Hello everyone,

I've recently returned to the game after a short while of inactivity and I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle when engaging forces in ground combat during PvE

Some enemies like Cardassians or Starfleet Officers are a piece of cake on advanced difficulty, while others like Nausicans or the Borg make minced meat of my crew and me even on normal difficulty.

Right now I've reached Gamma Orionis on my second character, an engineer, so advice against the borg would be greatly appreciated.

At the moment I generally initiate a fight by building a bunker with a Force Field Dome, medical generator and shield generator, along with a drone and phaser turret. I target the interlink nodes, medical drones, tactical drones and regular drones in that order and always order all my Boffs to attack the same target.

To be more precise:

- Which Boffs should I bring?
- What weapons should I equip my Boffs and me with? (right now they're using whatever I could find.)
- What skills should my Boffs have?
- Is there anything you think I might not be doing correctly?

Thanks on beforehand!
- What

Hey Khalkaroth I hope you don't mind me piggy backing your post but I've got a question or two pretty well up the same alley.

I'm just about to start with the Borg front missions and I have a ground weapon related question. When dealing with some of the Borg missions I've heard to avoid using BOFFs with turrets, as these don't listen to commands and can potentially pull aggro from Borg who would otherwise leave you alone.

ignoring special ground weapons, ie "ghostbusters rifle" "freeze rifle" for the moment should I switch my BOFFs with expose weapons from AOE cone types (dual pistols, wide beam pistols, etc) to single target (only the stun beam comes to mind) for a similar reason?

Short answer:

4x Engineers

Mine Barrier I
Phaser Turret I
Phaser Turret II
Phaser Turret III

Pop turrets. Pull mobs. Profit.

Their gear doesn't matter much because it's the turrets that do all the work. Sniper rifles are reliable, cheap, and easy to get. I like the look of Phaser Dual Pistols, so that's what mine have, except for one that has a Phaser Compression Pistol. I usually stick with Polyalloy Weave armor because it's the one thing that adds physical resist against all the melee happy mobs in game. But there again, anything will work really.

Slightly less short answer:

The Ground Playbook
http://forums.startrekonline.com/sho...d.php?t=204014

The one mission where this becomes a real problem is "Assimilated" (the one inside the borg ship that you get the console as a reward for). The solution is put all BOFFs in passive mode, and right-click any drone powers your engi BOFFs have to prevent them from using those abilities (the icon will turn red, letting you know it's disabled). Passive mode stops them from dropping turrets unless you issue an attack command, but you have to manually disable drones because they seem to pop those randomly whether you want them to or not. Drones also tend to run off and pull other groups once your current target is dead, so they're more of a problem than turrets. Your weapon types will not matter much; either groups are so close that they're going to get pulled in by social aggro anyway, or they're far enough away to be out of weapon range.

Thanks, Heezdedjim

Thanks, both of you, that ground combat post was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!

In Assimilated or any map where you might agro another group just set your BOs to a specific spot and enable passive mode before combat starts and they should mostly stay there and not run off.

I use almost the exact same build as Heezdedjim, and I have never had such an easy time on the ground. As and engineer I always use the bunker kit force dome whenever I see a mob that wants to melee me, like borg and klinks. Nice thing about the force field dome is that it pushes melee mobs away.