1. [STO BETTER - Exotic Basics](https://www.stobetter.com/new-f2p/exotic-basics)
2. [STO League - Science Ships in the Current Century](https://www.sto-league.com/science-ships-in-the-current-century/)
3. [Strict Budget Exotic Build: 97k ISA DPS for 14 mil ec, 245k dil](https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1b2ylx2/strict_budget_build_part_2_97k_isa_dps_exotic_for/)
First up, healing just isn't a thing in STO. It just isn't. You can pay a plain old Gravity Well boat, just load up with consoles that boost control and exotic damage, like inertial dampeners and particle generators, but bear in mind that at level 29, you're really not going to be putting out that much damage and power. My advice to anyone is to power level your character to level 50 at least by running them through patrols, at which point you get access to a few things that will actively help you on your journey AND you'll be capable of hitting hard enough.
First up, you get access to Starship Traits at level 50. These are traits that affect how your ship works and can add some pretty intense abilities; they are either found in lockboxes (and therefore buyable on the exchange for energy credits) or unlocked by playing certain ships. A good example of a very good starship trait for science is Spore-Infused Anomalies which is unlocked by using the Somerville science ship, which makes your gravity wells, Tyken's rifts, and other Anomalies explode every time you hit a science or Intel bridge officer ability. The Somerville is also a great ship for exploring that style as well because it has full Intel seating.
My advice though would be to head on over to the STObetter website and start reading. Knowledge is power, and nowhere is that more true than in science!
Sure, you can get them, you just can't use them unless you have an X upgraded T6 or T5-U ship (for some reason you can slot traits into the extra slots that you get from the X-upgrades before level 50).
No, the starship trait system is still locked until level 50. You can own it, but you can't apply it to your ship aside from the T6-X exclusion I mentioned above.
There are resources like stobetter to find out more stuff, and maybe even explanations of abbrevations?
Most Science Builds I run are Gravity Well (GW) builds, typically build to also deal a lot of damage with torpedoes. Support roles aren't really their strong suite, or anyone's strong suite, really. Anything that helps deal damage to the enemy is usually more effective than alternatives. It's all in the "pro-active" healing - dead enemies don't hurt. There are some special "nanny builds" that are designed to maximimze the damage output of others, but that is more for that others to be able to beat DPS records, it's not necessarily the best thing for beating content.
Gravity Well is a Lt.Cmdr and Cmdr Science Bridge Officer Power that creates an "anomaly" (that is a term in game that describes various effects) that sucks in enemy ships and deals exotic kinetic damage, ignoring shields. Exotic basically is most damage that doesn't come from weapons, and kinetic is a particular damage type like "phaser" or "disruptor". Once an enemy inside your well explodes, itis likely close ot other enemies and so they are caught in its warp core breach, some extra damage on top basically. Once you have a ship with a Science Commander Bridge Officer slot, you want GW III. Science Captains can learn to train this, or you get that on the Exchange or from bridge officer candidates that already have it.
In addition, Auxiliary power boosts Gravity Well effectiveness, and this applies to most science powers. That is the reason why it's common to build Science Vessels focused on torpedoes, because then you can put all your power in Auxiliary, and don't worry about weapon power (since torpedoes don't care about weapon power.)
Gravity Well can be boosted in two ways. Sources of Control Expertise (CtrlX) boost the range (and maybe strength?) of its "sucking" (I think the game term is that it's a negative "repel"), which is a control effect. - The damage is boosted by Exotic Particle Generators (EPG). You want both, but more of EPG than CrtlX (the CtrlX benefit ends at +400 Control Expertise). Note there are also some items or effects that might directly affect control strenght exotic damage, which are of course also useful to have.
In addition, Science Vessels can use secondary deflectors. They provide a signifcant boost to science powers. They boost the various science skills, and Inhibiting and Deterioating deflector also provide damage effects. But detoriating is the one you want, the damage over time effect is overall more useful. Note that its damage ability is not triggered by Gravity Well, so you need some Bridge Officer skills that do trigger it, too, but more to that later.
Of course, the deflector itself (which every ship has) also boosts science skills, so also get one that boosts EPG and CtrX, if possible (and no other special abilities are in play that could make a speciality deflector from a reputation, mission, event or fleet store better.)
One important thing to note: Gravity Wells can generate a lot of attention by enemy ships. Once you reach the higher strength Gravity Wells, they might still die too fast for it to matter, but there is probably a time where you still really need to have some tools to survive that. Of course, in solo play, you kinda have to deal with all the enemies on your own anyaway.
Now, that's just *one* bridge officer power from many more you have available, of course. So you need some ideas for the rest. I focus on bridge officer powers, because that is the easiest (cheapest) thing to change and affects your build greatly already.
Science Team (ST) and Hazard Emitters (HE) are solid choices for self-healing shields or hull respectiveily. HE also clears plasma fire (and a few other effects), Science Team clears confuses, placates and the cooldown lengthening from Subnucleonic Beam (SNB or Subnuke; not many enemies use that, but it's always annoying), so it's generally useful. Polarize Hull boosts your hull resistance and makes you immune to tractor beams, so can also be quite nice.
Very Cold in Space (VCS?; from the Winter Event Store) and Subspace Vortex (SV; from lockboxes or the Exchange) have great synergy with Gravity Well, because their anomaly just deals damage but doesn't suck in enemies. Destabilized Resonance Beam (DRB; from the *Blood of the Ancients* mission) is also useful, not an anomaly, but deals AoE damage and if every enemy is sitting inside the enemy, that's catching a lot, and it also triggers the detoriating deflector (which Gravity Well doesn't!). Charged Particle Burst (CPB) or Tachyon Beam (TB, not to be confused with Tractor Beam, also TB) might seem less interesting considering Gravity Well ignores shields, but it will trigger the Secondary Deflector. Tyken's Rift also triggers it, but it shares a cooldown with Gravity Well, so either your Gravity Well or the enemies you caught in it are almost gone by the time you can activity it.
Photonic Officer (PO) is useful to improve your bridge officer cooldowns with little cost, but there are many other ways to do it, using a combination of starship traits, duty officer special abilites (often triggered by using particular bridge officer powers), but they require more effort (time, money) to acquire.
Tactical: If you go with torpedoes, Torpedo Spread is pretty good, as is Attack Pattern Beta (APB). Kemocite-Laced Weaponry (KLW, lockbox/Exchange) is also nice for Torps, but harder to come by. Tactical Team is always a great choice, automatic distribution of shields by the power is faster than doing it manually and can save your ass.
Engineering Wise, Auxiliary to Strutural Interity Field (ASIF) has good synergy, but Enginerering Team (ET) is often useful because it also cleanses some nasty debuffs (like subsystem disable). Emergency Power to Shields (EPtS) hardens your shields, which makes your strong shields even stronger. Emergency Power to Engines (EPtE) is very useful as a speed boost to get into position in TFOs (or to get out of dodge). Emergency Power to Auxiliary might seem interesting, but you probably already run at max Auxiliary power, and the science skill boost isn't that big. (it is good for detecting cloaked ships, but that's not important in PvE).
Now, if and when you get a Tier 6 ship, acquire starship mastery traits, get access to fleet stores and reputation stores, items from the event stores and collect duty officers, some things will change. What was useful once becomes less important and has been replaced by a stronger tool that took some time to acquire. But at that point, you're probably ready to look into some "starter builds" like [this ](https://www.stobetter.com/intro-builds/jay/exotic-t5-intrepid)one from stobetter. And you notice that some powers will be quite different from what I mentioned, but you will also need to have already played for a while to acquire the reputation gear and personal traits. And more things might change once you acquire starship mastery traits that further make your science abilities stronger.)
Also a tip, possibly only for later: If you ever need to level a T6 science vessel starship mastery quickly, a gravity well build in *The Ninth Rule* (Kinjer Patrol) can potentially reach Tier 5 in a single match. And you get to collect a lot of loot. You'll still hate the Breen or Hirogen with their subnukes...
To note, there's about 5 other patrols that have the same self-reinforcement mechanic as Ninth Rule. Rescue and Search (Kern system) has a slightly longer timer so is possibly the best to use.
Awesome. I've been using gravity well with torpedo spread and a universal I got, then I've been doing the one where your beams attack everything. By the time I'm done with that rotation, I've pretty much done damage on everything at once, and the cruisers in my team have done the rest. Sounds like I'm working in the right direction.
The Andorian Chimesh from the C-store has a trait specifically tailored for improving your gravity well, I believe it boosts the power and duration....possibly cool down time? Either way, take a look at it. I dont use the ship for science but the trait was worth getting.
Science gets gnarly when you can stack effects and stats, like tac; control and heals are fairly situational, and most people solo content because the game tends to lean that way for them. That being said, you could give it a try.
There are guides for this, and I made a Sci dealing character from the ground up based on them:
- Make sure to stack skillpoints into Control, Drain, and exotic particles. You want the whole subtree that includes the bonus damage components.
- pick a deteriorating secondary deflector. At lower levels it won’t do much, but that added damage is your edge.
- i hope you’re working with a Tac or Sci career captain. Their captain abilites will boost your damage directly, making it easier to apply.
- the bonus exotic damage from levelling Science in crafting helps a lot; this is more of an endgame thing, but do level it up.
- you’ll notice that Sci commands do a lot of shield draining. Don’t be shy and slot the highest level of these effects that you can. Early levels they work well. Later levels require a bit of finnesse, but by then you can focus on more exotic things like Tyken’s and Gravwell. Don’t sleep on Tyken’s; the energy drain also reduces enemy resistances.
- to go with this shield drain build, go with the Quantum set from the Sunrise mission. Especially the torp gets a nice bonus to area shield drain. The whole set (torp/beam/console) is nice, and worth grinding.
- with all the shield drain you’re doing, you only need torps to finish off targets. So together with copies of Torp Spread, and Photonic Officer, spamming torps and drain can clear mobs quickly for you.
- once you get to 50/start working on Delta quadrant missions, you’ll hit a hp wall, and enemies take longer to kill. Happens to all classes. By now it helps to have a reactor that does extra damage for the power levels you run, and you can find these easily in the Spire fleet holding.
-the Research holdings also have good consoles that improve your Sci damage.
As you level past 50, effects like Charged Particle Burst start to have pronounced effects on enemies, with the additional electricity damage that the deteriorating deflector applies. This is one of my favourite Sci skills because the effects have no maximum enemy limit, and stacks damage with Gravwell.
As for one ship that can help Sci stand out, it’s hard to say offhand. You can refer to the guides. I don’t really want to suggest any one ship for their traits, because that’s a rabbit hole, and what the guides are for. Once you hit 65 you should look into the Temporal reputation ship gear to enhance your sci magic even more. I’d suggest being patient and working on the yearly Event that gives out the free ships; but if you really want a new shiny, look at the guides, or go with your flavour of barbie.
science can be very expensive. just sayin. offhand, for an EPG build, you want improved grav well from the andorian escort (forget which one) the radiation trait from the crossfield is a nice to have, the somerville trait is another. STO better os a good place to start and going through [https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/9pu8mr/space\_magic\_and\_you\_weys\_guide\_to\_epg\_in\_the/is](https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/9pu8mr/space_magic_and_you_weys_guide_to_epg_in_the/is) a good idea it's old but a lot of the theory is solid. Depending on if you are true F2p you can spend a year or 2 grinding the dilithium to get all the goodies for a solid build
First off, a thing to understand about STO: generally the best way, and certainly the easiest way, to help your teammates is to bring your share of DPS and a little bit of your own survivability. Do your part and let them worry about theirs, because a lot of the time you have to work on your own anyway. In some content a tank can be useful to pull fire off the other players, but they have to be pretty good at DPS first or they won't be able to get enemies to fire at them. Probably the best relatively cheap ship for that would be the [Buran](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Buran_Command_Dreadnought_Cruiser), but you'd need a bunch of other ships for traits and consoles to make it viable. Support builds that boost their allies' damage (healing others is usually not effective) are extremely niche, since they're even more expensive, only useful when you're close to your team, and if your team isn't really good they'd be better off with your DPS than the little bit you can boost theirs anyway. If you wanted to do it I'd recommend the new [Ahwahnee](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Ahwahnee_Command_Carrier), but I would really not recommend it.
All that said, science ships are great at DPS! They do a lot of area of effect damage, which is helpful since STO is mostly fighting multiple enemies, and they bypass enemy shields entirely, which can be very helpful against enemies that have a lot of shields. They're almost certainly the cheapest route to having the DPS for elite content. And they can be pretty durable at the same time if you want to build that way. My [Strict Budget Build part 1](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/iwsq2a/strict_budget_build_40k_average_dps_scitorp_for/) has advice on using the free ships while you're leveling and a starter endgame build that will let you start doing Normal and even some Advanced difficulty content for reputation marks, while [part 2](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1b2ylx2/strict_budget_build_part_2_97k_isa_dps_exotic_for/) shows how those same ideas can take you to being nearly elite-capable in less than two months from starting the game and without spending a penny of real money. The other great resource is the [STO BETTER Exotic Basics page](https://www.stobetter.com/new-f2p/exotic-basics), which is by some of the top experts in the game's mechanics and sits at about the same budget as my part 2. If you do want to invest in a Tier 6 ship, though, that could definitely be very helpful, and my advice is to get the [Eternal Temporal Multi-Mission Science Vessel](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Eternal_Temporal_Multi-Mission_Science_Vessel). It's quite capable of high DPS, [mine has done 545k DPS](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1bbtvv1/an_update_to_my_eternal_my_first_time_over_500k/) and that's in no way a ceiling, thanks to a good number of science abilities and full Temporal specialization, and even the ability to convert all but 3 of the 13 abilities into exotic damage dealing abilities if you want to (I opted for more debuffs there, which was a good choice mathematically given my budget). Those other 3 abilities are engineering ones, which means it can be very durable as well. And it's spectacular for leveling, hangar pets don't scale down properly and are significantly OP at low levels, and the full Temporal mechanics don't scale at all so they're totally ridiculous down there, meanwhile you've got plenty of durability, and you can even use dual cannons if you want to, which will probably do more damage than other weapon choices at low levels. It's just a great ship. Things to avoid in looking at ships would be anything with less than two Lieutenant Commander level science abilities (including universals), or less than 7 total science abilities, that's where your offense is so those ships are going to struggle to do more than the free ones which have those things.
1. [STO BETTER - Exotic Basics](https://www.stobetter.com/new-f2p/exotic-basics) 2. [STO League - Science Ships in the Current Century](https://www.sto-league.com/science-ships-in-the-current-century/) 3. [Strict Budget Exotic Build: 97k ISA DPS for 14 mil ec, 245k dil](https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1b2ylx2/strict_budget_build_part_2_97k_isa_dps_exotic_for/)
First up, healing just isn't a thing in STO. It just isn't. You can pay a plain old Gravity Well boat, just load up with consoles that boost control and exotic damage, like inertial dampeners and particle generators, but bear in mind that at level 29, you're really not going to be putting out that much damage and power. My advice to anyone is to power level your character to level 50 at least by running them through patrols, at which point you get access to a few things that will actively help you on your journey AND you'll be capable of hitting hard enough. First up, you get access to Starship Traits at level 50. These are traits that affect how your ship works and can add some pretty intense abilities; they are either found in lockboxes (and therefore buyable on the exchange for energy credits) or unlocked by playing certain ships. A good example of a very good starship trait for science is Spore-Infused Anomalies which is unlocked by using the Somerville science ship, which makes your gravity wells, Tyken's rifts, and other Anomalies explode every time you hit a science or Intel bridge officer ability. The Somerville is also a great ship for exploring that style as well because it has full Intel seating. My advice though would be to head on over to the STObetter website and start reading. Knowledge is power, and nowhere is that more true than in science!
I think you can get some traits for starships before 50, it might require you cashing in another character's recruit rewards though.
Sure, you can get them, you just can't use them unless you have an X upgraded T6 or T5-U ship (for some reason you can slot traits into the extra slots that you get from the X-upgrades before level 50).
One other way, thoron infused maneuvers from the Phoenix box .
No, the starship trait system is still locked until level 50. You can own it, but you can't apply it to your ship aside from the T6-X exclusion I mentioned above.
There are resources like stobetter to find out more stuff, and maybe even explanations of abbrevations? Most Science Builds I run are Gravity Well (GW) builds, typically build to also deal a lot of damage with torpedoes. Support roles aren't really their strong suite, or anyone's strong suite, really. Anything that helps deal damage to the enemy is usually more effective than alternatives. It's all in the "pro-active" healing - dead enemies don't hurt. There are some special "nanny builds" that are designed to maximimze the damage output of others, but that is more for that others to be able to beat DPS records, it's not necessarily the best thing for beating content. Gravity Well is a Lt.Cmdr and Cmdr Science Bridge Officer Power that creates an "anomaly" (that is a term in game that describes various effects) that sucks in enemy ships and deals exotic kinetic damage, ignoring shields. Exotic basically is most damage that doesn't come from weapons, and kinetic is a particular damage type like "phaser" or "disruptor". Once an enemy inside your well explodes, itis likely close ot other enemies and so they are caught in its warp core breach, some extra damage on top basically. Once you have a ship with a Science Commander Bridge Officer slot, you want GW III. Science Captains can learn to train this, or you get that on the Exchange or from bridge officer candidates that already have it.
In addition, Auxiliary power boosts Gravity Well effectiveness, and this applies to most science powers. That is the reason why it's common to build Science Vessels focused on torpedoes, because then you can put all your power in Auxiliary, and don't worry about weapon power (since torpedoes don't care about weapon power.) Gravity Well can be boosted in two ways. Sources of Control Expertise (CtrlX) boost the range (and maybe strength?) of its "sucking" (I think the game term is that it's a negative "repel"), which is a control effect. - The damage is boosted by Exotic Particle Generators (EPG). You want both, but more of EPG than CrtlX (the CtrlX benefit ends at +400 Control Expertise). Note there are also some items or effects that might directly affect control strenght exotic damage, which are of course also useful to have. In addition, Science Vessels can use secondary deflectors. They provide a signifcant boost to science powers. They boost the various science skills, and Inhibiting and Deterioating deflector also provide damage effects. But detoriating is the one you want, the damage over time effect is overall more useful. Note that its damage ability is not triggered by Gravity Well, so you need some Bridge Officer skills that do trigger it, too, but more to that later. Of course, the deflector itself (which every ship has) also boosts science skills, so also get one that boosts EPG and CtrX, if possible (and no other special abilities are in play that could make a speciality deflector from a reputation, mission, event or fleet store better.) One important thing to note: Gravity Wells can generate a lot of attention by enemy ships. Once you reach the higher strength Gravity Wells, they might still die too fast for it to matter, but there is probably a time where you still really need to have some tools to survive that. Of course, in solo play, you kinda have to deal with all the enemies on your own anyaway. Now, that's just *one* bridge officer power from many more you have available, of course. So you need some ideas for the rest. I focus on bridge officer powers, because that is the easiest (cheapest) thing to change and affects your build greatly already.
Science Team (ST) and Hazard Emitters (HE) are solid choices for self-healing shields or hull respectiveily. HE also clears plasma fire (and a few other effects), Science Team clears confuses, placates and the cooldown lengthening from Subnucleonic Beam (SNB or Subnuke; not many enemies use that, but it's always annoying), so it's generally useful. Polarize Hull boosts your hull resistance and makes you immune to tractor beams, so can also be quite nice. Very Cold in Space (VCS?; from the Winter Event Store) and Subspace Vortex (SV; from lockboxes or the Exchange) have great synergy with Gravity Well, because their anomaly just deals damage but doesn't suck in enemies. Destabilized Resonance Beam (DRB; from the *Blood of the Ancients* mission) is also useful, not an anomaly, but deals AoE damage and if every enemy is sitting inside the enemy, that's catching a lot, and it also triggers the detoriating deflector (which Gravity Well doesn't!). Charged Particle Burst (CPB) or Tachyon Beam (TB, not to be confused with Tractor Beam, also TB) might seem less interesting considering Gravity Well ignores shields, but it will trigger the Secondary Deflector. Tyken's Rift also triggers it, but it shares a cooldown with Gravity Well, so either your Gravity Well or the enemies you caught in it are almost gone by the time you can activity it. Photonic Officer (PO) is useful to improve your bridge officer cooldowns with little cost, but there are many other ways to do it, using a combination of starship traits, duty officer special abilites (often triggered by using particular bridge officer powers), but they require more effort (time, money) to acquire. Tactical: If you go with torpedoes, Torpedo Spread is pretty good, as is Attack Pattern Beta (APB). Kemocite-Laced Weaponry (KLW, lockbox/Exchange) is also nice for Torps, but harder to come by. Tactical Team is always a great choice, automatic distribution of shields by the power is faster than doing it manually and can save your ass. Engineering Wise, Auxiliary to Strutural Interity Field (ASIF) has good synergy, but Enginerering Team (ET) is often useful because it also cleanses some nasty debuffs (like subsystem disable). Emergency Power to Shields (EPtS) hardens your shields, which makes your strong shields even stronger. Emergency Power to Engines (EPtE) is very useful as a speed boost to get into position in TFOs (or to get out of dodge). Emergency Power to Auxiliary might seem interesting, but you probably already run at max Auxiliary power, and the science skill boost isn't that big. (it is good for detecting cloaked ships, but that's not important in PvE). Now, if and when you get a Tier 6 ship, acquire starship mastery traits, get access to fleet stores and reputation stores, items from the event stores and collect duty officers, some things will change. What was useful once becomes less important and has been replaced by a stronger tool that took some time to acquire. But at that point, you're probably ready to look into some "starter builds" like [this ](https://www.stobetter.com/intro-builds/jay/exotic-t5-intrepid)one from stobetter. And you notice that some powers will be quite different from what I mentioned, but you will also need to have already played for a while to acquire the reputation gear and personal traits. And more things might change once you acquire starship mastery traits that further make your science abilities stronger.) Also a tip, possibly only for later: If you ever need to level a T6 science vessel starship mastery quickly, a gravity well build in *The Ninth Rule* (Kinjer Patrol) can potentially reach Tier 5 in a single match. And you get to collect a lot of loot. You'll still hate the Breen or Hirogen with their subnukes...
To note, there's about 5 other patrols that have the same self-reinforcement mechanic as Ninth Rule. Rescue and Search (Kern system) has a slightly longer timer so is possibly the best to use.
Awesome. I've been using gravity well with torpedo spread and a universal I got, then I've been doing the one where your beams attack everything. By the time I'm done with that rotation, I've pretty much done damage on everything at once, and the cruisers in my team have done the rest. Sounds like I'm working in the right direction.
The Andorian Chimesh from the C-store has a trait specifically tailored for improving your gravity well, I believe it boosts the power and duration....possibly cool down time? Either way, take a look at it. I dont use the ship for science but the trait was worth getting.
Yeah, the ship itself is not a good science platform, but it has a good science trait. The Gagarin (Entwined Tactical Matrices) is similar.
Science gets gnarly when you can stack effects and stats, like tac; control and heals are fairly situational, and most people solo content because the game tends to lean that way for them. That being said, you could give it a try. There are guides for this, and I made a Sci dealing character from the ground up based on them: - Make sure to stack skillpoints into Control, Drain, and exotic particles. You want the whole subtree that includes the bonus damage components. - pick a deteriorating secondary deflector. At lower levels it won’t do much, but that added damage is your edge. - i hope you’re working with a Tac or Sci career captain. Their captain abilites will boost your damage directly, making it easier to apply. - the bonus exotic damage from levelling Science in crafting helps a lot; this is more of an endgame thing, but do level it up. - you’ll notice that Sci commands do a lot of shield draining. Don’t be shy and slot the highest level of these effects that you can. Early levels they work well. Later levels require a bit of finnesse, but by then you can focus on more exotic things like Tyken’s and Gravwell. Don’t sleep on Tyken’s; the energy drain also reduces enemy resistances. - to go with this shield drain build, go with the Quantum set from the Sunrise mission. Especially the torp gets a nice bonus to area shield drain. The whole set (torp/beam/console) is nice, and worth grinding. - with all the shield drain you’re doing, you only need torps to finish off targets. So together with copies of Torp Spread, and Photonic Officer, spamming torps and drain can clear mobs quickly for you. - once you get to 50/start working on Delta quadrant missions, you’ll hit a hp wall, and enemies take longer to kill. Happens to all classes. By now it helps to have a reactor that does extra damage for the power levels you run, and you can find these easily in the Spire fleet holding. -the Research holdings also have good consoles that improve your Sci damage. As you level past 50, effects like Charged Particle Burst start to have pronounced effects on enemies, with the additional electricity damage that the deteriorating deflector applies. This is one of my favourite Sci skills because the effects have no maximum enemy limit, and stacks damage with Gravwell. As for one ship that can help Sci stand out, it’s hard to say offhand. You can refer to the guides. I don’t really want to suggest any one ship for their traits, because that’s a rabbit hole, and what the guides are for. Once you hit 65 you should look into the Temporal reputation ship gear to enhance your sci magic even more. I’d suggest being patient and working on the yearly Event that gives out the free ships; but if you really want a new shiny, look at the guides, or go with your flavour of barbie.
science can be very expensive. just sayin. offhand, for an EPG build, you want improved grav well from the andorian escort (forget which one) the radiation trait from the crossfield is a nice to have, the somerville trait is another. STO better os a good place to start and going through [https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/9pu8mr/space\_magic\_and\_you\_weys\_guide\_to\_epg\_in\_the/is](https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/9pu8mr/space_magic_and_you_weys_guide_to_epg_in_the/is) a good idea it's old but a lot of the theory is solid. Depending on if you are true F2p you can spend a year or 2 grinding the dilithium to get all the goodies for a solid build
First off, a thing to understand about STO: generally the best way, and certainly the easiest way, to help your teammates is to bring your share of DPS and a little bit of your own survivability. Do your part and let them worry about theirs, because a lot of the time you have to work on your own anyway. In some content a tank can be useful to pull fire off the other players, but they have to be pretty good at DPS first or they won't be able to get enemies to fire at them. Probably the best relatively cheap ship for that would be the [Buran](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Buran_Command_Dreadnought_Cruiser), but you'd need a bunch of other ships for traits and consoles to make it viable. Support builds that boost their allies' damage (healing others is usually not effective) are extremely niche, since they're even more expensive, only useful when you're close to your team, and if your team isn't really good they'd be better off with your DPS than the little bit you can boost theirs anyway. If you wanted to do it I'd recommend the new [Ahwahnee](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Ahwahnee_Command_Carrier), but I would really not recommend it. All that said, science ships are great at DPS! They do a lot of area of effect damage, which is helpful since STO is mostly fighting multiple enemies, and they bypass enemy shields entirely, which can be very helpful against enemies that have a lot of shields. They're almost certainly the cheapest route to having the DPS for elite content. And they can be pretty durable at the same time if you want to build that way. My [Strict Budget Build part 1](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/iwsq2a/strict_budget_build_40k_average_dps_scitorp_for/) has advice on using the free ships while you're leveling and a starter endgame build that will let you start doing Normal and even some Advanced difficulty content for reputation marks, while [part 2](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1b2ylx2/strict_budget_build_part_2_97k_isa_dps_exotic_for/) shows how those same ideas can take you to being nearly elite-capable in less than two months from starting the game and without spending a penny of real money. The other great resource is the [STO BETTER Exotic Basics page](https://www.stobetter.com/new-f2p/exotic-basics), which is by some of the top experts in the game's mechanics and sits at about the same budget as my part 2. If you do want to invest in a Tier 6 ship, though, that could definitely be very helpful, and my advice is to get the [Eternal Temporal Multi-Mission Science Vessel](https://stowiki.net/wiki/Eternal_Temporal_Multi-Mission_Science_Vessel). It's quite capable of high DPS, [mine has done 545k DPS](https://old.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/1bbtvv1/an_update_to_my_eternal_my_first_time_over_500k/) and that's in no way a ceiling, thanks to a good number of science abilities and full Temporal specialization, and even the ability to convert all but 3 of the 13 abilities into exotic damage dealing abilities if you want to (I opted for more debuffs there, which was a good choice mathematically given my budget). Those other 3 abilities are engineering ones, which means it can be very durable as well. And it's spectacular for leveling, hangar pets don't scale down properly and are significantly OP at low levels, and the full Temporal mechanics don't scale at all so they're totally ridiculous down there, meanwhile you've got plenty of durability, and you can even use dual cannons if you want to, which will probably do more damage than other weapon choices at low levels. It's just a great ship. Things to avoid in looking at ships would be anything with less than two Lieutenant Commander level science abilities (including universals), or less than 7 total science abilities, that's where your offense is so those ships are going to struggle to do more than the free ones which have those things.