There’s a lot of slots to equip gear in Star Trek Online and gearing up can be hard starting out. You’ll need consoles, armaments, impulse engines and shields to power your ship not to mention you’ve got to equip a deflector and warp core! There’s a lot of loot that drops in the game and it can be really confusing on what to do to gear up and where to go to get ready to serve the Federation, Klingon Defense Force, etc.
We break the gear guide down to before level 65, right when you hit 65 and pulling together your gear after that. Let’s begin!
Gear Before Level 65
As a free-to-play player you’ll mostly be kitting your space ship out with mission rewards. You’ll be getting new gear constantly that you can use to replace your already equipped gear via missions. It comes so quickly to be quite honest that you’ll likely get to play around and test all of the different gear.
Once you’ve acquired a T6 ship, you can use that all the way until 65. Just remember every 10 levels or so to dismiss the ship and then reacquire it.
Additionally, a T6 will be your biggest power increase. Make sure to follow the seasonal events and get your free T6 ship when an event pops (which is almost all the time). If you start at the end of an event, just wait for it to wrap up and the next one will kick off likely with a free event ship.
Gear Fresh at Level 65
Once you reach level 65 you’re going to be pretty much at the lowest you’ll be DPS and hull size wise. Like most MMOs you’re placed in a place where it’s hard to grind for the things you need in order for it to be easy to grind for the things you need.
There’s some steps you can do. First, analyzing all the builds from players who focus on providing tips to lower level builds give a few strong easy to obtain consoles and weapons.
Defense First
The first is the engineering consoles from Beyond the Nexus (Reinforced Armaments), Brushfire (House Martok Defensive Configuration) and Ragnarok (Trellium-D Plating). These are commonly ranked as “C Tier” but the thing is they come directly as mission rewards and compete with Lobi and Zen consoles just as well.
These three consoles are going to make your ship very tanky and keep you alive. You’ll want to grind these missions for each ship you get, as they’re again easy and obtainable right at level 65 (well technically around 60 when you can get them at rank 12 by default).
So with defense taken care of, it’s time to make the weapons worthwhile.
Increasing your DPS
The very first thing you’ll need to do is commit, for now at least, to a weapon damage type. I suggest “phaser” damage, but any flavor is fine. Then you’ll want to load your ship up with rank 12 armaments specifically that have “phaser” “plasma” “antiproton” or whatever your damage type is. It should be on every weapon to make the Vulnerability Locators work properly.
You can get the weapons anywhere, they just need to be purple rarity. You don’t need to worry about epics or very rare, rare is fine enough. Missions and the exchange are great here – don’t pay more than 50,000~100,000 energy credits a weapon. You’ll later want to invest into lockbox weapons which you can upgrade yourself for Dilithium via Phoenix Packs.
Speaking of Phaser, there are prolonged engagement phaser beams & torpedos in the Phoenix Pack that are still best in slot. Something to consider.
Once you’ve slotted yourself out with all weapons of one damage type you’ll want to join a fleet that has a level 3 fleet spire and then stack Vulnerability Locators for your damage type. They’re 50,000 fleet credits each but are basically the most damage you’re getting for the bucks.
Finishing it Out
To finish your ship out you’ll want to get the rest of the console slots filled. Conductive RCS Accelerator, a crafted console and other consoles on the exchange can fill in everything on your ship. In regards to shields, deflectors and warp cores – don’t worry and just slot what you can afford from the exchange in. You’ll get better from missions and later – reputations. Just make sure everything is MK 12 and rare.
Speaking off, each time you start a reputation mission you get a loot box. This is can help fill in some slots.
Building a Build
Once you have your defense consoles and damage sorted, it’s time to start playing a much longer game: grinding reputations. You’ll need “Lorca’s Custom Fire Controls” from the Discovery Reputation for instance. You’ll need the “Assimilated Module” from the Omega Rep. Every build is going to require something from Omega, Gamma and Discovery reputations pretty much. So you’ll need to start grinding marks for reputations and get them to level 5.
Meanwhile you’ll need to farm both energy credits and Dilithium. You’ll need Phoenix Boxes to upgrade your items eventually and will want to buy your best in slot weapons from the exchange. The most cost efficient means of getting them is to buy the lowest rarity (for instance Agony Phasers) for around 1,000,000 if that. Then upgrade them yourself with Dilithium from the Phoenix Box.
It’ll take considerable research to throw things together, which is actually quite nice since you’ll need to play for awhile to get everything together to do exactly what you want. So keep grinding reputations until you get them rank 5 and then seriously start considering putting everything together with a large stockpile of EC, Dil and items.
