My main point of ship choice in this game is to fly ships that were in the shows/movies. The starting BOP is nice, but ideally I'm looking for a B'rel skin. Is it true my only choice to get the iconic bird is to buy the retrofit version that fires while cloaked?


I don't care what level it is, but is there any ships that have the B'rel skin? Or am I forced to get Chang's ship?

You're in luck. The B'rel is the level 50 Bird of Prey.

http://www.stowiki.org/B'rel_Bird-of-Prey_Retrofit

The only way to get the B'rel is to buy the retrofit. But the retro's nice, it can fire torpedoes while cloaked. Arm a tricobalt device, drop it on someone's doorstep all buffed up, and big badda boom. I was once one-shotted out of nowhere by a B'rel with a tricobalt.

I have a B'rel and love it as a torpedo boat and i am a menace in space

Ah shoot. That's what I feared. Well, time to grind for the zen.

In mho its crap. Its fun to r un around and annoy people but good lu ck on actually killing anything. And in STFs...you die often. I love the idea of the ship..but its so narrow in its role its hard to be effective.

Its funny ... I own the B'rel retrofit and love it to death...


but I HATE the look of it. Its so... 60's. Bulbous protuberances, curved surfaces.. bleh. Reminds me of those egg-shaped chairs in the Austin Powers movies.

I would love to be able to re-skin it as the Hegh'ta ... now THAT is an awesome looking ship.

When I was doing STF elite missions, I rarely died. I could even take on a cube on my own.

And it's entirely possible to do that in a BoP, if you're using an engineering toon and have the BoP focused more on 'tanking' abilities. You're sacrificing sheer firepower for that, though, and the BoP already has enough trouble competing on the DPS side of things compared to the nearest Fed equivalent, the Defiant and the other escorts. I run a Tactical toon in a Hegh'ta, and I've got 2 Tac Team 1s and an RSP 1, along with EPtS1 and HE1 and 2. That usually gives me enough crunchiness to survive most fights against NPCs, but I have trouble with STF cubes simply because they hit pretty hard, have a tendency to one-shot you, and drain your shields after you've used your Hazard Emitters to fend off a previous shield drain attempt.

That being said, the BoP is a versatile class due to the Universal boff slots, but it definitely suffers from limitations due to the overall fragility of the class, only 3 tac consoles on Hegh'ta and B'rel retro, etc.

My KDF character is a Tactical. My BOFF slots are as followed:
Commander = Tactical
Lt. Commander = Science
Lt. = Engineer
Lt. = Tactical

I have Hazard Emitters 2, Engineering Team 1, and Aux to SIF 1 for my hull heals. Since I fly a B'rel, it is a torpedo boat in every sense of the word.

To mitigate the heavy torpedoes, I use Aceton Assimilators. 100% hit rate, and with the heavy torpedoes only having 1 HP, they die instantly. Also, the cubes weaken their own shields when they attack it (as I have buffed their radiation damage when hit with energy weapons). I also hit them with Tacheyon Beam 3 and Jam Sensors so I can fire off my first volley of torpedoes, which includes a Bio-Neural Warhead.

I have enough hull resistance that I can take a good amount of punishment and can heal when I'm cloaked. I don't even bother with shield heals.

It's been awhile since I've done an STF with my Klingon (pre-season 6), but I was still able to do all of the STF elite missions without dying after they increased the difficulty in the STFs.

In PvP, I have taken severe punishment from DHCs, Beam Overloaded DBB, and torpedoes before recloaking again with no shields and have survived almost every time.