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). Due to performance issues, we had to move the hangar ones and ground ones to a separate page. 

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. 

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/Targeted Excision

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!

Top 15 Hangar Pet Choices

This is a quick list for what we believe are the top-performing hangar pets for either a base hangar selection (base) or hangar-focused pet build (carrier), with recommended firing mode traits in the next column. If you want to see how a specific hangar pet measures up using empirical data, scroll down to the Full Hangar Pet Evaluation spreadsheet.

Full Hangar Pet Evaluation

This is our full evaluation of hangar pets, as best as we can ascertain using the data we've either generated or had provided to us.