Prior to season four in ground combat, the best option was a placed ambush, or drawing enemy npcs into a firing line of your bridge officers. This also met having your bridge officers using abilities that helped in those area. After season, lets just say i got wiped by a bunch of Rmulans, needless to say. I think i need to adjust my tactics and my bridge officer abilities. So i figured id make this thread and people can put down what ground abilities for there bridge officers work well for ground, and what tactics they found works best..
Season four things to note
1. Shields and health drops allot faster.
2. The play is much faster, making it nearly impossible to target specific enemy npcs with your whole team.
3. Is placement of your team still viable given the changes?

Me i am going to try making my medics 100 percent about heals, my tacts about burst dps, and my engineers about staying alive and keeping peoples shields up.

Anyone has any other thoughts?
Looking for information and setups, not how unbalanced things are lol, i perfer to improvise over complaining.

Can you not pause anymore? I haven't had the chance to really test out the ground combat since it launched. But I was a fan of that button, and used it often in my fights.

Holy crap the world must be ending.


For equipment, higher capacity personal shields and energy dampening armor are handy if you're a more squishy type toon. If you're a Sci or Engineer, depending on your kit, you can go for a different armor type. Eng Equipment Technician makes you quite durable, and the Sci Physician mantra is pretty much "LOL NPC damage."

For weapons, the days of the expose/exploit tactic being the only viable combat option are now bye-bye. More weapons are worth having. I personally like a sniper rifle and pulsewave on my toon. I equip my BOs with a mix of stuff... generally a split beam rifle, minigun or auto rifle, blast assault, and a sniper rifle (check the BO passives and give them a weapon that might match any good ground traits they have). This works well until Borg, who adapt to higher rate of fire weapons faster, so I switch to things that pack more of a punch per shot.

BO abilities - you can't just win by having 4 engineers with turrets anymore. Boo freakin' hoo. I like one sci, two engineers, and one tac for most of my setups. For my sci officer, I usually load up 3 heals and a tricorder scan or some other simple debuff. For my engineers, a turret, a drone, maybe a generator or two (generators are useful now!!!). The rest of their skills go to shield recharge and weapons malfunction. The tac gets some nades and other damage increasing abilities.

So far I haven't died in solo play since I tweaked my loadout. I have a bridge officer go down every once in a while, but thats usually because I get into the ground fighting, go gung ho, and start pulling in multiple enemy groups. It isn't well known, but that is actually why ship commanders were not supposed to lead away teams for so long - they were so happy to get out of the chair and inadvertently caused redshirt casualties to rise.


EDIT:

Team placement isn't as big of a deal, but you can still assign targeting. Before engaging a group, I usually find a lieutenant, snipe them to get their attention, have my away team target that dude, then find the group commander and solo him to death while my crew kills most of everything else.

Thanks for the info, i might try that, usally i ended up pulling the mob. Using a bridge officer might work nicely. As for the pause i never thought i ever using that, but given the changes it might not be a bad idea. Keep information coming please.

Me being an Eng primarily I usually have my away team stick in one spot (depending on how likely the enemy is to throw AOE around) set a turret, quantum mortar, and med generator while I have the two other engineers on my team set up another turret and shield generator. That with my Science healing officer, and all around handy tactical makes short work of most groups. As for weapons I go with the minigun for everyone but Borg where I use rifles instead. Also the Combat Drone, and Support drone are nifty in a pinch, and now that Orbital Strike does something you can be truly godlike.

This tactic is still viable against the Borg, particularly in the "Assimilated" mission in the big room.

I tried that tactic on the Roumlans it did not go well, as for placing npcs, it seems as though theres more and more aoes with enemy npcs. So i am not sure about grouping up my npcs, rather spread formations maybe, with less fixed position abilities?

I've actually not found a reason to use anything other than Polyalloy Weave Armour. My characters are mostly at VA so I speak from the experience with those but at Mk XI the difference between Energy Dampening and Polyalloy Weave energy resistance is %6. But in return for the %6 reduction in energy resistance I gain almost %50 Kinetic and Physical resistance (%49 and %50.5 IIRC), this armour is also a massive help against grenades (Kinetic) and Lunge in ground PvP (Physical) so it's worth getting if you play a lot of ground.

in terms of targeting the same NPC go into options and change the target all function (which i think is Y as default) to a better button. i personally use E, that way the second i get a lock i tap E and everybody targets the same guy.

After getting killed way too many times by extended effects from Cryo and Plasma grenades the only tactic I've found really effective against massed NPCs is to equip my team with a combination of miniguns and shotguns. Hit a group of enemies from a distance with spray-n-pray then move in close with the shotgun so they can't toss grenades.