For Your Consideration: The Vesta Line

[idan]

I'm a big fan of this vessel. Hell, I'm a fan of the entire Multi-Mission line and I'll try to give you a breakdown to explain why from a Tactical point of view.

Is it worth the Zen?
I'd like to think so. I purchased the Aventine, the tactical hull variant and enjoyed it so much I snapped up the other two. A Zen based blunder on my part, but if I was willing to pony up a whopping 7500 Zen on her I'd like to think it was going to be worth my time. She does not disappoint.

Versatility. Each Vesta line vessel comes with a LT engineer, Lt Tactical and Commander Science bridge position. Mundane? Far from it. They also come equipped with two Universal positions for Lt Commander and Ensign, respectively. This feature adds tremendous versatility to any layout you wish to try.

Here is my current layout for Tactical:
LT Comm Tactical; Tac team1, Cannon rapid 1 and 2 (swapped out for volley abilities for pve. I'm running rapids atm so i don't aggro too much stuff in stfs)
Ensign; Tac team1
Lt Tactical; Torpedo Spread1, Attack Pattern Beta (primarily for beta, this ship doesn't use torps)
Lt Engineering; EPS 1 and 2
Commander Science; Hazard Emitters 1 and 2, Transfer Shields 3 and Gravity well 2 or 3 (if you can get it).

Now, here's the reason that these ships are great for everyone, especially science captains; The console layouts. Aventine has 2 engineer, 4 science and 4 tactical consoles. Rademaker has 3 engineer, 3 tactical and 4 science consoles and, here's the big part, the Vesta has 2 engineer, 3 tactical and a whopping 5 science consoles. Including fleet variants she is the only vessel to carry 5 science slots in the whole game.

Who needs weapon power anyway?
The Vesta line can equip every kind of cannon, well, maybe not the quad, but every readily available type of cannon. Importantly she comes with some very special mk 12 dual heavies. These cannons do NOT use weapon power. Instead, they run off your auxiliary. Is there any better news for someone using science heavy builds or abilities? With 3 of these babies mounted up front you can run around happily with an altered power setting for maximum auxiliary to do maximum damage with weapons AND abilities, this includes heals, people. Weapon power still needs maintained but only for the sake of keeping turret and cutting beam dps up (if using one ofc). A good reason to use cannons is this baby can turn. She is damn maneuverable even before you add in skill pointed abilities.

Experimental wonders.
Okay, so... Special console time. The Aventine comes equipped with a "Quantum Field Focus Controller". This basically amounts to technobabble meaning you can turn the main deflector into a massive phaser lance that, at full aux power, will do over 3000 damage per second to the target for 12 seconds. 12 whole seconds followed by a 3 minute cooldown. Did I mention running aux on this thing was a good idea? As this ability is affected by phaser related products and the fact that the aux cannons are phasers too, its probably no surprise that, yes, I'm sporting phasers all over mine.

The Rademaker sports a snazzy defensive console, the "Multi Dimensional Wave-function Analysis Module". This emits a graviton field in a 4k radius in all axis from your ship. It will repulse up to 4 targets at a time and reflect half of any kinetic damage received back to the fool that fired at you.

The Vesta's "Sympathetic Fermion Transceiver" Will generate a large Aoe Heal around you that will also affect all friendly targets in your vicinity. Its like throwing a massive hazard emitter and transfer shield volley at all your teammates at the same time. For twenty sweet seconds.

All of these consoles are mutually exclusive, they can only be activated one at a time but they all have individual cooldowns.

Set bonuses. 2 pieces nets you a hyper fast slipstream drive, you can even turn at slipstream. Great for the "Tour the Universe" event, not much else to write home about. All three consoles, however, will grant you a "Quantum Focussed Shield Bubble" While active, your weapons are offline but you are 100% totally invulnerable. To anything. Ever. I sat in front of Donatra in an elite run when she fired her thalaron weapon. Not a scratch.

Launch all fighters!

All Vesta line ships have a single hangar, as if they weren't good enough, right? This may make up for only having 3 fore weapon slots and adds a heck of a lot of versatility to the ship. She comes with Danube runabouts and can be equipped with Deltas, type 10s, Peregrines or shield healing workbees. Personally I use the Delta flyers for their tachyon beams and transphasic warheads.
Hangars cooldown times are also affected by auxiliary power levels. The more you have, the faster you can launch more small craft.

Set wise, until adapted MACO is within reach, the Aegis and Borg sets do very well with this flying toolkit. The Borg shields regenerate very quickly and the tractor beam is just funny as hell if you have already popped your Gravity Well or have them trapped in your forward firing arc with your uber phaser beam drilling into their hull.

As with all science ships, the shield modifier is very high on her stats and she can utilise subsystem targeting, if you mount any beams, that is. Sensor analysis remains as a passive, adding extra damage to anyone you are directly targeting with more damage over time.

Hope I've given you something to think about.

[samual]

Nice rundown Idan, to give you an alternative I run a radmaker with 3 phaser consoles and grav or a aventine with 4 phaser and emitter and and all the vesta universals, normal phaser/launcher setup with mk xi borg set atm. I run a 3 stage cycle, max weapon power and pop aux battery with vesta phaser console, feedback pulse 3 and borg tractor against a high threat target, against medium with cooldowns I use a modified split power weapon/aux with the vesta console feedback ability since it hits a full 1.0 reflect without full power, outside of that its gravity wells, and normal sci heals/buffs. Its been a flip flop for me so far, I love the extra punch on the 4 phaser relays (especially when doing the triple threat move) and the heal bonus with emitters but without the grav generator the wells don't get much mileage. Considering dropping the armor plating and moving another universal to engineering slot to clear more room, its pretty rare the shields go down anyways, maybe i'll try it on the vesta.

[Jav0x]

Sci captain here running a Vesta. I completely agree with Idan, the ship is great. Definitely worth the Zen.

[samual]

Tried dropping the armor plating and cycling through polorize, brace, hazard and sub field buffs if front shield gets low between tac team cycles, seems work well. Also tried going back to the aux phaser x3 setup and popping weapon batt to keep the cutting beam dps up, seems to also work well. Will see if that changes once I get the romulan torpedo, since usually face hug everything for max damage to generate threat and maximize reflect abilities anyways.

[samual]

So to date: I HATE the rom plasma launcher. Even sitting at my typical 3k distance its like watching paint dry. I switched back to a weapon power build, even with losing 1k/sec on phaser module if I do not pop aux batt I do well on DPS comparatively. I mixed in a dual beam array for the vesta's native subsystem attack, it's barely worth it but doesn't cost a whole lot (all of 200dps) to fit it in and between stf hitting engine sub to prevent spheres from getting away before the team can blow them and shield (or weapon if long on cycle) on cubes seems ok. Will see how elite fleet weapons pan out in a while, but really I think the dual beams would be more beneficial to PVP which I don't do in earnest, at least with the 4x phaser relay. If I was more concerened with the DOT and maybe ran a 3x relay I might think more of the romulan launcher perhaps. Still a little disatisfied with the grav generators, would think with a gen console would be ripping even STF mobs in to the well, but they almost ignore it. Usually I stack my grav well with another science to CC STF mobs if possible, otherwise neither of us do much aside from slow one mob and take 10% hp at most. I do have a strange sense of pride tanking tac cubes without armor though I have this sense like "who needs armor? oh yeah sucka's who don't reflect face!!" its fun but at the same time feel hamstringed with the 3 minute cooldowns. Works well on the STF's being able to solo the cube/vorcha quicker than an escort with reflect and phaser/borg tractor with aux batt but its starting to feel limited, if there was aux turrets and/or cutting beam would feel a bit better about it, I support my team as best I can in or out of fleet but thinking I might swap particle with second grav to get the CC I am looking for.

I should say that is if Doff don't proc, when it pops 1-2 more wells I can't complain, but with a maximum 25% chance it surprises me how often that actually happens.

[Maxima]

What do you have two BOffs trained in Tac team 1? It has the same cooldown and can only use it once every few seconds. Why not train one of them to do something else?

[Hawkins@JHawk1128]

Most of us have 2-3 BOFFS running Tac Team 1. When one fires off, the second one goes into a half-cooldown (15 seconds). This substantially shortens the time you are running without Tac Team 1, which can make quite the difference in PvP when your opponent is firing off boarding parties constantly.