Energy always has a linear benefit, but attack has a diminishing benefit. The closer you are to hitting the damagecap of npcs, the less having more attack will help you. For example, if it takes 10 shots to kill an npc on average, and you double your attack, in most cases you will then take 5, but to get down to 2-3 you will need to double your attack again (this is not considering that npc stats grow as you rank).

The portion of xp that comes from just whacking npcs is 2.1 xp/energy, the overall ratio varies with attack but generally the kill bonus portion is 30-50% of the total. This means the +40% attack from drannik for example doesn't give +40% xp, but it is more like 10-15%. If you double your energy you get basically double the xp from your bar. If you double your attack it does not double your xp, you get far less increase in xp for the points you spent (tac vs. engineers).

If you are already autoranking, then generally putting 5 pts into engineers from the rank up will maintain it, excess from prisoners can go to energy or tac as desired, one benefit of the higher attack is maintaining the # of shots to kill stuff, to maintain a set xp ratio on npcing.

If you can't decide, just get energy. Can't go wrong with that.

I totally agree with my guru here. after long talks with BinaryMan, I was convinced that I needed to put engineers in my ship. Now I can auto rank and at the same time massive energy on my ship.

Your attack is already ridiculous Remric
I don't think you need any more tac.

lol Im working on the engineer part too. You cant have a powerful ship that does not have good energy.

I put a few officers into scientist at the beginning of the game then I put some into decks then i put them into engineers for a good while know mostly I do tactical officer. glade i never put any into cargo and I put less then most into decks.

As everyone agrees that with high level you put all into either energy or TO there are two main questions for me:

1) When do you switch from putting anything into decks to pure energy/TO ?
2) What energy/rank ratio should you keep ?

Regarding 1) I stopped putting anything into decks when I had just 1500 decks, which is earlier then most but benefits me well. It means I have to switch energy mods to defense mod for npcing which costs some credits but i figured out that credit is not the critical factor.

Regarding 2) I try to go for a ratio of 13energy/rank which is allowing easy autorank and all the rest goes into TO. Currently am at 7080 energy at lvl567 so almost there. I know that with 10energy/rank I could still autolevel but only if I would foucs on npcing - now with 13 energy/rank I can autolevel with a mix of missions, npcing and boss/elites hits. Energy cubes/Tri-Matrix I dont use at all (>40 in stock) except for planet scan runs

The value of energy had increased greatly after base system went live.. So engineer value had gone up. Tactical officers value was very high in the past and engineers value were lower so I went after heavy TO and very low in engineers and it served me just fine until base system went live and I found myself badly deficit in engineers so I invested hard into engineers to the point that I am satisfied with it then went back to T.O.

Also, energy is extremely useful for any players who routinely burn GP refills on monthly basis. Energy limit is 120 charges per hour so more energy pool, lesser useful energy is other than rank-up.. That's why GP refills on regular basis kept the value of energy pool high cuz it bypasses the need of 120 charge per hour. Basically, if you got 5k energy pool, the cost of GP refill is 10 GP for 5k energy. If you boost your energy pool to 10k, the cost effective had doubled for GP refill to spend 10 GP for nice 10k energy. That definitely boost your energy production for same dollar spent which is always good thing..

How would a player with 1k energy pool feel when he spent $1k on energy refills to generate exactly same energy only to see that other player with 10k energy pool only spent $100 for same thing? HUGE difference there..

Insofar as dumping energy to high level base, I hear that. When I had ~18k energy bar I spent 30 refills or so and all my cubes to finish off our base to L6. That's the only time I ever bought refills and even then it was via FB gift cards from legion since I wasn't that concerned with it.

if you want to reach auto-level you have to increase energy.

tactical officer wont ever get you to auto-level.

once you reach auto-level, all you need is 40more EXP/level which is 20more energy (@2.0 ratio). check your ratio, add as much energy as necessary, then spend the rest in tactical officer.

Thanks for the contributions guys!

+1 to a great thread that stayed on topic. Very informative.

I totally agree with the everyone who says that engineers are the way to go if you want to auto rank.

The only time I see that tactical officers will give you an advantage is when

1. you already have enough energy to auto rank, add the points to tactical officers

2. With Gemini Canons in play, PVP action will be nice if you have to attack enemies players with less energy, remember the gemini canons damages your ship 10% of total hull and shield everytime you attack. and every time you click attack there is a 6% chance that the gemini canons will proc.

3. Having high attack will not increase your damage by leaps and bounds but when you are competing for Top damage on base fights. It will make a difference. Specially if you have a good Internet connection and a powerful PC (yup this facebook game respects powerful PC, Test it out go to BESTBUY try GL in a cheap PC and then try it on a powerful PC, you will notice that the attack gets faster with a more powerful computer)

4. I think this is the best place where high tactical officers comes into play. Since we already have an idea that invasion success rate is decided by ship attack its only the tactical officers who can add more to your ship when it comes to this aspect of the game.


Energy is by far the best place you can put your rank points in. But putting all your points on energy will make a good TIN CAN out of your ship. once you hit the higher ranks you will have a hard time killing Warp Stations and base since these buggers can hit you for the damage cap if you build your ship as fast as you can. I think its about balancing the progress of your ship. You can never really rank too fast otherwise you will have a hard time finding repair nano drones.

What does "proc" mean in this context? I still haven't figured it out.

it Means to activate.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5207&start=0

Odd, I just assumed it was short for a real word, alright.

Probably sort of process.

[quote="FerrusManus"][/quote]
Apparently it is an abbreviation:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Proc

That's what I assumed too.

And I hate when geminis proc on my hull...

Ah, now it makes sense.