Star Trek Online : A Guide to Recruiting Duty Officers

Here’s to the Finest Crew in Starfleet!!!

I love Star Trek Online’s Duty Officer system. Recently however, to my fright, I discovered that some of my fleet buddies didn’t know how to get their hands on a great crew, and it occurred to me that they might not be the only ones. And so I present my little guide to getting your hands on “The Finest Crew in Starfleet”. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to assume you know the basics of DOFFing.

General Recruitment

The basic recruitment missions used to be randomly found in the zones around Stardock or Qo’nos. That changed at some point, and now you can pick them up at any time from NPCs at your faction’s Academy. The Personnel Officer has most of them, but there are also race specific ones for Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellarite, from NPCs of those races. If you’re on Team Klingon it all works much the same, with Orion, Gorn, and Nausican-specific recruitment being on offer. For most of these missions you simply get given some DOFFs, but the general recruitment one will grant you a pack of DOFFs to open, trade, or store instead. The General Recruitment mission is the only one that costs 1000 Dilithium. The others are simply free officers, though they do have a long duration and cooldown. I generally leave them to my alts, freeing Arkturos Reh to deal with the more lucrative tasks.

Star Trek Online - Personnel Officer

Exploration Clusters

Exploration Cluster missions are the core, from which many wonderful things will follow. Each cluster has a series of 7 DOFF missions which follow on from eachother. You can recognise these because they will be marked as being part of a chain by ending with 3/7, or whichever stage of the series they belong to.

The next step in the series will not always be available. However, as I discovered with glee, you can double your chances of finding them by clicking on the “Department Heads” tab, and seeing what your Operations officer is offering. Nevertheless, it’s going to take a fair amount of time, and many visits, to get to the end of the chain.

The final (seventh) one will award a unique blue DOFF that you will only ever get one of. Welcome them to your crew, where I am sure they shall serve with distinction, but they are not our end goal.

Having completed the mission chain for the cluster, you will now have unlocked the cluster’s Support mission. For this mission you want to get your critical chance as high as possible, for it is only on a critical that you will get that cluster’s unique purple DOFF. Don’t worry though, for a regular success will still gain you a refugee, which we’ll be needing later. The Support mission can be repeated, when available, as much as you like, and you can have multiple copies of the purple DOFF. Some are more useful than others, but they’re all worth having.

Eventually, you may end up with so many copies of a cluster’s purple DOFF that you can’t make good use of them all. They’re bound to you, so you can’t sell them, but you can trade them in to the Personnel Officer at the Academy for three random unbound blue DOFFS. What you get may or may not be useful to you, but at least they’ll be different!

If, like me, you’re working on Fleet Projects, you need a good supply of low-end officers to feed to them. When you end up with any blues you don’t want, you can trade those in for 3 greens, which can each be turned into 3 commons. Thus one purple can be turned into 9 greens, or 27 commons.

Asylum Missions

You should be getting a refugee every time you attempt a Cluster’s Support mission. You may also get the occasional refugee from other recruitment missions at Starfleet Academy. These will be your currency for the Asylum Missions.

There are Asylum missions in quite a few locations, but they all work in the same way. They will either appear in your “Current Map” section, or under the jurisdiction of your ever-helpful Operations officer. The Asylum mission is for a specific race, Vulcan for example. The Vulcans will grant one of your refugees asylum in return for you taking one of their officers under your wing. You can offer up any of your collection of refugees, but depending on the race of the host, there will be certain favoured traits. Like any DOFF mission, you want to pick the candidate who matches as many of those as possible to raise your success chances.

The mission will remove the refugee from your roster, and you’ll receive a new officer of the relevent race, with the quality depending on your success result. Some races have rather difficult to fill trait requirements, but it’s still worth having a go even if you don’t have any refugees that fit them. If you’re doing Cluster Support missions regularly, you’ll have enough refugees to throw at every asylum mission you encounter.

There’s a lot of them, though they’re somewhat rare and have a cooldown. Here’s where you can find them:

Andorians : Sirius Sector, Andoria
Vulcans : Sirius Sector, Vulcan
Humans : Sirius Sector, Sol
Betazoids, Tellarite, and Rigellian: Sirius Sector
Caitian and Saurian : Alpha Centauri Sector
Bolians: Iota Pavonis Sector
Trill and Benzarite : Beta Ursae Sector
Bajorans, Cardassians, Karemmans and Paradan : Throughout “Cardassian Space” (Alpha Trianguli, Beta Ursae, and Zeta Andromedae)

Consular Authority

These are four similar small mission chains within Cardassian space (including the associated exploration clusters). One for each of the Bajorans, Cardassians, Paradans, and Karemmans. Once you complete the chain, you will sometimes encounter a repeatable “Officer Exchange” mission. These are a little similar to Asylum missions, in that you will lose the officer that you use for the mission, but they use regular officers rather than refugees. I tend to only use common DOFFs for this, though you might want to plug a green into it for a better chance at a higher quality result, if you happen to have spare greens with the right traits.

In the picture below, I sorted my DOFFs to only show common officers with the required traits of Honourable and Teamwork, and happened to have a candidate with both. That gives me a 14% chance of a purple and a 44% chance at a blue Karemman officer. Otherwise, I get a green, and that’s still an upgrade. I’ll take those odds today.
Star Trek Online Officer Exchange Duty Officer Mission

A few other DOFF sources

The above are my main sources of good officers, but there are a few other missions which will provide new members for your crew. The list below is not an exhaustive one, and new methods tend to come in with every update.

Cardassian Agents

There is a long mission chain over in Cardassian Space called “Ghosts of the Jem’Hadar”, that rewards a one-off purple Cardassian at the end. Once you’ve completed that chain, you’ll unlock a repeatable mission called “Provide Sanctuary to Anti-Dominion Cardassian Agent”. On a critical success, that’ll award a Cardassian of random quality.

Klingon Defectors

There’s a pretty rare mission you may come across called “Instigate Defection”. That’ll award a blue officer on a success, or a purple on a crit. The best thing about this mission is that you’re getting officers from the opposing team’s races, meaning they’ll often have very different trait selections to what you can usually get your hands on.

Right, hopefully that’s enough to get anyone who was not on the path to purple DOFFs well underway. If you have any questions about finding DOFFS, DOFFING in general, or anything else to do with Star Trek Online, I’ll be happy to try to answer in the comments, or update this post accordingly.

1 comment to Star Trek Online : A Guide to Recruiting Duty Officers

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