Star Trek Online: That Healthy, Green, Infected Glow

I talk a great talk about the importance of grouping and becoming part of a game’s community, but I don’t walk the walk as much as I should. When you open yourself up to grouping with strangers, you don’t know WHAT they’re going to do. Abusive chat, just plain abuse, people who think the group is there purely for their own benefit, could be anything.
Most missions in Star Trek Online, because they scale with the number and level of participants, can be done solo or in a group, and at three difficulty levels. As in any MMO where soloing is a viable option, it becomes the normal way players consume content.
Star Trek Online provides two kinds of group-only content — Fleet Actions, which are the STO equivalent to Warhammer’s public quests; and Special Task Forces, chunks of stories that pit players against “elite” ships and aliens and artificial situations that require more than one person to solve.
It had always been my long-term goal with our fleet, the Federation News Service, to eventually start doing the Special Task Forces on a regular basis. They are simply the best source for rare ship components and the token currency in the game, as well as not being too shabby experience-wise, either. There’s currently four STFs — Infected, The Cure and Khitomer Accord match players against the Borg, and Undine Terradome sets players behind enemy lines in a war against the shapeshifting invaders from fluidic space.
When FNS started the new Feature Episodes last weekend, Thumupp flew up in a partially assimilated shuttle. Borg ship components drop from the three Borg STFs.
I NEEDED those bits. So with fleet or without, I was going to finish the task forces I’d had in my mission log for months.
I thought I’d try Infected solo, first — after all, I was six levels higher than the mission.
I couldn’t kill even a single ship from the very first encounter. Longasc egged me on until I decided to give a random group a try. I turned on Zone chat, asked for a group for Infected from the beginning, was grouped in seconds and then we were in.
One of the weirdest things about Star Trek Online is the way they graft the “Holy Trinity” — tanks, healers and DPS — on to the Star Trek universe. I’m a science officer and fly a science-oriented starship, a Nebula class. If you took the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, shoved the secondary hull beneath the saucer and flipped the warp nacelles over, you’d have the Nebula. It’s a sleek, compact ship. Science ships ‘heal’ the shields of other ships, boost groups with buffs and draw horrendous aggro by aggressively debuffing enemy ships. Science officers directly heal other players on the ground, as well as a nice mix of buffs and debuffs. Tactical officers are tanks, Engineering officers are damage and gadgets, but Science is all about the group/fleet support.
It’s why I chose the role. And I knew that’s what I’d be expected to do in the group. I put extra power into auxiliary systems (powers science abilities) and we zoned in.
A handful of giant Borg cubes and spheres greeted us in system. We could see a Federation starbase — Starbase 82 — orbiting a nearby planet, and a giant Borg transwarp conduit keeping station nearby. After we dispensed with the first wave, we headed to destroy the conduit — when it opened for a few seconds to allow a half dozen spheres to warp in.
Turned out the only time we could directly attack the conduit was for a few seconds after we had defeated a wave of Borg ships. Kill a few ships, try to take a few percent off the health of the conduit, more ships — and of course, our regular and unavoidable deaths. Healing a ship’s shields can help for awhile, but the power has a very long cooldown period and can’t usefully keep any ship whole by itself. After about half an hour, we managed to get the conduit dead, but not before it started spitting out Tactical Cubes instead of spheres.
The Borg had had too much time unmolested in system; they’d invaded the starbase. We headed in to see if we could undo any of the damage.
We beamed in behind barricades the uninfected had set up to make a last stand against both the Borg and their partially assimilated crewmates. They gave us something that would slow down the newly-infected, but do little against the others. As we worked through the station, clearing it of Borg, we’d look for tiny transport nodes which had to be destroyed first — it has the ability to summon an infinite number of Borg.
We found the station’s captain deep inside the station — assimilated, of course. We had regrets, but killed him anyway. We came eventually to the heart of the station. The way was barred by a force field, but three people activating three consoles simultaneously could drop it. A cheap but effective trick to ensure no soloers could complete the mission.
The room beyond was flooded with warp plasma, instantly deadly to organic life. At the far side of the room, a Borg Queen floated, intent on coordinating the assimilation of the station behind an even stronger forcefield, generated by a field generator that was itself guarded by several consoles scattered around the periphery of the room.
So, we had to:

1. Kill the Borg in the central area
2. Without touching the floor, hop on platforms to the generators at each corner of the room
3. Kill the Borg guarding them
4. Activate three consoles simultaneously and upload a virus to the generator before its forcefield reactivated
5. Do this for the other three generators in a very few minutes, otherwise the entire system resets and you have to start over
6. Keep killing Borg all the while
7. Once all the corner generators are down within the time alloted, destroy the central generator
8. This frees the Borg Queen, who comes out and attacks. Kill her and all the continual respawns.

Only one person fell into the warp plasma, forcing a restart midway through (dead players revive outside the room which is now protected by a reactivated forcefield).
It took about an hour and a half to do Infected. It was my first STF, but those who had done this one before insisted we were the best group they’d seen. One player had never grouped with anyone at all before this first time.
I was rewarded with a Borg engine. Allows faster travel in sector space, and adds Borg components to one of the warp nacelles and one of the impulse engines.
Looks COOL. And EVIL.
I need to do the other two Borg missions! Hoping The Cure goes as well. We lost someone in the ground phase, not sure why — they just disappeared, but we got a replacement and continued. With all the deaths in ground and especially in space, I was sure we’d get some ragequits, but nobody said anything, they just got their act together and got back in the fight.
Clearly we weren’t playing on the advanced difficulties. If we’d had to worry about injuries, I think things would have gone a little differently.