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

Starship Traits

Space Personal Traits

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.