Free to Play Guide: Seneca Command Carrier, Part 1: Reason for the Challenge

Hello, Joe and STOers! Or if you’re on Endeavour’s blog, welcome to my parlour (most probably for the first time, so extra welcomes!)! I hope you’ve all been enjoying the game and some of the ships of both canon and original designs. I have to say, doing a Picard-themed character, I’ve come to enjoy STO-specific designs/redesigns a lot more.

Today’s not going to be a look at those, though. Sorry, I just needed something to open this post with, and I couldn’t think of something for the Seneca.

A few weeks ago, Cryptic released the Seneca Command Carrier, an STO-specific 25th century redesign of a ship from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2: the Hiawatha.

(Screenshot from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, Episode 1: “Brother”)

Reviews came in from some of the more frequently-posting content creators…and they weren’t exactly happy with its layout, console, and trait.

I’ll say that I don’t disagree with the general sentiment, and that both MC Stu and Stu1701 give good generic marks to the ship (or really, any ship in MC Stu’s case).

MC Stu: “I think Carriers need some serious help in STO. In my opinion, and correct me if I’m wrong guys, but there’s no reason to use a Carrier, not that class. Flight Deck Carrier would be better because you have a 4/4 and 2 Hangar Bays. A pure Carrier ship, I just, am I missing something?”

CasualSAB: “So an issue we have with ships like this (Seneca or Hiawatha, fleet version) is they do not get a Secondary Deflector…The Secondary Deflector adds a significant chunk of damage for a Science build. I’ve seen Secondary Deflectors do 200k-300k for people before, and Hangar Bays typically only do at best, like, 40k-50k per hangar bay…Until Cryptic realizes this is a bad decision, I can’t in any good conscience recommend these science carriers because they’re just so underpowered. So, if Cryptic ever puts a Secondary Deflector on this thing, then it’ll be a solid ship, but without a Secondary Deflector it’s a hard pass for me because the ship itself is just too weak without that Sec Def [EDITOR’S NOTE: Secondary Deflector].”

Stu1701: “…[N]ot a great starship trait when a personal trait actually performs better…Support Runabouts, not overly impressed with these, either…They feel like bulky Fighters, but you get less of them and they’re not as powerful and their cooldowns are longer. They need a buff…I’m a lot more excited for the Valkyries than this.”

I’m not trying to prove them wrong! Far from it. I, too, feel 3/3 Carriers with 2 hangar bays are underpowered compared to some ships that are 4/4 and also have 2 hangar bays or are 3/3 with a Secondary Deflector and 1 hangar bay.

But this isn’t about that.

WHY I TOOK ON THIS SELF-APPOINTED CHALLENGE

At one point, I wanted to take the worst ship available in the game and do a F2P build of it to show it can put numbers up that are reasonable for Normal-level content. At Normal difficulty, I do not believe there are unusable ships or bad purchases. Under-powered, absolutely! But not unusable or bad. (Once you start going toward Advanced, you’ll need to watch ship layouts, consoles you’re using, etc., which is where the above creators’ concerns primarily lie).

Well…I feel I found that worst ship, and that’s due to how under-powered the Seneca feels and is perceived to be.

SERIES PLAN

I’m going to do this series in 5 parts, as my time permits (so it’s not like I’ll upload an update each week for 3-4 weeks. It could take 6-8 weeks, depending on real-life priorities and if we get 2 Mudd’s Bundles around this time this year like we did last year.). Those parts are:

1. Reasoning and Tease: You’re reading it! You’ll see how I’m thinking about the testing method and economic restrictions, and you’ll get a slight tease of what to expect in Part 2. 😉

2. Solo ISN and the Build: You’ll see my Seneca build using almost only items, traits, etc., obtainable for free, the Seneca itself notwithstanding. I’ll go ahead and note that I used a couple extra Traits than I should have: a Personal Space Trait from an Elite Captain Training Token and an extra Space Reputation Trait from a Fleet Research Lab upgrade. I note what Traits I’d suggest throwing out because of that.

3. Fleet-upgraded F2P Fleet Hiawatha: The Discovery-era version of the Seneca, the Hiawatha, is available as a Fleet Ship. This version of the build will assume access to Fleet items but adds a Dilithium spending limit of 80,000 (10 days’ worth of Dilithium Ore for a single character).

4. All-out Fleet Hiawatha: You have practically no limits and can do whatever you wish for gear, traits, available device/trait/console slots, etc.

5. Testing the Competition: Let’s take a couple ships that are theoretically better than the Seneca/HIawatha and see how much of a difference different fighters and extra weapon slots matter with mostly the original build. I haven’t decided what these ships will be, but once I’m at this point, you’ll see them. This will be the “anything goes” section of the whole series.

METHODOLOGY

My thinking was this…if the Seneca can do an “ISN” (Infected: The Conduit [a Space queue], Normal difficulty) solo, then it’s good enough for a newer player or $0-budget player to build out the ship well enough to contribute to Normal-difficulty queues in general.

Why this queue specifically?

Infected: The Conduit is the most-run queue for DPS parsing. There’s not a lot of downtime (so combat log readers are essentially always reading your damage output), and with enough speed boosts you can get back into firing at enemies without dropping out of Red Alert (“combat”, for in-game purposes) not long after a section of the map is done. While some initial testing on a new, potentially Elite-capable build may be done in Advanced difficulty runs (Infected: Space, Advanced; or “ISA”), the majority of high-end testing and record runs are done in the Elite version (Infected: Space, Elite; or “ISE”).

I then figured, “Okay…so if Elite-level builds are tested on Elite, and Advanced-level builds are tested on Advanced, then I’ll test a Normal-level build on Normal!”

And since, in a traditional queue, you’ll be teamed with 4 other players, well, if you can solo the queue with this build then you can contribute meaningfully in public queues with the same setup!

So for all 3 versions of the Seneca build, I’ll be running “ISN” solo on Tribble. If you can dodge a Borg Cube on Normal solo, you can destroy a Sphere in group content!

BUILD RESTRICTIONS

My restrictions were pretty simple:

• You only bought the Seneca. You have put no other real-world currency into the game.
• Recruitment events’ items, traits, slots, DOFFs, etc., were all fair game as these only cost time to obtain and are intended to run once a year.
  • Recruit events are Temporal Agent Recruitment, Klingon Recruitment, Gamma Recruitment, and Delta Recruitment.
• For both F2P models, use of a T6-X token is allowed. We get 2-3 of these per year just from 2-week-long Galactic Red Alert events, and at least 1 is a Recruitment reward (Temporal Agent, for having a single Tier 6 Reputation [even though it’s Bound to Character, it will account-wide unlock the T6-X upgrade on other claimed exact versions of that ship]).
• The Exchange (where you can buy some items, traits, DOFFs, BOFFs, etc., for Energy Credits) is fair game up to a limit of ~3 million EC per item, and I’ve given myself some buffer room on cheaper traits to assume a huge jump but with no expectation of hitting 3+ million EC each.
• Reputation items were all fair game. Before earlier this year, Reputations awarded raw Dilithium Ore. That was great as you could spend it as you saw fit!…but that usually meant selling it on the Dilithium Exchange to get Zen. That effectively meant Reputation items had to adhere to an arbitrary budget on Dilithium spending. However, Reputations were changed to where getting to Tier 5 awarded Reputation Dilithium. Over 12 (13?) Reputations, that’s about 390,000 Reputation-specific Dilithium. You won’t run out of it. Marks are farmable, and the Energy Credits needed are tiny compared to some Exchange-purchasable gear. For that reason, there were no Reputation restrictions.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS GUIDE

If you’re looking at this post to be a definitive “how to gear up my ship for nothing/next to nothing” guide, you’re in for a rough time.

• This first part (today) uses a standard Z-Store (…fine, “C-Store,” for us ol’ fogeys!) Seneca with a T6-X token applied. This isn’t using the Fleet version Hiawatha. You’ll be missing 1 Console slot and some slightly increased stats by not using the Hiawatha.
• The Seneca has a 3-forward/3-aft (“3/3”) weapon layout. Many of your better ships have a 4-forward/3-aft (“4/3”) or higher setup, so weapon use will be a larger component of your damage in those ships, especially with the damage boosters on this build.
• The hangar pets used here are the default hangar pets and therefore not the best you can use. I kept them because of a chance for healing procs, which as a “professional noob” I feel I need. Ha ha! Plus, you probably want to run this as “fresh out of the box” as possible, so the default pets stay.
• Some gear is Mk XV Epic. Although the testing is done on Tribble, some things may not be available to me and not at the quality or quantity I’d need. It was faster to just work with what I already have.
• The audience for this is newer, lower-skill, and/or $0-budget players. As I fit 2 of these 3 (I’m not a $0 budget player), I’m hoping this guide resonates with that audience.
• Developers can change the power level of any ship or piece of gear with a change to the stats, how an active ability works, how a trait works, etc. While I feel that what I’ve used will likely not be “nerfed”, I feel I should at least acknowledge the chance of performance drop-off due to future changes that reduce items’/traits’ effectiveness.
• Conversely, newer, better items could be available to players either free or relatively cheaply, in which case these items will be obsoleted due to such “power creep.”
• Finally, when it comes to Exchange-purchased items, there’s always a possibility of price inflation. A trait that’s worth ~1,000,000 EC now may be 2-3 million EC in a year or two. Keep this in mind when reading this series beyond the immediate few weeks or months of it going live.

THE COMBAT VIDEO TEASE

I feel this post has gone long enough (then again, I’m not a big reader myself [SUCH IRONY!], so maybe it’s too short for most?). The full combat video will go up with Part 2.

BEFORE I GET TO CARRIERED AWAY…

Get it? Carried? Carriered?

…

Fine, my jokes are bad! I’m sorry! You miss 100% of the chances you don’t take, you know… :p

Anyway, I hope you’re ready for a trip through a Seneca test and upgrade path (in a sense). Until next time, enjoy Star Trek Online!