Tier Lists
We see many questions about traits, duty officers (doffs), kits, and hangar pets. Which ones are good? Which ones are not? There's three things in common with between starship traits, personal traits, kit modules, hangar pets and doffs:
1) There's a ton of choices
2) Many of them are expensive
3) There's a lot that aren't good
Because of that, we thought we'd try our hands at rating the top candidates for each one from the perspective of an endgame player looking to crush it on Elite (and not just the parsing maps). For space traits, we tried to divide them among the popular build types. Since there's a huge swathe of builds to choose from, space personal traits and duty officers (doffs) get also an added category for defensive traits called Survivability. On ground, we focused on kit modules and personal traits, leaning more towards offensive ones for kits and completely offensive for personal traits.
Remember, tier lists are a shortcut designed to circumvent specialized analysis for an individual build and provide a quick answer of what's good or not. They're for the general use cases and not hyper-specialized, super high-end, hybridized, or for really off-the-wall builds. As always, your mileage may vary.
Space
Principles
1) Starship traits are a limited build space with potentially irreplaceable effects. Nowhere lets you extend your firing modes or makes all your space anomalies explode in blue rings of doom! There's lots of places to add generic damage or durability; starship traits are simply too valuable to use for just survivability or cooldowns. Both of those needs can be filled elsewhere at less real cost and opportunity cost. As such, for starship trait suggestions geared towards general Advanced and Elite content, we're only recommending starship traits with at least some offensive benefit, even for tanks. Your authors have tanked Hive Elite without Honored Dead, for example. It's not needed. Non-tanks still generally shouldn't use valuable starship trait slots for staying alive barring a couple exceptions. We do sort and recommend defensive personal traits.
2) The traits and doffs are sorted by tier (S > A > B > C), but they are NOT sorted within the tier. That's a little too build-dependent.
3) If a trait or doff is situationally in two different tiers, we listed it at the highest and put a note on there. Traits/doffs definitely have nuance and dependencies so please read all the notes before potentially making an expensive purchase and decide if it works for you.
4) If you are really after chasing the deeps on just the Borg maps, some of these recommendations will seem weird. Subspatial Warheads, for example, is frequently slotted even on energy builds with a high-yield torpedo because Isolytic Tears from that trait wreck unshielded, immobile targets. This list isn't tailored for you, it's tailored for general Elite PvE content and builds.
5) No PvP considerations were made in the making of this list.
6) We're not reviewing all the traits or doffs. That ends up being a lot of work for little reward. Just the ones we think are good.
7) Don't forget to have fun! Some of the traits frequently described as "fun" aren't very good, but if it's fun for you and you're still feeling successful in the game, don't let a tier list get in your way!
Shoutouts to Spencer (Startrekker) and CounterYolo are merited for their review of some / all of our trait/doff list.
Note: There are multiple tabs (see the top of the tables to switch). See the changelog tab in the table for the revision date. You can filter or sort the list as desired.
Starship Traits
Space Personal Traits
Space Duty Officers
Hangar Pets
There may have been many attempts over the years to rank hangar pets. Unfortunately, they’ve been plagued by the data sets being small and there’s little/no commonality in test setups between the various tests. It’s time to fix those problems, at least as much as we can.
Our ranking is an aggregate from a wide variety of crowdsourced hangar pet tests. Since we’re pulling ALL of the publicly-available data that’s still relevant (post-Superior Area Denial nerf, post hangar-AI update in May 2019), we have a larger data set which should help reduce random error and small sample size. Compared to previous rankings that had 20-40 data sets, our compilation has over 200. That said, there are still hundreds of hangar pets that we do not have rankings for–there are simply too many and they are too expensive for us to evaluate all of them, even with help from the community. What data is available, we’ve included.
Since not everyone uses the same test, we’ve done one other thing: we’ve calibrated the ranking. Every data set incorporated here uses at least 1 pet in common: Normal Peregrine fighters. We took the results for Normal Peregrine fighters and averaged them. Then, we took each data set and divided its results for Normal Peregrines by this average value. We then took into consideration some other calibration factors:
Was the test conducted with just pets fighting or with the player ship fighting alongside? Empirical testing has shown an average of 30% increase in DPS for the player ship fighting, debuffing, and tanking for the pets.
How many bays were involved? (1 or 2)
How many runs of the test were performed for that pet? More runs lead to greater confidence in the data and thus more weighting for that test.
We used that information to give two things: an average calibrated DPS per bay based on all of the data sets as well as a ranking that simply takes the average DPS per bay and divides it by the average Normal Peregrine DPS for that setup. When we talk about hangar pet rankings, it’s important to consider that the level of build investment in the hangar varies substantially. With that said, here are the four broad categories that we consider:
Extra/Afterthought hangar: you have a hangar but are not building around it. We call this “Base”
Carrier setup: This is stuff like Flight Deck Officers, Wing Commander, high aux, possibly a Swarmer Matrix but NOT either of the two following traits. This setup will broadly cover builds that are invested in hangar DPS but are not shelling out for premium traits. We call this “Carrier”
Superior Area Denial: Carrier + Superior Area Denial
Coordinated Assault: Carrier + Coordinated Assault
Certain pets will perform differently depending on those key variables. There are many other smaller variables, but we believe these are the main divergent setups that will broadly influence rankings. We have data sets, calibrated DPS/bay, and rankings for pets across each of these four setups. We also color-coded pets that are shiplocked to distinguish them from those that can be freely slotted. The full table below has the numerical ranks for each one as well as how to acquire them, miscellaneous notes, and whether the pets have supportive abilities like Focused Assault or Attack Pattern Beta? Players building more supportive builds will want to review that sheet below the 4 charts. Likewise, captains building around pets and wanting to use the Super Charged Weapons trait will want to look and see if their pet is torpless in the table. If a pet isn't in the chart, we have no data for it for that build type.
STO BETTER would like to extend a very special thanks to all of our contributors on the STObuilds subreddit who helped collect hundreds of data points on hangar pets to provide the most comprehensive hangar pet evaluation in existence thus far: AboriakTheFickle, Cryhavok101, DilaZirk, jonfon74, Pottsey-X5, and thisvideoiswrong.
See the changelog tab in the spreadsheet for the revision date. IF YOU ARE ON MOBILE, PLEASE OPEN THE CHART IN A NEW TAB IN ORDER TO READ IT!
Ground
Principles
1) Kit modules are the most important part of a ground build, but there are also hundreds of them. We have evaluated several dozen we've used or have seen others put to good use in our armada. Not all kit modules have been evaluated, and melee builds are not considered. This is unlikely to ever change. Our coverage of defensive kit modules is light because no more than 1-2 should be slotted. There are few enough useful ground doffs that you can find ratings for them on our Ground Basics guide.
2) Ground personal traits are generally ranked by offensive value. Defensive personal traits are generally not needed on the ground and should only be slotted when useful offensive traits are not available.
3) Traits and kit modules are sorted by tier (S > A > B > C), but they are NOT sorted within the tier. That's a little too build-dependent.
4) If a trait or kit module is situationally in two different tiers, we listed it at the highest and put a note on there. Traits/doffs definitely have nuance and dependencies so please read all the notes before potentially making an expensive purchase and decide if it works for you.
5) If you are really after chasing the deeps on Bug Hunt/Trans-Dimensional Tactics, or high levels on Arena of Sompek, this list will not help much. It's geared for general Elite play.
6) No PvP considerations were made in the making of this list.
7) We're not reviewing all the modules or traits. That ends up being a lot of work for little reward. Just the ones we think are good and can speak to knowledgably.
8) Don't forget to have fun! Some of modules aren't very strong in terms of damage or healing, but if it's fun for you and you're still feeling successful in the game, don't let a tier list get in your way!