(Very) New Player feeling completely overwhelmed

There are no mistakes you can make while leveling that aren't correctable. You can't change your gender/race/career, but all races/careers can do all content and fly all ship types without any problems. Traits and specializations can be switched around at will, and you'll eventually get enough points to fill out every spec, so again, nothing to worry about. Skill point do cost zen, but cryptic tends to give out free ones occasionally, and it's not like you'll completely gimp your char if you pick a non-perfect skill layout.

Honestly, the worst thing that might happen is that you upgrade some equipment that you end up not liking/using, or you put points into a spec and later decide you want to use another spec. In both cases the solution will just be to grind a bit more.

Builds that are posted for this game do sometimes fall into the "if it's not meta it's dead" trope, but always with the understanding that meta only applies if you're chasing DPS leaderboards. You can run all the content in the game on normal and advanced (and most elite) with extremely off-meta builds - the meta in this game has so far surpassed what's necessary to play it that it's not even funny.

Take it easy, play, enjoy the game, forget about "meta" and all that shit. Play the way You like.

STO is not a hard game.

Maybe Im too simple. But that's my answer.

Have fun, and relax.

a new player shouldn't be reading guides about the Meta, honestly the Meta is irrelevant to 99% of the playerbase because this game is basically a single player game disguised an MMO

just pick an energy type(phaser, plasma, polaron, etc) and stick with consoles that boost that type(meaning don't equip a tetryon damage console if you're using phasers) and you'll get through content just fine

Bro in the early game, you're going to go through gear so much going from tier to tier, don't worry about it

As far as I know, the only things you can't change later or undo are species, gender, faction, and career. All your traits can be swapped out at will and you can redo your skills with a Captain Retrain Token, which you can get for 300 Zen or for free 100 rep marks each time you get a Reputation to Tier VI.

You can't reroll your Specialization Points you start earning at level 50, but you continue to earn them until you have enough to finish every Specialization, so if you decide you don't like the specialization you choose, it's not a huge deal.

It's a pretty forgiving game, overall.

The game is fairly well-balanced for levelling until you reach the Delta Quadrant; you shouldn't be able to give yourself issues unless you are actively trying to break your character. By the time you get that far, you should have a much better idea of how you want to play the game — the four main styles being "Beams", "Cannons" (plus turrets), "Torpedoes", and "EPG" (Using Bridge Officer abilities — mostly Science ones — to deal damage)

The main thing to watch out for when levelling a character is that, every 10 levels or so, you will unlock the next 2 levels of Gear Mark. So, at levels 10, 20, 30, 40, and 45, you will want to look into swapping out your equipment ASAP! However, comparing gear can be a bit buggy (especially if you are looking at Ground equipment while in Space, or vice-versa) because gear you have equipped includes all of your character's bonuses, but gear in the Inventory doesn't. It is best to unequip items to compare them properly — however, as a general rule, a single level of Mark is worth more than a level of Quality/Rarity. A Mk IV Green (uncommon) item is better than a Mk II Blue (rare) item.

The Delta Quadrant content has a huge difficulty spike, because it was released when they raised the Level Cap — so it was designed for players who had maxed out and started optimising. When you start on the Dyson Sphere missions, you'll probably want to re-read those guides to get your ship ready, and check how much you now understand.

I'm a very new player as well and agree completely about the overwhelming amount of stuff to constantly analyze and digest. However I've been just equipping stuff that seems neat and selling the rest. I've made it to level 45 already just by charging ahead and promising to figure stuff out later.

Don't worry about gear because like the others have said, you'll be getting a lot. If there's a particular piece that's a mission-specific drop, you can always replay the mission later to get it again at a better rank.

Don't worry about the skill tree. Once you get max level (at least that's how it was with fed characters), or somewhere around it, you'll just get a captain retrain token free, which will let you redo your skill tree however you want.

Just enjoy yourself and play through the missions however you want.

The early game is only about having fun until you’ll like level 50-60 just enjoy the game after that then you can start worrying about builds and stuff like that.

In my experience, there's two big obstacles to keeping up with the late game:

1. Basic ship optimization. You can give your bridge officers (or "Boffs") whatever gear you want as long as it's high level, but you can't just slap whatever weapons you want onto your ship. There's a whole college for maximizing your damage output, but you can get yourself through the story on normal difficulty if you choose a weapon type to build off of (phasers and photon torpedoes, antiprotons and transphasics; the combinations are endless). Each damage type, be it energy weapon or torpedo, has its own tactical console that can boost its damage a lot. You don't really need to settle on one type until you get to Captain and above.
2. Knowing where everything is. The user interface is kinda cluttered, and you've got a whole lot of side minigames that can only be accessed by clicking a tiny button. Each of those can earn you cool loot, credits, latinum, dilithium, character perks, etc., but the only way to get to those is by clicking on every single button on the UI and discovering it by yourself. If you're not quite sure what a certain currency does or where to get ship requisition tokens, you can look it up on the STO wiki.

Any mistake that you make when you start playing can be fixed without having to do anything you wouldn’t have already needed to do. The only thing you can’t change is your race, profession, and faction. You’ve chosen the best faction and race, science is generally considered the weakest of the professions, however that will only matter if you plan to ever get into dps chasing. In normal play, even on Elite, you’ll do just fine.

Add me bruh. Death@slaveforenone1. I can help.

I would say that most things you can do at that level aren't going to matter. Almost all your gear is going to get thrown out the airlock in a few days, so that doesn't matter. Some stuff is capable of leveling with you, so it's nice if you can collect things that say Mk infinity or show Ready to Upgrade when you open the upgrade menu and hold on to them, but anything worth having you can get again by replaying the mission. Your skill tree does cost you to reset, that's the one thing you'll actually keep, but you get 13 respec tokens for it from getting reputations to tier 6, so it's not a huge problem. When I'm very efficient with my spending I can save up about 5 million energy credits while leveling, but I can earn a million a day at endgame without much difficulty. For dilithium I managed to save 26k while leveling, but it's pretty easy to get your 8k every day at endgame. So you don't even need to worry much about saving currency.

It is helpful to plan ahead when you hit level 40, because the game starts getting much harder after level 50 and that's the last free ship you'll get for a long while. That's the point where you'd benefit from having a build picked out to work toward (although Prelude to Ten Forward is rather out of date at this point, I'd advise against using those builds, maybe look at the STO BETTER google site which has very up to date information on lots of stuff). You will get to a point where not having a well designed build will make playing pretty miserable, and it's easier to get moving in the right direction before you hit that wall. Some people will say to just upgrade your equipment when that happens, but that won't really fix the problem and will cost a lot of dilithium, so most people say figure out what's good first and then upgrade that. But at level 10 hardly anything matters and you can force your way through with a completely terrible build (because you don't have enough slots to make a particularly good one).

Edit: It just occurred to me that there are exceptions to being able to get anything valuable from replaying missions. Those exceptions are the special bridge officers, ones with unusual species and such, the Hierarchy one being the most famous since it has space traits. Those you won't be able to get again, so don't get rid of them.

I had zero clue how to play this game but i am a trek nerd so i just rolled with it. Have fun . I'v reached level 17 and I'm already feeling like General SISKO! LoL

It's cool, OP! STO was also my very first complex mmorpg game too! I was basically playing in the blind, not knowing what on Earth I was doing till I was stuck at a literal wall on how to proceed.

Honestly, that's where I literally had to stop and read any guides I can find on the web and ask questions on the community on whatever things I don't understand. The community is quite laid back and would gladly help a newbie on how to properly play the game.

If you have any whatsoever trouble, the Question Thread pinned at the very beginning in this subreddit is always a place where you can visit to ask questions!

You can literally play anything, with anything on, and have all the fun of anyone else dude. Pick what YOU like! If ye want a friend to trundle around with ye and relax with then prod me and ye have one!

You really can't brake your character however you might find some content challenging without specific Boffs. There are some awkward bits here and there but until you get to delta rising you can pretty much use what you find.

I recently rolled a temporal recruit and went with white, level appropriate ground and space weapons for a large part of the game and it worked perfectly fine.

Play however you want to but if you need help just ask. Most long time players will help and if you're on playstation I can help too good luck LLAP captain

My best advice; don't spend any dilithium until you understand why you are spending it on Phoenix Upgrades. They are the most efficient way to upgrade your gear, once you have assembled the right gear for your ship.

I mean I would highly recommend giving a read over how to use your ships shields.
I even wrote up a guide detailing some basics on it on steam.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2450716995

This was mostly because I see tons of people just getting capped repeatedly in missions and tfos, to the point where I just well full on crazy person... I happily call myself a Support Tank now. Probably horrible DPS for what I can do but it keeps people in the fight around me for longer so, it works... for me.

Anywho, The best advice I can give anyone 'new' to sto or just wanting to have fun.
It is a game about what 'you' want to do. So don't actually let those guides control every decision you make on your playthrough. Sure some of it can be helpful, but if you don't play the game at your own pace, you just burn out and honestly let yourself down in the end.