PvP LOUNGE

Survivability and Shipbuilding Basics

In general, the PvE mindset is to do as much damage as possible against a predetermined set of enemies, then add survivability as needed. Many times, no healing is even needed because you can defeat NPC's before they even have a chance to fire back (advanced and normal), and AoE or multiple target damage is preferred.

In PvP, we need to come at it from the opposite direction - build a ship that is able to handle a large amount of incoming damage and then add outgoing damage as we go. Finding the best balance of that is the fun part. We are also focusing on single target damage - if you can't defeat your target alone, then you need to work as a team to focus fire on one designated target to take them down.

Hull Capacity

Most player ships only have 100-200k hull. There ways to increase this - traits, Pax consoles etc, but the important thing to point out is that this is nothing like PvE, where you have ships with millions of hull HP. So how does a player ship with such a comparatively small amount of hull stay alive?

This is also probably the best place to mention Temporary Hull. The console "Hull Image Refractors" gives you up to 20 stacks of whatever heals overflow your maximum hull. This can be very beneficial for certain builds (usually required on Pilot escorts for example) but actually a detriment to some other builds - see the next section for that.

That said, ALWAYS activate threatening stance in Pvp, every time you die, make sure to turn it back on. There's no reason not to want that additional hull capacity it can get you and there aren't any appreciable benefits to leaving it off.

Resists

It's important to have a high amount of resists to stay alive, but the game does cap our resists out at 75%. So even if you have 300 DR, you are still probably not hitting that 75% cap because of diminishing returns - that said, you still want to get the most you can there.

Take a look here to understand how that part works: https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Damage_resistance

There are also "cat 2" damage resists - look for the term "Bonus Damage Resistance" in item descriptions. Usually, that is only part of certain traits or active abilities - for example the DPRM console will give you an additional bonus +100 damage resistance over its 20 second duration. That can help you hit damage resists in the 90%+ range in short bursts, so with some good timing and practice you can keep your ship alive a long time.

Note that "temporary hull" does NOT benefit from damage resistance. That means on builds that are capable of a lot of rapid hull healing, any temporary hull you gain from that overflow is actually *less* valuable than if the healing was applied to your standard hull HP pool.

A few ways to build up resists:

• Rhythmic Rumble - activated by pilot abilities or A2D. This is almost always used by pilot escorts, and the weapon power cost reduction is a great added bonus. Fun detail, but Attack Pattern Lambda *does not* count for activating this.

• Pax Triburnium Alloy - "free" console you can get from Discovery reputation boxes. Increases your hull capacity and gets you some resistances to all energy damage types. It won't protect you from radiation, electrical, kinetic, etc damage types though.

• Hull Plating skill - available from your skill tree or this handy list of items on the wiki. There are diminishing returns but it's better to have more than you need.

Healing

Another way to stay alive is to have active or passive healing abilities. Simple illustration: say you have taken my advice above and your ship is at 75% resist and someone attacks you for 100k damage. That's still 25k damage stripped off of your hull that needs to be restored in some way. Every point of healed hull gains that 75% resist from earlier, so essentially, for each point of hull you heal, it's worth nearly 4x the amount of incoming damage required to kill you (more or less, shields/penetration/debuffs play havoc with this sort of example once put to practice).

Examples of active healing:

• Engineering Team (engineering boff ability)

• Hazard Emitters (science boff ability)

• Causal Reversion (temporal boff ability)

• Hold Together (pilot boff ability)

• Protomatter Tactical Consoles (from Colony). One common setup is to use multiple Protomatter tactical consoles + Beam Overload + Cannon Scatter volley to activate them. Those give you a flat 5% of your hull back in healing, 5 times.

Examples of passive healing:

• PLOT Armor (starship trait) is very good, Greater Than The Sum can be good but situational

• Reconstructive Radiation, Secret Command Codes, Ablative Shell (personal space traits)

• Innate Hull Regen % (can be boosted by several traits and some gear, for example the Discovery 2-piece space set gives you 120% extra hull regen - even in combat). Note that hull regen does not give you any healing ticks and thus does not show up on parses at all (!).

• Shield Mastery + Shield Absorption (science skill tree - seriously, get this one it's very very good).

Ways to boost your healing:

• Imposing Presence, Biotech Patch, etc personal traits

• Radiant Nanite Cloud, Going the Extra Mile, etc starship traits

• Hull Repair skill or Hull Healing %consoles (Kobali Samsar console, Iconian Rep console, etc)

• "% increased incoming hull healing" specializations and traits. This is a sneaky one - it only affects YOUR ship. I.e. if you were to be healed - from any source - you get an larger heal. Example - you have 20% incoming healing on, and someone else throws you a 10k engineering team, you'll actually get back 12k hull. If you heal yourself with engineering team for 10k, you also get 12k hull. If you heal your teammate, they only get 10k just like it says on the engineering team tooltip. https://i.imgur.com/bO6R8Z8.png

• "Probability Shell" Science Utlimate ability - lasts 15 seconds and can be activated every 90 seconds - doubles hull and shield healing (including outgoing heals to teammates).

Damage Mitigation

Another way to avoid death is to have something to make you difficult to attack. A few common ones:

• Intel team (boff ability). Gives you "targeting stealth" for 9 seconds. Note that science ships, and other ships using stealthsight boosting gear, will still target you even through your stealth and attack you anyway. Do not rely exclusively on Intel team for survival, in a section below I will outline how to beat this from the attacker's perspective. It's still viable for certain situations though.

• Placates. This can be the Aux2Sif placate duty officer(available from exchange or Delta Operations pack), Pseudo-Submission personal trait, or even Jam Sensors. Setting these up on a cycle will make you very difficult to target and it's critical to avoiding incoming damage. Enemy players can be placated mid-firing cycle as well, sometimes not all of their weapons will even fire if you placate them at the right moment.

• Raw Speed. A few trivial exceptions aside, you are only target-able within 10km. Many smaller ships control the range of engagement because they have the speed advantage. So either build your ship to handle a lot of incoming damage, or control the speed, or better yet, both.

• "Untargetable" console active abilities. This includes stuff like the Obfuscation Screen, Alpha Deception Field, Temporal Backstep etc. that essentially take you out of the fight for a few seconds. Sometimes a few seconds to gather yourself and separate yourself from combat is enough to stay alive and wait for your team to reinforce you or plan your escape.

• Give Your All - engineering R&D trait dodges 20% of all incoming damage.

Escape Consoles and Countering Holds/Slows/Disables

The current meta does involve science builds with a lot of control abilities. The in-game descriptions of skills might lead you to think that if you have a high enough control skill, or if your enemy has a higher control skill than you do, that's why you are being held/frozen killed in a pile of plasma storms and red gravity wells.

Instead, it is absolutely imperative to equip some consoles to escape these situations. Most PvP control builds don't even need to waste any time slotting damage abilities and can focus entirely on controls - if you are locked down your measly 100k hull will be gone in a few seconds even from a completely unbuffed Plasma Storm.

The trick to this is slotting something that phases you out and allows you to move away from the "storms." Examples:

• Invasive Maneuvers starship trait (Elachi frigate)

• Elachi Rift Jump, Picard Maneuver, Fluidic Phase Decoupler, Personal Wormhole, etc consoles

Picard and Fluidic are the least expensive of these and very easy to acquire, so grab one (or both). These consoles will also get you out of Parasitic Ice, if you are hit with that.

Debuff Cleansing

It's important to be able to clear certain debuffs from your ship, especially when dealing with science/control builds, but also many other more traditional damage dealers will use debuffs against you to slow you down, lower your resists, etc.

• Tactical Team - clears debuff from abilities such as Suppression Barrage. The game and wiki are not clear about exactly what Tac Team clears, but since it also distributes your shields automatically it's a good one to bring. Do not activate it within a second or two of activating Beam Overload though, it is bugged and will prevent Beam Overload from being applied to you.

• Engineering Team - clears offline subsytems, such as shields and engines which are frequently targeting by the opposing team.

• Science Team - probably the most important cleanse - you could get by without the others but this is a requirement. This clears the debuff from Subnucleonic Beam, which strips all of your buffs as well as adds to your ability cooldown timers. A ship hit with subnucleonic beam that does not clear it quickly is a dead ship, simple as that.

• Warp Core Engineer Doff (debuff cleanse) is another great way to strip off debuffs, but it's locked into using Emergency Power abilities, so a max of once every 15 seconds and usually not "on-demand" like a science team would be. Still, worth slotting as insurance.

• Boost Morale from the Command Specialization (primary spec). This gives your entire team 4 seconds of debuff and control removal and timed right can really help out everyone.

• Hold Together, Hazard Emitters, Aux2Damp etc. These abilities also clear "hazard debuffs" whatever that is exactly - these will all clear Damage Over Time's, plasma burn, etc but most control ships will still be able to lock you down even with these slotted. Still worth noting for those situations.

Immunities + Invincible

Nearly every dedicated PvP ship uses the Zahl trait "Invincible" which makes your ship unkillable for 8 seconds and greatly boosts healing during that time, when you reach 5% hull hp. It's very important especially in Arenas - every death gives the opposing team one more point towards winning the match. That 8 seconds can be enough time to escape, regroup with your team, and win the game. Many times, a ship will be "Zahled" and then escape, hanging around the fray playing it safe for a few minutes until it is recharged (every 2 minutes). We can all have complaints about damage immunities and this playstyle, but it's in the game and if you won't use it, the other team will.

Another immunity is the pilot specialization tree - being damaged on all 4 shield facings grants some time of damage immunity. I wouldn't slot the pilot tree just for this reason, but it's worth noting too.

Pilot ship maneuvers also grand immunity, only for a second or two, but can be timed well to avoid an incoming damage spike.

I still died. Now what?

So what? It's a just spaceship video game. Don't take it personally and pour out salt all over zone chat, take a look at your damage history in-game, in a parse, or hop chat with some friends, fleetmates, etc and practice and see what you can do better. Don't call the other team cheaters or exploiters for using something that you don't fully understand, instead figure out what it is and how to counter it.

Adding Damage

The next step is to add some damage to fight back with. We're talking single target damage here, and even more important, landing some hits on one target then switching to another is a waste - you and preferably your entire team need to focus on a single target to take them down. The opposing team is going to make this as hard as possible - either by placating you, spamming the area with pets, perception or weapons offline hazards, etc.

I'm not going to cover science/control or torpedo builds here, but those are perfectly viable as well. Instead I'm going to mirror the section above and cover the counters to each of the above categories. It's best to understand both sides to the PvP "chess match" so you know what to do in any given situation.

The Basics

Focus fire. Try to stay on one target, or pick out the weaker targets and go for them, I personally play with the attitude "everyone must die at least once" and if I've picked on someone once or twice, I try to spread the love in the interest of a fun environment. In a pre-scheduled competitive match, sure, pick on the weakest target the whole time, play to win.

This helps coordinate even a random group of players onto one target.

Additionally, turn off "auto target pets" and "auto target objects" in your control options for PvP. You can safely ignore most pets, and if you really need to target one, you can manually click it with your mouse. This will prevent someone from spawning in some pets and causing you to target them instead of the player.

Generally, you will want to focus on single-target damage abilities. Beam Overload is bread and butter for PvP.

Another note about PvP parses, if you choose to parse your matches and look at them afterwards:

• DPS and total damage dealt do not matter. If a science ship drops a gravity well and kills a bunch of my Nimbus Pirate pets, that counts as damage/dps, but it doesn't matter if they didn't damage a player ship.

• Some abilities do not appear on parses, such as hull regen rating. A parse can give you a clue to what is going on - but observing buff bars and what is happening in practice is sometimes to only way to figure things out.

Damage Resist Debuffs

Your enemies will (hopefully) be maximizing their damage resist numbers. Abilities like Superior Area Denial, Cold-Hearted, Feel the Weight of Our Presence, Attack Pattern Beta and other damage resist debuffs you can apply can help take them down faster and also have the benefit of helping your entire team, as opposed to damage increase skills that only help your ship. These skills are even more beneficial against high-resist player ships, as opposed to PvE enemies which usually have very very low resists to begin with because of the way resists are applied.

Combating Healing/Healers

This one is a little tougher - there are some skills you can use to help stop enemy ships from healing, but generally the only way to beat a high healing ship is to hit them with more damage than they can keep up with. Still, it's worth noting a few things:

• Constable Specialization can be used to mark an antagonist and some of their healing is applied to you, as well as greatly reducing their regeneration and healing rates. To do this, you need to maintain a 4 second, uninterrupted lock on your target, so someone using lots of placates and escapes is going to be hard to apply this to.

• Engineering Ultimate "EPS Corruption" with "Ablative Corruption" can entirely stop your target's hull regen and drop their incoming healing by 50%. This can be used to great effect by science and support builds that don't necessary need the points in the tactical or science trees.

• Disables and Interrupts - for example those from the Red Gravity Well, can prevent a target from activating their heal and escape abilities.

Beating Intel Team Users

Intel team does not make the user Untargetable, it only grants them some "targeting stealth" - essentially as if they are partially cloaked even though they are still visible. If their stealth skill is higher than your stealth detection skill, you can't target them until the ability is up. Some people really lean on this mechanic and if you don't know how to get around it, you may have issues. A few things you can do:

• Jem Hadar Deflector Dish or Romulan Advanced Prototype Deflector both add 2.5% stealth detection bonus. The Jem'Hadar is slightly superior due to the Perception skill it includes.

• Tachyon Detection Field Console - can be used on any ship and grants 2.5% stealthsight for 30 seconds, every 60 seconds, plus some built-in perception passive skill as well.

Those two things can be used on ANY ship, so grab them. I carry them both in my inventory when I'm not using them and equip them if I encounter someone using Intel Team.

• Attack Pattern Lambda also increases your perception if you have a pilot seat, as well as accuracy and this is probably the best general attack pattern to run in PvP anyway so it's a nice added bonus.

• Tachyon Detection GRID console- same as the "Field" version above - except locked to the T5 Nebula ship - with the added bonus of applying to the entire team and a huge 15% stealthsight bonus.

• Sensor Scan - for science captains, grants you a nice stealthsight bonus and if applied to an enemy ship, decreases their stealth rating to make them more visible to the rest of your team

• Science Vessels have an innately higher starship stealth detection rating

• Auxiliary Power - higher aux power also improves stealth detection

• Science Skill tree - 15 points spent - Choose the Starship Perception path, which doubles the stealth detection benefit you get from aux power. This is very good, far far superior to a tiny +10 control rating. https://i.imgur.com/PQzKZVY.png

• Intelligence Specialization (secondary)- grants "Perception Bending", another increase of your perception based on aux power.

Getting through Placates

Most PvP ships will be running lots of placates to avoid taking incoming damage. When you are placated, the enemy ship will appear invisible and you cannot target them, however you can frequently see visual effects on their ship. Here's an example - the purple "ripples" are an activation of Pseudo Submission, so I am placated. However, I can still visually see the target ship because they have activated Reverse Shield Polarity, a distinct orange bubble.https://i.imgur.com/SZwvcWD.png

Sometimes in the heat of combat, with lots of visual effects, it can be hard to keep track of your target, but with some practice you can stay on the same target and keep chipping away at them.

Some placates can be cleared or blocked. Here is each common placate and its counter:

• Aux2Sif Doff -> Countered by Engineering Team. Attacker must activate Eng Team *after* being placated in this way, not before.

• Jam Sensors -> Countered by Science Team.

• Pseudo Submission or any other placates -> Narrow Sensor Bands (miracle worker) is a great choice, and the Intelligence Specialization secondary also grants you a 20% chance to remove all placates.

• Some personal and reputation traits that give you immunity to control DO NOT clear placates, even though a placate is a control ability. It's worth testing each one and noting what happens. Sometimes, it might be more beneficial to slot something like "Hardened Sensors," which does not clear placates but instead decreases the time you are placated for. Some placates such as Aux2Sif Doff are a FIXED time, so that placate is always 4 seconds regardless of your control skill - but that's true as of my last testing and may have changed recently (or could change with future patches).

Now that we know how stay on target through those pesky placates, the next part cannot be told - only practiced. If placated in a team environment, you will likely target the next valid target and attack that instead of your original target. It's important to focus back on your original target here. In the basics section, I outlined how to avoid targeting pets - make sure to do that, at least that way you only have to deal with 5 total targets instead of 50.

Immunities + Invincible

The Science Captain ability "Subnucleonic Beam" can strip all buffs - including immunities. If you are trying to decide which of your captains to set up a pvp build on, a good team usually has at least a few Science captains for this reason. Tactical still has a place for sure for the high damage output, but they will run into that 8-second wall of someone using the Zahl trait. Science captains can strip that buff off and defeat a target immediately, so keep that in mind.

I scored a kill! Now What?

Enjoy your moment of triumph and try not to get a big head about it. We're all at different stages in the game and it's important to keep the environment fun and welcoming to others, especially as PvP is generally neglected in this game. I'd rather more people played PvP and had a good time. If you want to get into some serious PvP, trash talk, whatever, then join a fleet with a good PvP premade team and schedule a match against another fleet and gloat all you want there.

Ker'rat - Open Space PvP Battlezone

This one requires its own section for a few reasons. This is a giant open arena, each team spawns on opposite sides of a bunch of borg in the middle. This can be a great place to get to know some people, practice some different builds, and even try some builds you might not ever want to take into an actual Arena match. 

This area is ONLY federation vs klingons. The only way to fight against your own faction is to form a private PvP match. Ker'rat does not restrict the instance to be fair in any way - you could be on a team of 5 Feds and end up against 15 Klingons, or vice versa. I'd encourage everyone to set up a passable build on both factions for this scenario - if you are on the side that is obviously winning, switch to the other team and try to even things up. The best fights are relatively even matches and that's also how you learn the most and improve the most.

You can also check to see if anyone is currently in Ker'rat by searching on the friends list "search" tab. This will show players - even those that are not on your friends list - in the specified region. This is a good way to see if there is any action. The icons don't always show which side has more players (Romulan and Jem'Hadar icons don't show their faction for some reason), but you can make a decent guess from fleet names and such. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/PkA8P3B.png At any given time of the day, there are usually 5+ people there.

One final note on Ker'rat I have to voice here - occasionally, you may enter Ker'rat and find a grudge match between two high-end pvp fleets in an absolute massive battle. That might sound fun, but if you aren't ready for it - it's like a minor league player brought into the majors unexpectedly.

Another note on Ker'rat, make sure your privacy settings allow you to accept team invites, and accept them. Just like in Arenas, a focused team, using team-wide buffs like Tactical Fleet, Science Fleet, and others is a huge advantage. It will also help you find where the fight is, and help you regroup and attack together - flying in one at a time is a good way to die over and over and get frustrated.

Arena Queues

So Ker'rat is a bit of a mess at times, and a nice fair 5v5 match can be quite a bit more fun. Here's how to make that happen:

• Queue up for Arenas. The same way you would normally run your TFO's, there is a PvP tab where you can queue up for a space arena. There are two options:

• "Arena F. Admiral" - this can be queued with any size team. The danger of queuing up for this is that if you are solo, you might end up facing off against a team of 5 well organized players. A team of 5 on voice chat, with a specific team makeup (1 healer, 1 control, 3 dogfighters for example), will pretty much always beat a team of 5 randoms with who knows what kind of team.

• "Arena Solo or Duo Queue" - only single or teams of 2 can queue up for this. This helps keep things a lot more fair for most public pvp queuing, so I'd urge anyone to ONLY queue for this one, unless you have a good 5-man team. Even if you are on with your friends, queue this anyway and face off against each other anyway- it's fun. That way both teams are at an equal disadvantage when it comes to team configuration.

• Go to Ker'rat and hang out, and keep an eye on zone chat. We usually get a few 5v5 arena queues going at least once or twice a week and the call is usually made here.

You might say: "But HOW do I set up a PvP build? I heard it was pay to win? Doesn't everyone die in one hit anyway? Someone said it was dead/broken/toxic/not fun/etc?"

Well the good news is that whether by luck or design, most of the equipment you need to survive more than "one hit" and actually participate, instead of doing your best impression of a borg probe, is available for *free!* Like anything in the game though, it will require you to earn it. Just because someone else doesn't like it doesn't mean that you won't - but most don't even give it a chance.

Here's the short version for those of you on very tight budgets just dipping your toes in:

1. Select your favorite T6 ship

2. Go to your fleet colony and purchase as many Colony Tactical Consoles as you can fit on your ship, in whatever your energy damage of choice is.

3. Modify your bridge officer layout. The following are MUST HAVES for pvp:

   1. Emergency Power To Engines - (slow ships are dead ships)

   2. Beam Overload 3 + Any Cannon Ability (rapid fire or scatter volley) - Slot these both back to back and you will get double the healing from the consoles in step 2. Ideally, do not use any cannons, just use beams for pvp for a basic, effective build.

   3. Science Team - Use this when you are hit with Subnucleonic Beam, Tyken's Rift, Spore Infused Anomalies, etc. any negative "science" effects on your ship

   4. Engineering Team - Use this when you are disabled or have any subsystem knocked offline, for example by Viral Matrix, Phaser procs, or anything else like that

   5. Auxiliary to Dampers or Auxiliary to Structural Integrity Field - Use these constantly for additional resistances and healing. Dampers makes you immune to disable and movement penalties, but SIF gives you a constant source of healing every 10-12 seconds.

   6. Photonic Officer - Aux2Batt does not work in PvP very well because you don't want to have low aux power for very long. Photonic Officer is the preferred method of cooldown, but feel free to combine it with other options you might have (borg doffs, Boimler trait, Chrono Capacitor trait that every has for free...)

Go to your Options then Controls and turn ON "Never Auto Target Pets" and "Never Auto Target Objects." Then turn OFF "Only Attack If Target Selected." This will allow your ship to only attack player targets, not hangar pets, summons, photonic fleets etc. You can still target those things by manually clicking them, but you don't have to TAB through 500 on-screen targets to get to the player you are trying to attack.

If you can, also grab the following Universal consoles from the exchange

1. 1. Hull Image Refractors - Only activate as a last resort. It is actually slotted for the passive "incoming hull healing exceeding max hull instead applies temporary hitpoints"

   2. One of these: Fluidic Phase Decoupler (Exchange), Elachi Rift Jump (Free/Event), Picard Maneuver (Dilithium), Molecular Phase Inversion (Dilithium), Voth Phase Decoy (Phoenix). These consoles are to be used in an emergency - for example when your ship is held in a tractor beam, gravity well, parasitic ice or some other situation where you are stuck and vulnerable. You can use them to escape and heal, reposition, and stay in the fight without costing your team a death.

PRACTICE

The only way to get better is to participate in matches and pay attention to what is happening, ask questions, and adapt your build and playstyle to get better. The first time I was hit with a subnucleonic beam I had no idea what was happening but now I see it and hit science team in a second or two and I'm right back in action.

Now, the ceiling gets much higher than those basic steps of course. For example, if you have an Intel ship, you may want to use Intel Team for the targeting stealth, or whatever other specialization seating you have available. 

Budget PVP 2024 

Intelligence and Pilot Bridge Officer Abilities:
Untargetability [Budget PvP+]:
One of the current primary ways to survive is through using the bridge officer ability "Evade Target Lock." This bridge officer ability will trigger on the player's target if the adversary target is within 10 kilometers and will when activated provide Untargetability which can last for multiple seconds.
Additionally, the length of this untargetability increases when the CtrlX stats are raised higher. Not only does the ability provide untargetability from enemy players, it also makes the player not targetable by control effects and anomalies. When building for PvP almost every ship with the exception of the Hurq Velcrid Hive Dreadnought has intelligence seating in the current meta. As a note on game balance while this might be frustrating for many newcomers as well as experienced players, due to power creep and the variety of different ways of disabling a ship, having a substantive form of untargetability in the game seems to be required for proper balancing without making any one ship class (Dogfighters, Support Builds, Healers, Etc) too overpowered in one specific way.

Stealth & Perception Mechanics [Meta PvP Budget]:
Another way to stay alive and attempt to force your adversary to build around you is to have a large amount of Stealth. One of the easiest ways to do this is to run Intelligence Team along with the Starship Trait Exitus Acta Probat. While around a year ago this ability did receive an effective significant nerf with the Pilot revamp, it still sits in a comfortable position of being meta but not required. More details on the Perception Formulae and its conversions can be read on the wiki, however for the current Meta Hydra build most players run Attack Pattern Lambda III which provides +750 Perception, as well as Intel Team II which provides +300 Perception. However, it also provides a -450 perception debuff to targets which are hit with weapons. When factoring in Intelligence Team Stealth of 4680, Exitus Stealth of about 500 an adversary running Exitus would have total stealth of 5180. In the perception formula on the wiki this comes out too a visibility range without the lambda debuff of:
(5000 + 750 + 300 - 5180)/ 50 = 17.4 km
With the Lambda Debuff though this becomes:
(5000 + 750 + 300 - 450 5180)/ 50 = 8.4 km
In a team setting since the Lambda Debuff can stack multiple times, this can act as a way to blind an adversary of anyone on your team running Exitus Acta Probat. Additionally, in one vs ones it can provide a window to briefly disengage and outmaneuver your adversary since usually ships are moving at speeds upwards of 200 impulse on the lower end and 500 impulse on the higher end.

Whole Lotta X's and Invincible:
Whole Lotta X's Personal Space Trait [Budget PvP+]:
This personal space trait provides a one time every two minutes heal of your ship for 50% of your maximum hull capacity when your current hull capacity reaches 25%. This trait is very cheap and sells in the range of 3m - 30m EC and is one of the most accessible ways to make a ship survive longer as an extremely useful method of last resort. Usually in any PvP fight, ships survive for a long time and will receive spike damage which will lower their hull rapidly. This can buy significant extra time to survive. While new, this trait acts as an important part of the current balance. This trait acts as a cheap form of the more expensive Invincible Starship Trait.

Invincible Starship Trait [Advanced PvP Budget+]:
This trait provides a buff when your ship reaches 0% hull which will make your ship unkillable for 8 seconds. Its worth noting that both Constable and Subnucleonic Beam can remove this buff.
This starship trait is on virtually all if not all serious PvP builds. (This is commonly just called "Zahl" after the "Zahl Heavy Crusier" which is the ship the trait comes from) For the same reason as a Whole Lotta X's, usually adversaries shouldn't be able to take a PvP build down to 0% hull capacity regularly. This acts as a final line of defense, so you have time to react and continue to live in the fight. If you have fought well and you have a solid build behind you, this should give you that moment to notice a huge spike and respond to it.

Resistances & Bonus Resistance:
Rhythmic Rumble [Advanced PvP Budget+]:
Rhythmic Rumble is a starship trait which comes off of the Mudds Market Risian Corvette which can be purchased for 4250 Zen when on a 75% off sale. This trait provides weapon power cost reduction, and equally importantly, resistance which is equal to the current flight speed. As I mentioned previously most meta PvP builds fly at a speed of around 200-500 impulse which means that ships which can fly this fast can get significant resistances. However, it's worth nothing that this trait can only proc off of pilot abilities or Aux 2 Damp, which is one of many reasons that Pilot specialization seating is so highly valued in PvP among other reasons as well.

Pax Triburnium [Budget PvP+]:
Pax Triburnium Consoles are one of the cheapest ways and most cost-effective ways to increase survivability. They provide as a passive around 50 resistance to the major DEW types and +10% hull capacity. This console can be used on virtually any PvP build as a BiS item.

Importance of Bonus Resistance:
One of the more under-appreciated sides of tanking in STO PvP is the Bonus Resistance Statistic. Consider the Space Reputation Trait "Advanced Hull Reinforcement" which gives a mere 12.5 Bonus All Damage Resistance. If we take a realistic scenerio of a PvP ship with 100k hull, and 290 resist subject to -100 drr from attackers with an incoming shot of 50k spike (likely a technical overload from the Advanced Piezo Polaron Beam from the Lukari Reputation), merely running this trait saves 3,473 hull capacity from being damaged. This may not seem like a lot, but this is 3.4% of the hull in one shot which would have been removed which isn't. When subject to multiple shots the difference is huge.
Final Hull Capacity with base tanking statistics vs 50000 incoming damage: 67580
Final Hull Capacity with additional tanking statistics vs 50000 incoming damage: 71053
Now consider clickable consoles such as Dynamic Power Redistribution Module,
Overloaded SIF Linkage, and Molecular Phase Inversion Field. These consoles each give a minimum of +100 Bonus Damage Resistance and up to 300 for one of them. If we were to add minimum of 100 Bonus DRR into the same scenario with the space reputation trait these would be the results.
Final Hull Capacity with base tanking statistics vs 50000 incoming damage: 67580
Final Hull Capacity with additional tanking statistics vs 50000 incoming damage: 84707
This saves 17k off of the Hull Capacity, or 17% of the hull in this example.
Investing into as much Bonus Damage Resistance rating as possible (within reason) is highly desirable.

Healing vs Hull Regeneration:
Protomatter Consoles & Clickable Regeneration Trade-Off:
There are two approaches you can take to regain your hull capacity. The first of these is through healing. Healing has many advantages, in particular that when paired with the console Hull Image Refractors you can gain Temporary Hit Points. Temporary Hit Points provide an increased buffer to damage and being killed. One of the strongest and practical sources of healing in STO which is PvP viable is Protomatter Consoles from the T5 Colony World. These consoles are budget friendly.
Hull Regeneration on the other hand will not increase Temporary Hitpoints. However, sources of Hull Regeneration often come from clickable consoles which also give other survivability buffs like Bonus Damage Resistance Rating so investing into more of these often means that when you need regeneration and bonus drr you have it. Since the number of Protomatter consoles needed to be combat effective is usually at least 4+, having both of these is usually mutually exclusive since there would be no leftover console slots for damage consoles, debuff consoles, disable and hold consoles, or team wide healing consoles. Therefore, picking one of these approaches and designing around it is good idea.

Disco Two Piece Core and Shields & Competitive Core Shield and Engine [Budget PvP+]:
Using the Discovery Reputation Warp Core and the Discovery Reputation Shields provides a passive +180% regeneration as part of the two pieces. This is exceptionally strong and the approach I prefer. However, another very common approach is to use the Competitive 3-piece as when you receive spike damage it provides significant bonus damage resistance rating. Depending on the build and players style there could be a strong argument for either.

Unconventional Systems & Other Important Consoles:
Unconventional Systems Personal Space Trait [Budget PvP+]:
The Unconventional Systems Personal Space Trait is used on virtually all meta PvP builds to provide a reduction in cooldown on other Universal Consoles. The trait activates on certain control effects. Consult the wiki for a comprehensive list.

Fluidic Phase Decoupler [Budget PvP+] & Jump Consoles:
Fluidic Phase Decoupler is a "Jump" Console. This console provides a brief period of untargetability. In the current meta it is common for there to be moments where despite your best efforts you simply can't absorb any more damage without going to 0% hull capacity. In these moments, using a console such as Fluidic Phase Decoupler or similar consoles like Elachi Rift Jump, Warp Burst Capacitor, and Personal Wormhole Generator can save you from your invincible or Whole Lotta X's activating and removing those final lines of defense or if they do activate as a way to stall for time until other regeneration consoles come back. Note that generally speaking using all or most of these consoles one after another is not combat effective. While using two of them has grown more popular in recent weeks, it's worth highlighting that sacrificing actual regeneration potential or tanking potential for jumps will usually result in you simply getting killed a few seconds later as these jumps only last for a few seconds but Regeneration and tanking consoles typically last for 20-30 seconds.

Practice and  Training:
Practice & Training:
Something which cannot be stated enough is how important practice and training and tuning a build to fit your play style can be. While you can assemble a competent build if you do not practice flying it you will do poorly. Once you finish your PvP build always use it for some time so you can get used to it and understand its strengths and weaknesses and find ways to improve it.