the first full minute of combat. Push into the formation gradually at first and then as only a few targets are left, attack more aggressively. Suppression Barrage is very helpful on this map.

When fighting the queen, I find it better to stay farther away from her as Aceton Field is no joke and neither are her confuses. Hopefully your teammates will use Subnucleonic Beam to clear out the queen’s Feedback Pulse, but that’s not really a problem as long as your big heals are back off of cooldown.

I’ve found that if you can solo HSA without dying and 100K DPS, you’re probably in good shape for HSE. It’s a good way to practice getting a feel for the map, placement/positioning, and knowing when you can ride your regen/HP and when you need to pop a big heal to keep from dying.

Parse Breakdown

You might remark that 389K is really too high for a support tank and I generally agree with you. That said, this was a 4-man run and our primary DPS was doing 813K. That's a lot of damage, but it's not enough on a 4-man run for the team to benefit from a lower DPS tank, as evidenced by our combat time being just over 2 minutes. On runs with higher DPS ships above 1M DPS, I generally parse in the 200-250K range, but with lower attacks in. You can always dial back the damage by lowering weapons power. Setting it to around 50 should reduce your damage significantly. 

Numbers from record ISE:

• Ba'ul Antiproton Beam Array: 111478.79

• Entropic Rider: 55442.86

• Elite Type 7 Shuttlecraft: 29657.05

• Mycelial Lightning: 23444.55

• Digital Compilation Field: 22107.95

• Resonant Transphasic Torpedo: 15539.46

• Ba'ul Refraction: 14045.01

• Radiant Detonation: 12888.89

• Fek'ihri Torment Engine: 11574.57

• Tachyon Net Drones: 34674.01

• Antiproton Beam Array: 8282.38

• Kemocite-Laced Weaponry III: 6566.68

• Cascading Subatomic Disruptions: 6044.26

• Approaching Agony: 4628.07

• Magnetohydrodynamic Fusion Expulsion: 4279.85

• Destabilizing Resonance Beam I: 2066.75

• Concentrate Firepower III: 1878.72

• Distributed Targeting: 688.98

• Anti-Time Entanglement Singularity: 222.57

Heal breakdown (Heals-per-second)

• Miraculous Repairs: 965.12

• Bio-Molecular Shield Generator: 589.07

• Greater Than the Sum: 417.81

• Reiterative Capacitor Repairs: 370.19

• Energy Refrequencer: 146.56

• Rotate Shield Frequency: 45.12

• Brace for Impact: 17.56

Clearly I didn't need all of the healing tools I have at my disposal but it's good to have them for harder maps.

The transphasic torpedo is pretty bad, but that's okay for our purposes. It's here to debuff things and trigger debuffs, not deal DPS. I had very high selfish DPS this time and it's attributable to our team composition. We were a 4 man run with a Carrier primary DPS, myself tanking, and two supports. It wasn't a a bad run, the DPS is higher than I'd like. Since most of the damage was brought by energy weapons, the best move if you're concerned about taking DPS away from your primary would be to dump some weapons power, cutting it from 85 down to about 50 or so,. 

Portability

The easiest ship to port this build over to from the C-store would be the Presidio or its cross-faction equivalent. One consideration is that the Presidio does not have Intel seating, so you'll want to swap either another A2B or RSP into the extra Engineering seat since Ionic Turbulence will not be available. The same swap will need to be made on the Ross, as it loses a tactical ability (likely Rapid Fire). There are other ships like the Clarke, Buran, or Verity which drop a Tactical power in favor of science, which is not a trade I'm eager to make. Dropping the Cannon: Rapid Fire for Gravity Well is a choice you can make but it will cost you survivability.