What Ship Weapons to Equip?

The other day, I wrote a post on how I was trying to improve my Heavy Escort’s survivability in Star Trek Online. Well, so far, the changes have proven to be a success. Now it’s time for me to start looking at ways to maximize my damage, which is the reason I decided to fly a glass cannon in the first place.

In many ways, this is going to be a lot more complicated. For one thing, my current set-up is a mess! I’m not exactly swimming in energy credits, so I’m mostly making my weapon upgrades through what I can get with exploration badges, buy off that space-wench Romaine and her Memory Alpha buddies, or through quest rewards and random drops. It also doesn’t help that there are so many choices of equipment and ways to load up your starship weapon slots. As a result, the set-up on the U.S.S. Savannah was a jumble of cannons, beam arrays, torpedoes, and turrets of several damage types. Somehow I still managed to do decent DPS, but there were clearly things I could do to streamline and improve my weapons system.

I will take some time in the next few days to formulate ideas on how I’m going to go about boosting my damage. For now though, I’ve discovered two things that are really helping me out in this department:

1. Because my tactics often involve me directly facing my enemies in combat, loading my aft weapon slots with two sets of turrets seems to be best option. Overall, turrets have lower sustained DPS, but they can fire in a 360′ sphere and having 100% uptime on them really makes a difference.

2. Escort ships have an extra forward weapon slot and can load cannons, so might as well make the most out of it. Right now, having two sets of dual cannons in front of my Tier 3 Escort is working out pretty well, enabling me to effectively whittle away my enemies’ shields before launching a torpedo at their hulls.

Return to Taris

There was a drought of news about Star Wars: The Old Republic as of late, which is why I was bouncing up and down with excitement when I saw that today’s update was a pretty big planet reveal.

At first, I was surprised to see that it was Taris, but it makes sense if you think about it. In the same way that Tattooine is there for fans of the movies, Taris is there for the fans of KOTOR…except the latter planet is no longer the ecumenopolis we knew it to be. Remember, it was utterly destroyed by the Sith. Screenshots and concept art depict it as a swampy ruin, and the forums are already abuzz with speculations as to whether or not Bioware is going to implement the concept of the “Promised Land” that was first mentioned in KOTOR by the denizens of Taris’ Undercity. God, I sure as hell hope so. A nerdgasm-inducing thought, that is.