Tau Dewa Sector Patrol

Mission Completed

Jumping to the opposite end of the game from the tutorials, we have the Tau Dewa Sector Patrol, a daily mission that earns Romulan marks for level 50 characters. I've been working on my Romulan Reputation and after the initial "oooooh" wore off from running around the surface of New Romulus I realized that the marks were pretty slow in coming. Plus, the ground activities were interesting once but were not thrilling me as a "grind" I wanted to repeat many times. It is a beautiful zone, and it's a big one, but the return on time spent seemed low to me.

Then I discovered the TDSP daily mission and things got a lot more interesting.

Most importantly it's all in space, and there are 15 different missions in it, but you will only need to do 5-7 of them to have a complete run for the day. Each completed mission contributes 10, 15, or 20% towards completion of the patrol. Finish that up and you have 60 marks, 75 if you finish during a bonus period. There's an excellent breakdown of it on the STO Wiki here.

Oops!

For me I just run 5 "stop the attacking ships" missions and call it good. Each one is a good-sized space battle with some allies and with 5 waves of enemies. It's great for practicing with a new ship or trying out new builds for a ship. You can battle everything from Tal Shiar to Hirogen to Gorn to Tholians, so there's plenty of variety. Every once in a while the Enterprise-F shows up and assists you in the fight, which is a nice little touch.

U.S.S. Mjolnir and the Enterprise-F

The 60 mark reward is plenty to keep your tier advancement going since you can only run 1 large and 1 small project at a time anyway. I have not done much gear build yet on it and I suspect to squeeze more out of each day for that I will be returning to the surface of New Romulus. If you're willing to take some time though, 60 a day is not terrible and the actual encounters are a lot of fun.