Star Trek Online: My First (Almost) Failed Mission

I've been playing Star Trek Online (STO) since the 'early start' but I can only spare a few hours a week, and so I'm still grinding my way to Lieutenant Commander so that I can get my first ship upgrade.

I've been focusing exclusively on PVE missions and trying to get a better feel for the game. I've seen some of the comments on the official STO forums which state that the missions are way too easy, and while I would agree that few of them are challenging, I've experienced a few hairy moments so far. While getting killed has no downside other than making you re-spawn, it still feels bad every time this happens.

My worst experience was only a few days ago on the 'Unseen Threat' mission issued by Admiral Quinn. You are directed to visit a listening post on the other side of the sector and protect it from Klingon insurgents. I beamed down to the station and fought some pretty tough hand-to-hand with the Klingon invaders, but things were even harder when I beamed back to my ship.

You are directed at this point to take out an Undine dreadnought and a number of Klingon ships appear on your HUD as friendlies. There are also a number of Undine escort ships which keep spawning around the dreadnought.

On my first few runs at this I concentrated on the escorts first, hoping to take out the dreadnought last. What actually happened though was that the Undine killed all the Klingons and then concentrated all their fire on me to destroy my ship in seconds. I soon worked out that after re-spawning if I distanced myself from the dreadnought I could avoid its fire while simultaneously luring the escorts away to destroy them. However, I then discovered that every time I went near the dreadnought it just spawned more escorts to surround me.

After exploding 10 times in a row I was very tempted to just give it up, but after checking on the forums I learned that if you warp out of the system and back in again, your Klingon allies are also re-spawned, giving you the fighting chance that you need. This time I concentrated all fire (and a weapons battery) on the dreadnought and it went down in flames. Phew.