This guide goes into depth on various skills and abilities available to players and analyzes common and uncommon tactics used often to beat your opponents. If you want to rank up as fast as possible make sure you know how to fight in PvP, and this guide will increase your chances of success astronomically. I approve.

Read the full PvP guide…

In STO there are several ranks:

• Ensign (only during the tutorial)
• Lieutenant
• Lieutenant Commander
• Commander
• Captain
• Admiral

Each of these ranks also has ten so-called sub-ranks. You must attain all these sub-ranks to achieve the main ranks, which roughly means there are 50 levels in STO.

By doing missions (and some other ways like PvP) you gain skill points and based on how many you have you gain levels/ranks, so there’s no experience points either. Skill points can also be gained by doing Genesis missions (random exploration mission) as well as a number of PvE diplomacy missions.

You should use skill points for new skills and skill ranks as soon as you get them, as they improve your ground and space combat performance greatly for both you and your bridge officers.

There’s a lot of different questions and confusion lately about how leveling works in Star Trek Online so hopefully this post will clarify a few things for you. If you’re looking for a leveling guide, click here.

In a recent news item posted on the official site which for the most part talks about Klingon gameplay, there’s a list of different available PvP scenarios players can engage in:

• Challenges allow two teams to square off in a private instance created for them on-the-fly.
• Arena maps are team-vs.-team matchups in instances, played either by teams that challenge one another, or by randomly-assigned teams created via a global queue system.
• Scenarios feature objective-oriented gameplay like Assault and Area Control. The Assault scenario is straightforward: Move forces from your area to the opponents’, inflicting more casualties than you suffer. The Area Control scenario is more subtle: Capture key objectives and hold them longer than your opponents to win the day.
• War Zone maps are static maps that are always open for players to join. Both factions may enter this may enter this map, which has Open Mission-style PvE objectives to achieve, with the twist that members of opposing factions can hinder each other’s progress via PvP.

Despite my initial thoughts that Klingons will be played the same as Federation, it appears Cryptic has other things in mind. You can read the full article here, but if you’re too lazy here’s a short summary:

• You won’t be able to create a Klingon character right away: you can unlock them after you’re finished with the first sector of Federation content, which takes about five hours of gameplay. The Klingon character will however start at the same rank as the Fed character with which you unlocked
• Klingons won’t have they access to as much PvE content as Federation and will have to advance through PvP
• You can have the same skills and professions as with federation characters
• Klingons have different ships, and gain them in a slightly different way. Their ships are typically more maneuverable than Federation ships and have more forward-facing weapons. And of course, most of Klingon ships look way better
• The last fact for today, Klingon bridge officers are not restricted by class which means you can put a Science officer at a Tactical station without any drawbacks

The release date is drawing closer and closer (Feb 2) and there was a lot of various news regarding Star Trek Online in the last few days. There’s bound to be a lot more in the days ahead so don’t forget to subscribe via email or RSS to receive new updates!