Notes

Jill's focus as a character is a tank. That means that she needs damage, but also needs to have a lot of defenses. I tend to prefer passive defenses (such as resists and regeneration) over active (such as clickies and heals). As such, you'll see the skill tree reflect that.

Shield/Hull Restoration are just too good to pass up. +25% Hull/Shield healing are a solid addition to any heals, especially since most heals don't have some "baked in" Cat1 healing like weapons do for damage. Now, this build may not have a lot in the way of specific heals, but everyone has access to the Undine shield bubble and Brace for Impact, so at a minimum it enhances those. Rally Point Marker, a power I typically use, has both hull and shield healing and as such, benefits from both points. My Kiwavi uses the Protomatter Field Projector, and its regen is enhanced by both skills.

Advanced Hull Capacity is not a typical choice, but I have at least two items on most of my tanks that scale with max hull. The Tilly 3pc lightning zap Mycelial Lightning scales its damage up to 200k hull, and Tyler's Duality reputation trait scales its CrtH up to 200k hull. This makes 200k hull the target hull I am for. Now, the first point is 15% more hull, then the next is 10.5%, and the last is 4.5%. This means that last point gives 1/3 the bonus the first point does, but in context, that is still 2,835 (Kiwavi) or 2,885 (Endeavour) extra hull. This also contributes to regen effectiveness. Regen heals 3% of hull in a specific increment. So, 4.5% capacity means an extra ~85 hull healed every tick of regen. That may not seem like a lot, but with 300% regen or so, that's a tick every 0.6s! In the 10 seconds Aux to SIF takes to cool down, that last point of Hull Capacity has healed 1,500 hull. (I'm not selling you on this, am I?)

I pick up a point in shield capacity, but generally don't rely on shields to stay alive. Reverse Shield Polarity doesn't rely on capacity, but it's an easy point to spend for some extra capacity the rest of the time.

Weapon Training adds a lot to my primary damage source, which is weapons. Energy weapons are what do the most damage, but the token Torpedo packs a punch as well with the extra damage from Projectile Weapon Training. I choose Improved because I choose to use that extra point elsewhere.

Since energy weapons are a primary damage source, EPS really helps keep my extra power topped up as weapons drain power when firing. These two points double the speed I get power restored.

Impulse Energy shunt is completely wasted, Miracle Worker primary means power moves instantly after Full Impulse and the "benefit" from the shunt is wasted.

Impulse Expertise, however, is something I always max out anymore. I tend to fly large ships, and they need all the help they can get in the speed and turn department. Impulse Expertise helps both.

I always pick up at least one point in both Control Expertise (CtrlX) and Drain Expertise (DrainX) not because of the buffs, but because of the resistances they offer. I also picked up the second point in CtrlX because I run several control powers for Unconventional Systems, and I run Fragment of AI Tech, which turns CtrlX into damage for my weapons.

I don't find Drain Infection useful on this build as I have no drains to enable it. I do pick up Control Amplification because I run controls, and the extra exotic debuff helps out my teammates.

Accuracy/Defense is a tough one to gauge, especially because you never know exactly how accurate you are. 100% accuracy is optimal, but extra accuracy is just turned into a little CrtX (CrtH & CrtD is CrtX). If you are missing in your parses, add some accuracy. If you have 100% accuracy, maybe spend that point elsewhere? Unless you start missing again... Defense is similar, and more complex because of movement adding to Defense. I pick up improved in both because... it feels right. I don't have a definitive answer.

Hull Plating is passive defense, but not quite as good as "all" damage resistance. Being a tank, one point here is well spent, though spending the next two for Kinetic and Energy resists is harder to justify, especially in a world with Honored Dead and History Will Remember which are huge boons to tank survivability. I sometimes skip this point on damage builds because 15 actual resistance is pretty small compared to some powers (Aux to SIF) or traits (Repair Crews), and some have way more than that (Terran Engines, 100; Honored Dead 10x20)

Shield Regeneration is special in some way, but you should read Jayiie's work for details on that. I always pick up a point here because its so special.

Shield Hardness is a point I rarely pick up, but being a tank, it seemed like a good idea. Basic Skills offer often as much or more than Improved and Advanced combined, so a single point can go further spread out than focused.

Speaking of focusing, Criticals' are always a crowd pleaser. Since most of my damage output here is based on weapons, I took all 3 points in both skills. I would say if a point is to be skipped, 0.4% CrtH is not much return for a skill point. If I didn't already have Advanced Hull Capacity, I'd evaluate if the point in Hull Capacity would be worth more (via Tyler's Duality) than the point here.

As far as Power goes, I'll cover all 9 unlocks at once. Subsystem tuning (and power in general) is a tricky subject. Each ship comes with power bonuses, and I am using Emergency Power abilities as well. I ended up choosing Warp Core Potential to add a flat 3 to each subsystem for a total of 12 (largest single +power per skill point). I also chose offensive because of the 4.8 power for engines trying to speed my ships up, and the 4.8 helps for my energy weapon output. This is a total of 9.6 power for the point. Improved Warp Core potential adds a total of 8 (2 per system), and adding to a specific system only adds 3.2 power, so significantly diminishing returns. Beyond weapon power, I don't end up needing a lot of extra power because of batteries and Emergency Power abilities.

Exotic Particle Generator (EPG) is an odd point here, but I think it has good value for the point, netting 50 EPG to boost any abilities that use EPG (such as clicky consoles). I wouldn't fault anyone for not choosing the point in EPG on a build where exotic powers aren't a primary damage source.

Long Range Targeting Sensors is always maxed out on energy builds for me because it is the only source that reduces damage falloff with distance. There's no other way to get this.

Hull/Shield Pen for weapons is a tough one because these skills translate to such a low amount of actual value, and they are only for weapons (not Kemocite or Mycelial Lightning, etc). Even though I am extremely focused on weapon damage, these are near the end of the list for pickups because the value is so low. A single point is 1/2 a [Pen] mod, and all 3 is a single [Pen] mod. My AP beams already have a [Pen] mod, but my Kiwavi doesn't have that, so it is helpful to pick up to at least Improved on both.

Readiness is absolutely wasted because of the methods I use to hit global cooldown. I primarily use Photonic Officer 1 (PO1), which manages cooldowns just fine 2/3rds of the time. Using Entwined Tactical Matricies (ETM) for Fire at Will/Torpedo Spread (FAW/TS) means I need to only take off 10 seconds of their 30 second initial cooldowns. Since I am running strategist and Threatening Stance on, I also get cooldowns from using heals when Photonic Officer is on cooldown. I'm also more likely to miss my FAW/TS timing due to not being able to fire a torpedo spread than missing cooldowns (more on that later).

Shield Mastery is always terrible. Ignoring a random hit once every 20 seconds is terrible, and none of the other points help either.

Coordination is really solid for me solo, but also as part of a team. None of my builds use hangar pets, but both have summon clickies (Delta Reinforcements, etc.). As part of a team, I can't expect anyone to send the buff my way if I don't send it theirs (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Matthew 7:12).

As far as unlocks go, there's usually either a pretty minor choice or only one relevant option. I don't push skill points anywhere just to hit unlocks. 

Unlocks

Since I have a balanced skill tree, I end up without an Ultimate, which is fine by me. Most unlocks are pretty straightforward.

Engineering-5 (Engineering unlock for 5 points) is between Hangar health for my pets, or doubling the duration of most batteries. I don't see 10% extra health really ever being worth choosing, but every build can take advantage of Battery Expertise, and this is the only place you can get it!

Engineering-10 is between hull capacity and subsystem offline resistance. I don't have a great number for subsystem offline duration, even moreso how the skill reduces this. Subsystem Repair is a skill called out in the bridge officer trait Leadership, which I tend to slot for their regeneration so I end up with this skill as a byproduct. 10 Hull Capacity isn't that impressive, but on a cruiser, I'll take it. This is 3% more hull, which makes regeneration that much more effective. Neither pick is impressive, so there isn't a definitive right answer. 

Engineering-15 and Engineering-20 are just +2 to specific subsystem power, so they aren't worth dead points in Engineering to chase. The Engineering Ultimate is also unimpressive single target. 

Science-5 is entirely a preference between sector speed increase or transwarp cooldown reduction. I tend to favor transwarp cooldown as most locations can be transwarped to anymore, especially endgame places like fleet holdings. 

Science-10 is between shield capacity and starship stealth. Since I am not relying on stealth (just the opposite), shield capacity makes the most sense. 

Science-15 and Science-20 are some pretty minor resists or perception. Control Expertise and Drain Expertise provide these skills naturally. The Science Ultimate is not helpful in the current state of the game as it would reduce my effective CrtH. Therefore, none of these are worth taking extra points to unlock. 

Tactical-5 is absolutely essential for a tank. Choosing 100% extra threat for Threatening Stance makes a large difference, whereas 10% extra damage for hangar pets won't make that large of a difference. If you made the wrong choice here, please respec. 

Tactical-10 and Tactical-15 are somewhat preferential, but I find that the CrtH just slightly edges out the CrtD. 

Tactical-20 is a super small choice, but since this is a tank, the extra defense was my choice. Not worth a respec if you choose accuracy. 

Notes

An addition to the game in 2020 was been Ba'ul Antiproton Weapons. These trade the innate Critical Severity of Antiproton for a reflection which deals 5% of damage dealt to target to the closest target. This applies to every shot, and with the lobi 2pc this is further increased to 10% of total damage dealt to up to two additional targets after the initial. There are some effects which carry over on these reflections, such as Suppression Barrage Debuffs.Because of how tanking works, Ba'ul weapons have quickly become the go-to for tanking options. This isn't to say that other weapon types are inherently bad, but the inability to hit as many targets that Ba'ul weapons can leave them lacking for ability to draw as many targets. 

As a note to any prospective tank players, feel free to choose whatever type you want. Ba'ul is great at tanking but there are other DPS options than can create similar threat. Crafted AP is 'cheaper', piezoelectric from Lukari Reputation, Phasers or Disruptors of any kind, and so on. Refer to the Energy Basics for some top contenders in each energy flavor. 

It would be reasonable to base our FAW uptime on the trait Entwined Tactical Matrices, but then we would need to make sure we have a torpedo to clear the Torpedo Spread. Otherwise we will have to wait out the full 30 second duration and gain nothing from ETM. In this case, I would choose the Dark Matter torpedo for its DoT application (for Entropic Rider, more on that later) as well as the 2pc set with the Lorca console. This set would provide a large amount of CrtD to the build, and both the console and torpedo are very good. 

However, we're going to be broadsiding all the time with how we fly at full speed, so Redirecting Arrays makes much more sense and still has the potential for 100% uptime. Tanking is the perfect application for Redirecting Arrays since taking damage extends Fire at Will. This lets us go full beams and avoid having to shift our piloting to fire the torpedo. Broadsiding also means the Kerala trait can come in handy for some extra damage output, but more on that later. The point is, for this tank, we will be using entirely just Beam Arrays. 

If you don't have or can't afford the Ba'ul Omni from the lockbox, just swap in a regular crafted AP omni or another Beam Array and you will be fine - we're broadsiding all the time anyways so the firing arc uptime difference will be much lower here. 

Notes

Our main gear is the Tilly 3pc. The Mycelial Lightning is a great way to "lock in" your threat with a big burst of damage. Even a tickle from the Ba'ul beams and they get zapped with the 3pc. This really extends the coverage of the tank. Even without refractions, Fire at Will hits many targets in a short period of time, once again triggering these initial spikes of damage. Mycelial Lightning also gives us a little payoff for having a high hull capacity (up to 200k) as this scales the damage. 

Since we have the 3pc Tilly for the 3pc set, we really just need to pick what piece we don't want in the Tilly set. In fact, there's nothing wrong with going the full 4pc set and is a great budget option. For extra CrtH and CrtD, the Colony Protomatter Deflector makes a solid option. In our case, the speed boost from the Competitive Engines is second-to-none for how we want to fly, so this is our preferred piece to drop from the Tilly 3pc.  

Just about all of these BOffs have Leadership, which helps slightly with Hull Regeneration. Pirate is slotted since it is a free Bridge Officer with passive extra damage. 

Commander Engineering/Pilot

The Kumari is a Pilot ship, and this is where the core of the speed tank lies. Rhythmic Rumble scales with current ship speed, and needs Pilot powers to actually trigger. When everything is running, we're often around 65-70% resistance, which is a ton of damage reduction. Rhythmic Rumble alone is accounting for somewhere around 30% resistance, with our other sources adding somewhere around 10-20%. If you actually look at Pilot powers, not all of them contribute to the bottom line of speed or turn rate. Subspace Boom, Reroute Reserves to Weapons, Form Up, Coolant Ignition, Reinforcements Squadron, Lock Trajectory and Attack Pattern Lambda really just don't make any sense here as they don't boost our speed, and several even have effects we don't want at all (like Lock trajectory...)

Hold Together is damage resistance and healing, much like Hazard Emitters. It also can clear hazard debuffs like Hazard Emitters. However, it scales with ship Throttle, which we should already be at full for Rhythmic Rumble. It's uptime isn't amazing, but when Hold Together III is compared to Hazard Emitters I at around 50 Aux, it's 5x the heals per second and 6x the damage resistance. We pick rank 3 because there's simply not much better we can slot at Commander, except maybe Reverse Shield Polarity. You'll find, however, you really don't need the 3rd rank of Reverse Shield Polarity simply due to A Budding Alliance being a weaker form of Reverse Shield Polarity that's simply up all the time. 

Fly Her Apart is typically seen as a really strong damage boost, and in our case would also be a super strong speed boost. However, I'm not a huge fan of self-damage on tanks, and frankly the camera shenanegans this power has really makes piloting this ship much harder. With Reverse Shield Polarity and Hold Together occupying the same rank seats as Fly Her Apart, this really gets demoted to a lower priority. In the end, there just isn't room. Rank III at full stacks is 300% flight speed, the same speed we get out of Clean Getaway at rank I with much better uptime. The scaling nature of this power just makes it harder to fly, so I chose to leave this one at home. 

Clean Getaway, however, plays right into what we want to do with a speed tank. It's an instantaneous click to give us 300% more speed. Honestly, you could take higher ranks for even more speed and uptime, but I elected for more direct resistance from Hold Together and more uptime from Reverse Shield Polarity. I could easily swap RSP and Clean Getaway, but not sure I could give up Hold Together III for just how big the throttle scaling of Hazard Removal is on Hold Together. 

It's safe to say these three seats are easily Reverse Shield Polarity, Hold Together, and Clean Getaway. However, which ranks you choose is certainly open to experimentation. Never take Hold Together at Rank I, as the hazard removal there only happens at 100% throttle, and there will be occasions where you need to cut speed even just a little. Rank II and III at least give you some leeway there. If you don't have a really strong Fabrication Engineer to extend Reverse Shield Polarity's duration, you'll really feel the lack of power and uptime of RSP at Rank I - base duration of 12 seconds, versus 16 and 20 seconds at higher ranks and up to 8 more seconds from a duty officer, not to mention the absorb scaling as well. If you don't have a Duty Officer, don't go lower than rank II. This logically relegates Clean Getaway to Rank I (you'll find out where the other potential place for RSP II goes in a moment). If you have a solid Duty Officer for RSP, you can take the hit for dropping to Rank I (especially with A Budding Alliance), drop Hold Together to Rank II, and get Clean Getaway to Rank III - netting an additional 4 seconds of duration and 100% more speed (total of 400%). I was much happier with the 4 more seconds on RSP, and we're doing just fine on speed from everything else, though I may try this alternative on occasion, especially if I can pick up a Purple Fabrication Engineer. 

That leaves us with an Ensign seat, and a couple Pilot powers we should talk about. Deploy Countermeasures seems like an amazing choice here, with decoys that taunt enemies and immunity to certain damage types. Unless we are going to completely displace one of our big 3 we already discussed, that immunity is 4 seconds and we only get 3 decoys. Frankly, you could get 50 decoys and this power would still be awful. The Decoys on this build were around 18k hit points. For reference, Fleet Support's battleship has over 200k hit points. 18k hull, with a taunt, and basically no resists means the decoys last for only a fraction of a second on Elite content. This means the decoys/taunt portion is basically worthless, and 4 seconds of kinetic immunity out of every 30 isn't huge. Remember, shields drastically reduce kinetic damage, and we have really high resistance. 4 out of 30 seconds is only 13% uptime, and taking us from 90% resistance (75% reduction from shields, ~60% Kinetic Resistance) to 100% really only means we're getting 10% more resistance from the power, and only for Kinetics at that. I'd rather get some more speed to apply a little more ALL damage resistance instead of total Kinetic immunity with low uptime. 

Pilot Team fits the bill for Ensign and Speed, providing turn rate and speed, as well as some defense with 66% uptime.

Lt. Commander Universal/Command

We went really heavy on Pilot powers on our forced Engineering seat, so we'll go ahead and plan to take more Engineering powers here as there are two distinct speed boosts we haven't picked. But first, at Lt. Commander Command, we can pick up rank I of Suppression Barrage. This further reduces incoming damage by reducing their outgoing damage. While not as strong as rank III, it's certainly worth taking for the -20% damage. This leaves the Lieutenant and Ensign seats. 

At Lieutenant, we take Aux to Dampeners I. The speed and turn rate don't scale with rank, just the damage resist so there's really no reason to take a higher rank. We can also get a duty officer to drastically extend the uptime of A2D. Also of note, since we are pulling threat, the immunity to Disable and Repel will absolutely come into play on some maps. You don't want to be disabled while under heavy weapons fire. For Ensign, it's really tough to beat the maneuverability of Emergency Power to Engines. However, you'll notice we don't take the Emergency Conn Officer on this build... but we take it on literally every other build on the site. On this build, we need Evasive Maneuvers *faster* than the Emergency Conn Hologram can bring it back up. Evasive Maneuvers has a base cooldown of 45 seconds, and Emergency Power to Engines is a minimum cooldown of 30 seconds. In general play, this works out pretty well basically letting you bank up back to back Evasive Maneuvers. For our speed tank, we can do better. Suffice to say, we'll cover it more in piloting and Duty Officers, but now we can just spambar Emergency Power to Engines without it being tied to our Evasive Maneuvers. We will lose a couple extra Duty Officer slots as a result, but it will all work out...

Lt. Commander Tactical

With these being all forced Tactical seats, our pool to pull from is greatly reduced. Since we are planning to broadside 100% of the time, ETM and a torpedo really doesn't work out well for us in our build plan. This build could use Attack Pattern Beta, but since we have Redirecting Arrays, we can take advantage of 100% uptime Fire at Will III. If you take Fire at Will I, you can take Attack Pattern Beta II at Lt. Commander. Our Lieutenant slot will be Cannon Rapid Fire or Cannon Scatter Volley simply to trigger the Protomatter consoles. I chose to stick with Fire at Will III since in general, we aren't going to be doing an outrageous amount of damage. It's equally viable to use Fire at Will I and Attack Pattern Beta II instead of Kemocite Laced Weaponry I and Fire at Will III.

Lieutenant Science

Photonic Officer I plus Boimler and even Custom Power Matrix is more than enough to cover our cooldowns. Again, we really want passive cooldown methods so I went pretty boring here. What's more unusual is Polarize hull, a power we don't typically see. The damage resistance is nice, but what we're really slotting it for is the immunity to tractor beams. Going from full speed to a dead stop because something caught you with a tractor beam is a death sentence, especially since so much of our resistance is based on our flight speed.

Ensign Universal

For the last seat, Hazard Emitters I is also a typical pickup for the hazard clear, but if you recall, we get that from Hold Together as well. We're not really going to find a better power at Ensign than we already have. We could use Emergency Power to Weapons or Tactical Team or something, but those will be pretty marginal since we aren't planning on using traits like Ship of the Line or Emergency Weapon Cycle (more on those later). We're also not going to need or use Unconventional Systems here, so those typical triggers are absent from the build. 

We finally get to Duty Officers, and hopefully everything we've talked about so far starts to make sense. Normally the first Duty Officer you would see would be the Emergency Conn Hologram, but we don't need it here. We take 3 plain-old Conn Officers instead. Well, mostly. Zero is really close to a standard Conn Officer, but has a chance to reduce cooldown a little more than normal. When Conn Officers were first introduced, it was a chance to reduce the cooldown. This was Eons ago in STO life. Now, they apply a flat 2/3/4/5 seconds reduction as soon as Evasive Maneuvers is over. These are easy enough to obtain at Very Rare there's no reason not to. You might even already have some. Zero has a chance to apply anywhere from 4 seconds to 10 seconds cooldown. If we assume standard probability, 1 out of 7 will be worse than a regular Conn Officer, but 6 out of 7 will be the same or better than a regular Conn Officer. Let's do some math. 

Evasive Maneuvers starts with a 45 second cooldown. The minimum is somewhere around 8 seconds, so we've got a long ways to go. Helmsman removes 10 seconds, 2x Very Rare Conn Officers removes another 10 seconds. We're already recovering Evasive Maneuvers faster than the Emergency Conn Hologram. Let's assume for a moment Zero gets a perfect 10 second reduction, and then we are down to 15 seconds right off the bat - all of these are passive. Intel Agent Attache is going to trigger at some point in those 15 seconds for a whopping… 0.9s reduction on cooldown. If we hit some captain power, like Brace for Impact or Go Down Fighting while Evasive is on cooldown, that will remove another 2.25s due to One Impossible thing at a Time. We're down pretty close to 10 seconds at this point. This is up often enough now that we can actually put Evasive Maneuvers on the spambar! I think you could potentially put more into getting captain cooldowns, but really shaving just a couple seconds off shouldn't be necessary. You'll get plenty of critical hits with as many sources of outgoing damage and those Intel Agent Attache triggers will shave off a few more seconds. Really aggressive play might even use some of the other Captain powers, but 8-12 seconds between Evasives is plenty, especially considering it's a channel and you can't reduce it further while it is running. 

The Fabrication Engineer we pick up drastically improves the duration of Reverse Shield Polarity. You could absolutely spring for a Very Rare, but it's going to depend on your budget. Note here I have a Rare, someday I'll drop the 20M+ EC for a Very Rare, but picking up Helmsman was more essential to my goals this time…

The Matter-Antimatter duty officer also drastically increases Aux to Dampeners, which is huge. Normally this power lasts 15 seconds, but the Very Rare duty officer takes it up to 23 seconds, and we get a lot of speed and turn out of this so more uptime is very welcome. 

The last duty officer is basically filler - I'd love more speed or turn, but you just won't find it since we filled up all of our Conn Officers.

Piloting

Piloting is a very important aspect of this build. We're not going to take a typical piloting strategy and throw out the manual, but we are going to fly very differently. First of all, the general positioning rules still apply. Aim to be within 5km of your primary target, know your positioning on the map, etc. However, instead of picking a single side for something like flanking or coordination, think of yourself as orbiting your target! You will constantly be at full throttle for maximum speed and therefore durability. The only way to stay on target with that much speed is to fly in circles. It's pretty easy to set up an orbit, and if it's not perfectly centered on your target, that's fine. I find setting the camera to Free is essential. If you have Chase camera on, it will glitch out at these turn rates. I will fly to position using my typical mouse movement, and then switch to keyboard control. Holding Left or Right (A or D on my setup) will cause you to do very fast loops. However, STO is a 3D game, and any sort of pitch up or down will cause you to orbit in a spiral. A quick tap on the up or down while still spinning will adjust your pitch to either level out or pitch into the opposite spiral. You'll end up holding your Left or Right turn at a position, and making micro-adjustments to your pitch. When you need to make a macro-move to another location, such as another shipyard in Cure, switch back to mouse controls and aim where you want to go. Once you arrive, switch back to the circular movement. 

If you find at any point you break out of your orbit and go flying off, your Competitive Engines more than likely have stopped running. Having Fire at Will and a Cannon power running a few seconds out of sync will keep them up all the time, and if those powers either get stuck on cooldown or sync up too closely, your Competitive Engines

Portability

When it comes to a Speed Tank, you can really run this on any full Pilot ship. You'll be looking for a high base turn rate, so carriers and dreadnoughts are out. I'm not sure on the breakpoint of turn rate, but you'll also pretty quickly notice a lower hull mod. If you go Full Pilot and Lt. Commander Command, that only leaves the Eagle. I don't have to tell you twice, the Eagle will be almost too fast and too squishy to pull this off. I might try it just to see, but I really can't recommend it. While suppression barrage isn't essential, it's a solid chunk of damage mitigation, so I'd like to say you should keep it. If we aim for at least Lt. Commander Pilot and Lt. Commander Command, the Shangri-la will rise to the top with solid turn rate and similar seating capability. Technically the Kiwavi and Cheirax wouldn't be too bad for portability