Hello, all, and welcome back to Joe and STO! I’m back talking about past Event Ships and why you should always consider grinding out the Events that reward ships.

If you need a refresher, I’ll post the link to Part 1 below:

EVENT SHIPS BLOG 1: The Tier 5 Era

I’ll note that I’ve added a GIF from Twitter user Lord-Ice. You may want to hit up Part 1 again to see the insane Impulse Speeds people tried to get with the Risian corvette!

Today’s entry won’t be too splashy. It’ll basically be a “wall of text” covering the end of 2014 and the whole of 2015. A number of changes to how Event Ship rewards were handled led to an increased need to get as many ships as you could. You’ll see things ranging from consoles not tied to their ships to Admiralty cards being rewarded, along with a few ships becoming meta choices for one reason or another.

But enough tease. Let’s get started on this admittedly brief entry!

TIER 6 ERA

From this point on (technically starting on October 14, 2014, which was after the 2014 Summer Event), all Event Ships rewarded are Tier 6 ships. This means that, in addition to just being a free ship that came with a console having fringe use (unless the ship itself was a great platform), you could unlock Starship Traits to help boost your older ships’ performance! (Hey, even a trait that ultimately gives an additional 300 DPS is 300 DPS you didn’t have prior…and for free!).

Remember that Ship Scaling wasn’t really a thing yet. While Tier 6 ships did increase shield and hull strength numbers from a base level upward, they weren’t usable by any level of character. However, unlike C-Store Tier 6 ships, I believe Event Tier 6 ships were usable at Level 45. This at least gave you 15 levels of super-powered goodness compared to sticking with a level-up reward Tier 5 until you could buy a Tier 6 from the C-Store.

2014

EVENT: Winter Event/Q’s Winter Wonderland

  • IMPORTANCE: Not only was it the first Tier 6 ship available for free to all players (meaning theoretically, all max-level characters could at least have 1 Starship Trait to earn and players could essentially earn Starship Traits going forward), it was the first Carrier made freely available outside of a single mission and the first free ship to have Specialization seating (Intel, which would turn out to be a meta choice of Specialization seating for a long time). Although ship earnings were still on a per-character basis, getting the ship for other characters didn’t take nearly as long: just 1 run of “Fastest Game on Ice” on each character that wanted the ship as opposed to each character needing the 25 daily runs (1,000 Q Portraits / 40 Portraits per run = 25 daily runs). Also, this was the last of the unique Breen consoles, making a 4-piece set with previous (and forward) versions of the Breen ship consoles.
    • As we know now and through various changes made to the mechanic, Hangar Pets are among some of the better damage dealers you can have. This at least gave players a free platform to try the Carrier lifestyle.

2015

EVENT: 5th Anniversary

  • IMPORTANCE: For the first time, the console equipped to the Event ship was not bound to only being used by the ship itself or its counterparts (it would take nearly 5 more years for all new Event Ship consoles to be usable on all ships, with Summer 2019 being the final holdout). The console on the Cruiser was considered a meta choice for healing/tank builds for a long time. It also started a long trend of the console from the Anniversary ship being a 4th piece of that year’s Anniversary Mega-Bundle console set, in this case the Command Cruiser Mega Bundle. Finally, it came with its own Warp Core/Singularity Core, completing an episode gear set bonus.

THE RECLAIM ERA

In early June of 2015, Cryptic revealed they were adding a Reclaim tab to the Event Reputation UI (the previous place for Event-based earning turn-ins). With this change, previous ships that were earned via the Event Reputation UI would become account-wide unlocks (which excluded the stripped-down Odyssey/Bortas, the T5 Ambassador/Kamarag, The Obelisk Carrier, and the preview versions of the Dyson Science Destroyers as they were all earned as Episode rewards). This changed the whole nature of earning Event-based Starships. Now, even if you figured you’d never use a ship now, you never know what the future would hold going forward. You also didn’t know what would become meta (or conversely, what would drop out of the meta), so you were best to have everything available if you could do the Events.

2015

EVENT: Summer Event/Lohlunat Festival

  • IMPORTANCE: This was the first Tier 6 ship to have Bank, Exchange, and Mail access available to players from their starship’s bridge; previously, you had to purchase a Tuffli Freighter, Suliban Cell Ship, or the Ferengi D’Kora Marauder, all of which were single-character purchases and winnings from various Lockboxes (D’Kora) or DOFF promotions (Tuffli and Suliban). This gave you the account-wide capability to fly around in an endgame-capable ship, running TFOs and doing Patrols & new missions, while still having access to most of what you’d need while you’re away from a Starbase or other major faction hub. I also want to say the trait “Greedy Emitters” was a staple choice for Science/Energy Weapon builds, but I can’t be too sure on that. Regardless, if the ship was free and you could slot Energy Syphon, Tachyon Beam, or (preferablye) Tyken’s Rift, any DPS help for free was appreciated.
  • The Ferengi Nandi: having a convenient end-game account-unlocked ship interior hub before having convenient ship interior hubs on end-game ships was cool!
  • INTERESTING NOTE: Now with the Endeavor System sometimes asking you to play Dabo (not necessarily at Quark’s, as some Endeavors will ask), this also becomes a convenient Endeavor-completing vehicle for those who were able to get this when it was free as an Event reward (though unless Greedy Emitters is still decent, I wouldn’t waste an Epic Phoenix Token on it for a single character).

THE ADMIRALTY ERA

One of the final pieces to why you should always grind out Event Ships came in late October 2015. With the release of Season 11: A New Dawn, Cryptic gave players the ability to get some kind of use out of their old and current ships via the Admiralty System. Each ship you had commissioned and ready for use got added to your Admiralty’s Ship Roster (1 “card” per ship). If you had many C-Store and Event ship unlocks, this got tedious fast, but it was a good way to get some use out of those out-of-date or lower-tiered ships you’d otherwise never use again.

2015…again…(seriously, so many game changes this year in relation to ships!)

EVENT: Winter Event/Q’s Winter Wonderland

  • IMPORTANCE: If you’d collected the Breen ships prior to this year, this ship finished off a 4-piece set while also giving players another shot at a Carrier-like ship in the form of a Dreadnought Cruiser, a mix of a Carrier (has a hangar bay) and a Cruiser (sturdier and more Engineering focused than what’s now called a Strike Wing Escort).

RECAP OF PROGRESS IN THE PAST YEAR

So let’s recap…what could a player gotten for free from the end of 2014 through the end of 2015?

  • SHIP TYPES:
    • Tactically-focused: 1 (Warship)
    • Cruisers: 2 (Cruiser and Dreadnought Cruiser)
    • Carriers/Science-Focused: 1 (Carrier)
  • STARSHIP TRAITS: 4
    • NOTE: This fill’s a Starship’s free Starship Trait slots. A 5th can be unlocked via a fleet’s Research Lab holding.
  • “TRULY UNIVERSAL” CONSOLES: 1 (Regenerative Integrity Field)

As you can see, if you were any kind of player, over these 4 Events, at least 1 should have been a ship that closely fit your play style. Granted, there were no Science ships that didn’t have hangars and no Tactical ships that were pure Escorts, but hey, free is free, right?

Also, if you did all the Events, this meant you could theoretically fill your Starship Trait list on any character with all 4 freely-available traits if you were willing to grind the XP via Patrols and TFOs on the character(s) that wanted them. As I said above, any increase in damage output, especially for free, was welcome until you could trade out for trait(s), console(s), etc. that were strictly superior.

SHIPPING IT OVER TO 2016…AND BEYOND!

My apologies for the brevity of this entry as the research on release and patch dates took up more time than I expected. I do believe Part 3 will end the series with a run through…counts on his fingers…5 years worth of ships!? That would mean 17 ships for 1 blog post! Yeah…maybe this will extend into a Part 4 (and maybe Part 5?) to keep the Wall of Text ™ down to a manageable length.

Until Part 3 hits, take care and continue enjoying this year’s Lohlunat Festival! And I do hope this part of the series at least convinces you to go ahead and start making those daily rounds for the Risian Weather Control Ship! I mean, free is free, even if everything on it is/will be horrible at the high end. You never know when a fix/buff makes anything on the ship worth using. 😉

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